Do not think of a pink elephant

You know the scariest thing that happens in my life?
The 5 seconds after I rinse my mouth out with water after brushing my teeth. You start brushing your teeth, brush brush brush, minty minty freshness, you nonchantly look into your own reflection in the bathroom mirror facing you. The scraggly balding 19 year old, with bags under your eyes, and spots on your face where other people don't get spots. You bend down and rinse your mouth out under the tap, and I'm paralysed with fear from looking back up in case I see a figure behind me in the bathroom mirror about to scare me witless. Even now, I have to rise up from the tap with my eyes closed. Even if I'm at a friends house or a hotel with no bathroom mirror for the unknown beast to scare me.
There was a period in my earlier life where I actually thought I was insane. I'd say I was about 13 or 14, like most people that age, its a period filled with angst and confusion, but in my eyes everyone else was coping a hell of a lot better than me. I was counting every step from my house to the local shop (at the time 387 steps from Beach Road to Deols Convience Store), and tapping out a rhythm with my hands on my thighs before every rugby game or practice (right, left, left, right, both, left, right, right, left, both, ad infinitum), and hundreds of other rituals I'd have to carry out every day to make sure the pessimist and worse case scenario gremlin in my mind would be quiet for 2 seconds before he starts again. Tt was only a couple of years later when I found out that these things, although abnormal, are experienced by everyone.
Essentially, I was responding to a superstitious impulse. There are people who won't walk under ladders or open an umbrella indoors, and football players with lucky socks or who touch the pitchline and bless themselves with the sign of the cross before going on pitch. "Its the rational mind playing a bad stereo accompaniment with the irrational subconcious" is how Stephen King once put it.
How do you tell the difference between everyday superstition and abnormal obsessions? It's when the aforementioned football player blames the teams loss for not following his ritual, or when a judge issues a court order making it illegal to open umbrellas indoors, blaming it for the rise in natural disasters. I may be taking it too far here, but its entirely true.
Theres something in everyone which is attracted to madness, and capable of doing insane things at the flick of a switch, everyone who has looked off the edge of a tall building has felt a small, minute morbid urge to jump. And everyone who's held something sharp and pointy has touched the end a little too hard for no reason whatsoever.
My point, however scary it is to whoever reads this, everybody is a thin line away from losing their sanity. I also believe that everyone at some point in their life, will poke a toe over that line and let the gremlin take over. If only for a few seconds. But it only takes a few seconds to jump.

Love and Pink Elephants

Jc