I am Rodney McKay trash.
Jun. 24th, 2018 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
respoftwSo, I filled my first Hurt/Comfort Bingo Card yesterday which you can read here and the prompt was phobias. I made a conscious decision to have John be the one with the phobia (branching out from my usual mode of ‘let’s make Rodney suffer as much as possible) and would you like to see how my first (binned) attempt went?
Trigger warning for mention of homophobia, mental health issues and Rodney’s miserable childhood.
Rodney was intimately familiar with the difference between fears and phobias.
Everyone was afraid of something, whether it was spiders, heights, clowns or whales (thanks Dad) but most people were lucky enough to have escaped whatever mental roulette spin of brain chemistry that caused a fear to transcend into a phobia.
Phobia was one of those overused words that people attributed to petty fears, not realising just how extreme a phobic reaction could be. By its very nature, a phobia implied a level of impairment that went well beyond a few shudders. It was the difference between shrieking at a spider and refusing to step out onto the porch at night because the dark made it impossible to tell if there were any spiders lurking.
Rodney’s mother had been a couple dozen different types of phobic, running the gamut from agoraphobic to mysophobic to homophobic.
And it was homophobic in the truest of senses. Moira McKay hadn’t disliked gay people, she had been genuinely afraid of them. When Rodney, at the age of thirteen had told her he was gay she had been accepting of it in her own way. Her way involved a lot of ignoring it and never speaking about it but she didn’t seem to like him any less because of it. Then, a few years later, the term AIDS had first been reported on and Rodney’s mother had latched on to a whole new phobia, impaired by it to the point that she had kicked her fifteen year old son out of the house, terrified that he had already passed this plague on to her and her darling daughter.
So, yeah, Rodney knew phobias. He even had one of his own. It would have been hard to escape his childhood without one. He counted himself lucky that all he had to deal with was some good, old-fashioned claustrophobia, most likely a direct by product of that one winter when he was six and his mother, pregnant with Jeannie at the time, had refused to let him out of his room for fear that they would catch the virulent strain of flu that had been going around, going so far as to nail the windows shut. He was just lucky that he had a bathroom attached to his small bedroom.
OH MY GOD, ASHLEIGH, LEAVE RODNEY ALONE!! This was supposed to be Hurt John!
Trigger warning for mention of homophobia, mental health issues and Rodney’s miserable childhood.
Rodney was intimately familiar with the difference between fears and phobias.
Everyone was afraid of something, whether it was spiders, heights, clowns or whales (thanks Dad) but most people were lucky enough to have escaped whatever mental roulette spin of brain chemistry that caused a fear to transcend into a phobia.
Phobia was one of those overused words that people attributed to petty fears, not realising just how extreme a phobic reaction could be. By its very nature, a phobia implied a level of impairment that went well beyond a few shudders. It was the difference between shrieking at a spider and refusing to step out onto the porch at night because the dark made it impossible to tell if there were any spiders lurking.
Rodney’s mother had been a couple dozen different types of phobic, running the gamut from agoraphobic to mysophobic to homophobic.
And it was homophobic in the truest of senses. Moira McKay hadn’t disliked gay people, she had been genuinely afraid of them. When Rodney, at the age of thirteen had told her he was gay she had been accepting of it in her own way. Her way involved a lot of ignoring it and never speaking about it but she didn’t seem to like him any less because of it. Then, a few years later, the term AIDS had first been reported on and Rodney’s mother had latched on to a whole new phobia, impaired by it to the point that she had kicked her fifteen year old son out of the house, terrified that he had already passed this plague on to her and her darling daughter.
So, yeah, Rodney knew phobias. He even had one of his own. It would have been hard to escape his childhood without one. He counted himself lucky that all he had to deal with was some good, old-fashioned claustrophobia, most likely a direct by product of that one winter when he was six and his mother, pregnant with Jeannie at the time, had refused to let him out of his room for fear that they would catch the virulent strain of flu that had been going around, going so far as to nail the windows shut. He was just lucky that he had a bathroom attached to his small bedroom.
OH MY GOD, ASHLEIGH, LEAVE RODNEY ALONE!! This was supposed to be Hurt John!
