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I believe all Children at one time in their lives obsess about something....
By definition, I don’t agree all children ‘obsess’ or are troubled by intrusive and repetitive thoughts; interests, passions or even fears do not (necessarily) equate to such. That said, I loved baseball as a kid; when I wasn’t playing, though, I didn’t keep thinking/obsessing about it. In fact, I think most kids have a short attention span. ;-)
Baseball statistics. I would buy baseball magazines, in particular Baseball Digest, and pore over the stats. Strikeout leaders since 1900, home run and RBI leaders, you name it. I'd tally up which team had the most leaders in each category, which team had the longest drought between leaders, etc.
I guess an obsession with data was a precursor to my becoming a professional computer programmer and amateur stock trader.
I did that with the Dodgers, I knew everyone's ERA's, Hr's, stolen bases, etc. Loved it.
My obsession was feeling safe or not safe.
I go to bed and hear something and not move for a long time and did not open my eyes. When I finally did, it was nothing. Baseless fear.
In the car in early mornings, to go boating, camping, still in Pj's listening to my parents talk and looking at the lights outside, was a very safe, calming wonderful feeling. Sometimes at night, I could hear the TV and my parents and that was comforting.
Today if I open my eyes, I want to see. I have a light on in living room at night and a night light. I don't want to be in total darkness.
I believe all Children at one time in their lives obsess about something....
For instance, for as long as I an remember, since the day I was born, I obsessed about horses, wanted a horse so badly at times I'd cry....
and that desire/obsession followed me most of my life, even after I obtained horses...
There was a time in my life, when horses were my life....
Another one of mine was food....we were poor and sometimes I was hungry...was a very active child, outside playing all the time, which helped to build up an appetite...so food was an obsession...loved food, loved to cook and create new recipes...
what was yours...
My childhood obsession was horses as well. My family wasn't exactly "well to do" so horses seemed out of the picture for me. But, on my 12th birthday, my Dad traded an old Ford Falcon Station Wagon with the local stable owner for a Palamino Gelding, affectionately called "Scotty". I would go to the stables every day, after school and on weekends. I did my homework turned around backwards with my books on his butt. I had leased a horse for one month prior to this and when the lease was up I was devastated.
My horse was my best friend. He was my life. Now I'm 65 and just 2 years ago I sold my most recent horse. His stable mate, Blaze, dang near killed me by throwing her head back while my fingers were stuck in her halter. Pulled my arm out, broke my shoulder and tore my rotator cuff. Not good.
I had to make the most painful decision of my life by letting go of the passion of all passions. My horse in my own back yard. Getting too old to ride, as a horse does have a mind of its own. So now I ride on the back of a Harley and rock crawl and run trails on a new Kawasaki Teryx side by side.
All of that is fun, but nothing will ever compare to my lifelong love of horses. A pet that you can ride, now how cool is that?
I did that with the Dodgers, I knew everyone's ERA's, Hr's, stolen bases, etc. Loved it.
My obsession was feeling safe or not safe.
I go to bed and hear something and not move for a long time and did not open my eyes. When I finally did, it was nothing. Baseless fear.
In the car in early mornings, to go boating, camping, still in Pj's listening to my parents talk and looking at the lights outside, was a very safe, calming wonderful feeling. Sometimes at night, I could hear the TV and my parents and that was comforting.
Today if I open my eyes, I want to see. I have a light on in living room at night and a night light. I don't want to be in total darkness.
Don't know where this stuff comes from.
Cincinnati Reds and dinosaurs. I wanted to be an archeologist.
It may be more accurate to ask what was your "obsession" or strong interest/hobby as a child. Of course one isn't clinically "obsessed" with that in the pathological sense.
Don't really recall having obsessive anxieties or fears as a kid. Didn't worry about death, sickness, losing people, strangers, objects and new situations didn't scare me very often. Except for the big overgrown swath of English ivy surrounding part of our back yard. That one seemed to skip years however. One year for some reason I'd become freshly aware that spiders and other stinging biting creepy crawlies might lurk out of sight under all those vines and I'd refuse to step foot in it. The next year the same realization that those spiders/creepy crawlies existed no longer bothered me, so I'd crash right through it without a flinch. Rinse and repeat the cycle over following years.
Last edited by Parnassia; 05-01-2024 at 05:43 PM..
No wonder the other children wanted to kill me, or cause dogs to kill me. No wonder most of the teachers, and most of the skanks in the Principal's Office, wanted the children or the dogs to kill me.
My 'Cousin Crazy'(whose obsessions have always included a 'White Savior Complex' despite our being brown), who's just retired from teaching - a job where her atypical number of degrees and certifications earned her salaries superior to those of most attorneys, spent her entire career TRAPPED-WITHIN the school system of an especially-awful Southern city (early-on, a bureaucrat secretly "fixed her", so that she couldn't escape, to teach in any of the Midwest's whiteopian paradises, where teachers don't routinely have their lives threatened/destroyed/ended by students), has repeatedly bemoaned the absolute lack of curiosity among those she's attempted to teach.
She grew up very-rich. I grew up very-poor. Neither knew the other existed. She was out in her canoe, interacting with alligators and Water Moccasins and Copperheads, at the same age when I was out learning (on my own, with no help) how to kill and EAT them. The point being that something INNATE drove us each to explore and discover.
My childhood peers, were infuriated by my need to discover and to analyze: to "find-out-about". They were just redundant lumps of unthinking flesh, in the same way that Cousin Crazy's students were. Our librarians were inscrutable. Were they pleased, that SOMEONE, particularly a little girl who'd only recently learned to read, was reading "those weird magazines" (science and literary, ordered, presumably, by someone at state or national level) nobody else read? Were they pleased, that someone was reading those "empty-shelf-filler books" on native plants (I was wondering what, in the woods, I could eat, or brew as tea, or use as a spice, or to deodorize my clothes, to or put on wounds caused by classmates and dogs, or use to poison dogs and maybe the wells of my tormentors)?
Or were the librarians, like the Principal's Office Skanks, too distracted by the Service Merchandise Catalogue and the Zales Jewelers Catalogue? Did they think about ANYTHING, beyond buying, on payment plans, the hideous quasimoderndemitraditional diamond chip garbage in those catalogues (which looked exactly like the hideous diamond chip garbage STILL being sold by schlock jewelers, today)? Well... thinking about that, and cooking those family-pleasing recipes in the WhiteTrashWoman Magazines, like Family Circle?
Bringing things full-circle, Cousin Crazy's Dead Sister, who'd had a different set of obsessions (being believed; not being raped, anymore - toddlerhood through adolescence; not being tortured by her stepmother; not being beaten by "Daddy"; "having a good time"; charming the maids, so they'd like her enough to tell ANYBODY WHO MIGHT POSSIBLY HELP, that she was being raped and tortured; and finding money for prescription and illegal drugs - even at age 12), in one of her last jobs, before carbohydrates and Polypharmacy drove her, irretrievably, into a pit of madness and despair, spent two years as the Personal Secretary of a retired schlock jewelry mogul: I forget which chain/catalogue. In a mostly-empty Modern office tower, in the mostly-empty downtown of a dying Southern city, they had the entire floor-thru office to themselves, where The Schlock Jewelry Mogul pretended to do business, and she pretended to assist. They were perfect for each other. Having been the mistress of the richest JB in Myrtle Beach, she knew the language of Schlock - literally - having distinguished herself by selling 2-Dollar watches to drunken sailors, for 200 Dollars, in one of her boyfriend's beachfront stores. When your primary childhood obsession is being believed...
Even when little, I was obsessed with making things better. I planted the pits of half-rotten peaches I dug out of the garbage at the Corner Store (one corner of that wretched rural intersection). They bore good fruit, for years. I transplanted Mint and Asparagus, from the garden of the elderly lady for whom I pulled weeds. I took what was left of my Grandmother's only Dior - ever - and stretched fabric from the skirt, over one window of our shack. It filtered the air, and looked like floral stained glass - a genuine bit of Paris, in our two-room Mississippi shack. I got up under the "house", and stuffed a mixture of grass and mud, into the cracks. I improvised a hammer, and salvaged nails from rotten planks, to tack errant sheets of tarpaper back-straight on the outside of our house.
Much of my 'Finding-out-about' consisted of studying rich people, so that I could pass-myself-off-as someone good-enough to be around them, so that I could work for them. Thank you, Town & Country, for having existed. I only wanted to get close-ENOUGH.
And then I got to college, where my GETTING obsession paid-off. I'd GOTTEN virtually every dark solid schmatte which ever got hung on the Used Clothes rack, up in front of the Corner Store, in good weather. Such rags were RARE. Mostly, things were pastels and patterns and tees with tacky graphics. I'd scrounged old copies of The New Yorker, too, and knew how to look like one of those people up in Yankeeland. - the right kind. I didn't know to call that 'New England Boarding School', or 'Manhattan Upper East Side'.
Then, at 17, in Economics 101, at a college for poor kids, I was recognizable to an atypical group of kids, who ALSO read 'The New Yorker'. Even with my lower-than-White-Trash accent, they individually decided I was ONE OF THEM, because of what I'd GOTTEN as clothing. So, when I said, "We need a study group!", that first day of class, those substantial kids moved toward me. This was the first organization I'd formed since Second grade, when I was recognized by teachers, as "The ringleader of those Coloreds". (I CONSPIRED with those playmates, to do all sorts of things, before my poverty and their prettiness turned them against me).
My talent for conspiracy, stood me in good stead, with my first "real" childhood employer, for whom I counted illegal cash, as it was passed through his car window. This probably saved my life - having a powerful protector in a community where there'd been multiple suicides of bullying victims.
My struggles to GET, as a child with no sources of clothing but piles of cast-off rags, honed my ability to ACQUIRE, when my new friends took me to the original Steinmart Saks Sales. I knew how to MAKE THINGS BETTER. I could and did take articles being sold at one and two percent of Original Retail, and repair them. For the guy who knocked-me-up, and taught me Math for Economics while knocking-me-up, again and again, I acquired and mended two Saks Fifth Avenue Armani Suits and a Hugo Boss. I got him Fendi ties, Burberry accessories, executive-length English socks, and shirts from Hilditch & Key https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hilditch+%...ages&ia=images .
And whose workstudy office girl would YOU want to poach for your own office, if you were a big somebody at a university? You'd want the one in the Ungaro and Rive Gauche outfits, with the Italian handbags. That was ME. Which one would be likely to get invited to parties, with her husband, to show off to distinguished alums? And while elite religious sects do not exactly ban undesirables, you can imagine which up-and-coming couple, when wondering what to become, thus pondering the parable of King Bulan's Dilemma https://duckduckgo.com/?q=king+bulan...&t=ffab&ia=web , would find welcoming mentors within both Episcopalianism and the top sect within the faith to which we ultimately "returned" (triggering my "pass-myself-off-as" obsession, again, until writing a few big checks, and getting good-ENOUGH at both languages - plus DNA analysis and some geneology - turned me, unimpeachably, into The Genuine Article. Mostly, it was the big checks, and a few conspiracies, which turned the trick.)
You see how my childhood obsessions coalesced.
Last edited by GrandviewGloria; 05-01-2024 at 06:13 PM..
Mine was animals. I wanted every one of them as a pet.
They used to advertise “exotic” animals sold as pets in the back of some magazines. I remember wanting to order a baby woodchuck. I thought my parents ordered one for me. They may have told me they did to shut me up, lol. I waited daily for months for the mail truck or delivery service (UPS, I guess) to bring that baby to me!
Sadly for me, it never came.
I wanted to be a veterinarian when I grew up.
I don't remember obsessing about things when I was very young, except maybe owning Breyer horses. I wanted all of them.
By the time I was 14, I was obsessing about getting out of my parents' house. I couldn't wait to leave home. I left when I just turned 17 and since then all I've obsessed about has been money. If you asked me if I could have anything in the world right now, I'd ask for money and nothing else. So it figures that that's probably something I'll never have.
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