Fear of kurents

Yesterday was the last day to “drive away” the winter. This is Slovenian tradition every year, when people dress themselves up in costumes and that kind of things. This lasts from Saturday to Tuesday and there are also kurents (this is traditional mask in Slovenia and people are dressed in sheepskin and they have huge cow bells all around their waists and a big mask on their heads) who are involved in this carnival every year. 

 They are collecting hankies from women and they don’t go away if they don’t get it. And nowadays people don’t carry fabric hankies anymore…anyways… Every time when I hear bells from kurent or when I see one I get a strange feeling in my stomach and it is because of the fear. I am afraid when they are close to me because I find their masks very scary looking and the expressions on the masks are like angry and mean. When they were passing by, I was very stiff and I was standing there like a statue because I thought that if I make myself “unnoticeable”, standing in the background (preferably behind some big man) that they won’t bother me or noticed me. 

Also, a memory came up then from my childhood and I remembered that we (my family) were going somewhere and I was dressed in a costume and it was really freezing outside (I remember a big pile of snow outside the building) and kurents came. It was dark and they were even scarier in the dark…so they were fooling around when suddenly two kurents lifted my sister in the air and throw her in that pile of snow. I was soooo scared because I didn’t understand why they would do that and I was scared because I thought that they would do something to my sister and I was also afraid that I was next to go into that snow…I can still see this memory in the pictures in my head like it is real…

Then, while I was trying to sleep, I started wondering that I live in a constant fear. It is insane how fear controls me in almost every moment of my life. So I started to pay attention more on my fears. And they are basically everywhere…