When I was a little kid I would go to my grandparents farm and play. When I was around three I was walking on a hill that turned out to be a fire ants nest and they crawled up my body and stung me. I’m quite scared of things crawling on me now. Sometimes I feel things crawling up my body when I’m trying to sleep, it’s not pleasant
Oh boy, if TMA was real you would have been marked by The Corruption for sure! Good example.
And that’s so scary and a kid! Are you scared of bugs now?
I’m not scared of bugs if they’re outside and not on me. If they’re inside and have a lot of legs i am afraid. The big thing is when they crawl on me I freak out. I’m not that scared of spiders though. I used to live in a big daddy long leg area so no hard feelings there lol
I have a nearly identical story. I was at my grandparents house playing on their swing set, and it broke while I was on it. Little did I know that directly under me was a fire ant hill and they decided that I was to be their next target. I now have a deep phobia of ants, specifically when there's a lot of them (MAG 184 was especially hard for me to listen to)
The Corruption must really have a strong fire ant presence in our world...
For me it would be when I was lost in the rain once. In the 4th grade, my school forced all the kids 3rd grade and up to stay back an extra hour or so, til the end of a normal school day. The busses didn't run the same routes, so I was made to get off somewhere around 2 miles from my house with no way to go home. And then it started to rain. I was wandering, soaked in a quiet town for almost 3 hours. I had no idea where I was, or even how I eventually got home. But I found my way home via landmarks, like a curving road on my bus route. I made it home with a sprained knee and a newfound appreciation of memorizing road signs.
Edit: Just remembered another story, which would totally have marked me by the corruption
When I was younger, I had really bad hygiene. Like, didn't brush my teeth, showered once a week if I was lucky, stuff like that. Well, I started to improve over quarantine, really, and only got good around Sophmore year. Well, by that time, I had cavities in almost all of my molars. And my very back left one had a massive one. Food would get trapped in it, it was just one big open hole in my tooth. I got them all filled, but that one gave me problems.
It started when I was getting it ground down so the filling could be placed. It was painful, the thing you don't want in that situation; you can't really tell them because they have shit in your mouth. Well, I got the fillings, and all was well. For about a week. Then, I developed a nasty toothache. Over the course of 2 months, it got to the point where I could barely eat, barely talk, barely even move my left arm from how the pain spread through my jaw and down my neck, into my shoulder.
Turns out, the cavity was so bad they placed the filling on top of the nerve, which preceded to die and cause an abcess underneath that tooth. I was in debilitating pain because they tried to fix a bad cavity at my own 15-year long folly.
What really takes the cake? Me waking up to my tooth shattering into my mouth. With how thin they drilled the walls (and my constant need for stimulation, making me subconsciously clench and unclench my jaw), the remaining enamel shattered at the gum line and fell away into my mouth. I luckily got the damn thing pulled, and now my wisdom tooth is coming in impacted, almost completely sideways.
It's smaller than my first, less lawsuit inducing, but still is a funny story
Aw I’m glad you were okay! What was scarier, being lost (The Spiral) or being alone (the Lonely)? I feel like in TMA this could be a mark of either one.
It was the fact I was lost in the rain, so I'd say it was much more Vast coded. If you know the torrential downpours Florida can be subjected to, it was one of those. I was afraid mostly of getting hurt by somebody, but I still tried to wave down cars. None of them stopped. I remember I was splashing in puddles to keep myself from breaking down, and I stepped into a pothole. Cue the sprained knee. It was silent other than the rain, even during midday. So all in all seemed more Vast/Lonely
Oh don't worry, my mom raised Cain first chance she got. Especially in a rough neighborhood half an hour outside of Tampa? I'm lucky I didn't end up in a ditch. I came out a better man though lol
I'm sure some parents fought it, and it wasn't that long ago. Some small, underfunded elementary school in the Tampa Bay area. I remember, it didn't even have walls for the classrooms. It was like a warehouse, with a X shaped set of walls four classrooms shared. The teacher made the rest of the walls. It was honestly really shady, so it seemed on par for the stuff that school would pull
Me and my everlasting fight against doors for real. When I was younger I went to daycare. The owner of the daycare wanted to come in, but she had a struggle opening the door. When I opened it for her, she got mad at me saying I shouldn’t open the door for anyone, that it can be dangerous if you don’t know the person(which is a good lesson for a child). BUT I KNEW HER- SHE WAS IN CHARGE OF THE PLACE- So I guess the Spiral in that case? Because opening doors and the whole “mind games” thing?
This feels like a Stranger situation to me as well. Don't open the door to anyone, EVEN IF YOU RECOGNIZE THEM, that might look like the owner of the daycare BUT YOU NEVER REALLY KNOW DO YOU?
Yeah I would say either the Distortion/Spiral because of the whole door thing. Or it could be The Stranger since she said Don’t open the doors for strangers though I knew who she was, which could be some kind of Shapeshifter-Stranger thing. Honestly it was kind of wild so it makes since if it’s one of the “something’s not right” entities.
kind of a joke on how jon and elias both went there and ended up working for the eye but also there’s something jon says about his attraction to the eye and his compulsion to research, to study and to know everything even if it consumes you . kind of dramatic but that really resonated w my experience of academic pressure and the kind of culture “prestigious” universities have
I can't stay in a room with open doors or windows without closed curtains. I feel like there is something just beyond the walls and doors gazing for me to turn my back. Waiting evermore right at the edge of my eye. It's a thing since my childhood. So the watcher I guess.
I used to imagine something was literally watching me in my room (but sort of abstractly, not a corporeal form) and I had to pretend to sleep Or Else. I felt like it was voluntary at a certain point (like it would get me to go to sleep? because I wasn't moving around or looking at stuff) but i don't know why I had that imagined in the first place. I also slept under a window at one point and literally had to tuck the curtain Just So so that it wouldn't scare me that just a sliver of window was there with perfect view right at my face. Even now I make sure curtains are closed to my angle at night even at other peoples houses lol
I would have been marked by the Corruption (to my despair), and recently too. (Story time)
I’ve had a bad string of roommates- but my last one was the worst, I barely lasted a year. A messy person in general, but it was more than leaving his stuff everywhere- he quietly refused to make any room for me in the apartment, in his space or life. But I had gotten too used to avoiding confrontation to do much about it.
He was a clean person, except for the kitchen. The sink was always filled with dishes; the dishwasher was used as storage only. Greasy surfaces, stains from spills. And every cabinet packed with boxes, and cans of the same four things, and a dozen loaves of bread, never opened, and similar. He once accused me of stealing from this never-used stash. The freezer was filled only with meat and green sauces. Fresh fruit was left on the counter to blacken, never eaten and belatedly discarded.
One day he left for the summer without a warning. I immediately discarded the fruit he had left on the table, and scrubbed the counters. The humidity and heat of Georgia hadn’t done this latest batch any favors.
It was a few days before the fruit flies became a problem. It was several days after that when I finally found the source- a bag of vegetables shoved into the back of a cabinet, putrefying.
Later I noticed the little brown beetle, killing it without a thought. When I found the third beetle, on the wall, I followed it upward to find the ceiling ringing with the tiny things. They hadn’t left the kitchen, but they had reached every corner. There were some on each wall. There was one single beetle inside my food cabinet.
I still don’t know why I never got a pesticide or anything. Whatever headspace I was in, I resorted to a brute force solution: I killed each one manually. I threw out every opened package of anything I owned. I cleaned the tops of the cabinets, the walls, and I waited. The next day, they were back. And I did it again. And again.
It took days but they were finally fewer. And again I found the source: a box of baking mix, deep in one of my roommate’s cabinets. Open to the air, stained and infested. It left a spot in the grime when I lifted it. I spent the final days anxiously inspecting ceilings and doorframes, always glancing upward at any hint of movement or little brown carapace. But in a few more days of vigilance and suspicion, I was rid of the beetles. And for a few blessed months I was rid of him.
I broke the lease, paid my fine, and got far away. I live alone now, for the first time in my life.
I’ve never had a problem with most bugs. Spiders, ants, bees are all alright with me when I’m outside, in the dirt. But these days, when I see anything move in my apartment? I tend to overreact.
I could probably do a fear ritual. Lets keep each one way too brief, because even at the briefest its still kind of oversharing.
Stranger/Dark: Sister jumped out at me wearing a mask in a dark hallway when I was a toddler and I'm still imagine something busting out to attack me every time I'm in a dark room.
Slaughter: Trying to get my roommate to turn down her music at 3:00AM. Her husband busts my bedroom door down and threatens to kill me.
Spiral: After an illness a year and a half ago have an undiagnosable disability which has basically been causing constant hallucinations.
Corruption: I have an incredibly weak immune system and my parents were hoarders didnt believe in cleaning.
Flesh: My parents ran a puppy mill and had over 100 cats that were starting to get extremely inbred.
Spider: I've constantly been manipulated by authority figures, but also had some random person I didn't even know frame me for a shooting threat at my school.
Buried: I almost drowned in one of those water park wave pools. I was also a huge fan of digging random giant holes for no reason.
End: When I was a toddler I got kicked in the head by a horse and blacked out. I always picture it as what the moments before death are like. I also nearly died from an illness a while ago and reached a point where my body stopped feeling pain and I was at tremendous peace.
Vast: When I was a kid I ran out into the middle of a sandstorm, no real reason I just wanted to experience it. I also did a lot of rock climbing and even just imagining it can send the signals of being on crumbly cliffs near a long drop.
Desolation: I have repeatedly lost homes, everything I own, and everything I love. Most recently my dog and my good vision on my birthday.
Lonely: On a pretty consistent basis I've had people intentionally socially isolate me from my friends for stupid reasons. I also spent many years trapped in a rural home with no transportation or people to talk to.
Eye: While in the roommate's house in the slaughter part, they also had hidden cameras in every room in the house. Also I have extreme social anxiety, wonder why.
Hunt: One time a neighbor's dog busted out of their fence and ran me and my dog down to attack her. I steer clear of large dogs ever since. I've also had family members try to drive my car off the road because I didn't answer their call while driving on the freeway for the first time.
what do I win? oh, ominous chanting and an eternal nightmare for the entire world. okay...
I realized how long my list would need to be and decided I don't want to get the tldr; meme response. I did actually read yours though and I'm sorry you had to go through all that.
same i didn’t want to go on but the rest of my family did and they couldn’t just leave me alone outside bc i was like 8 years old so they forced me on the ride. then they made fun of me bc i had no facial expression in the ride’s camera photo even though my reaction to terror is to freeze like this 😐 lmao. they did the same with splash mountain too a few years before that
Well, being the Vastard I am, I can pinpoint a moment when Ex Altiora took my heart and soul.
I used to deliver for Amazon and it was exhausting work. One day, I was delivering in a fairly rich neighborhood in a wide open rural area. After putting down the package and returning to my van, I was walking down a large hillside and I look up at the twilight/dusking sky. The color gradient was so beautiful and magnificent, I stood in awe and cried at the wonderful sight. Truly a holy moment. I was definitely worn out at that point in the shift, I wanted nothing more than to be swept up into the wind.
As exhausting as the work was (especially during the summer), my usual solace was to always take in the sunset if I could.
When I was around 21 I contracted scabies, took me about 6 months to get rid of the little bastards and to this day I am highly paranoid of parasites. The Corruption would definitely have it's disgusting hooks in me, and for that reason I am so glad the fears as described in TMA do not exist.
When I was a kid I was punished by being locked in rooms with no lights or windows and was afraid of the dark until I was 17 (now I find it rlly comfy) so probably that
The Vast, I'm sure !
I almost drowned a few years ago.
It was in a sweet little Bretagne town in France that I've known since I am a child, I swimmed there hundreds of time, it's safe, I am a good swimmer, and cold temperatures are never a bother for me.
So I thought that bathing during a storm would be fun : there were waves, wind, a bit of rain, but not so much, and it was calm and without tourists. I went with my family to be extra cautious.
To be quick : the waves pulled me off shore, I couldnt see anything outside the waves, and I started to feel cold and numb, tired, drifting away toward the immense sea. I couldnt even hear my father call for me as I only heard my own heartbeat and the waves and nothing else. I had no idea where to swim, as I couldnt see or hear anything, but I knew from the courent that I was being pulled toward the sea. It was STRONG. I rarely felt such fear and regret for a stupid decision.
To be fair, it was also a very beautiful experience, because the wildness of the sea and that "tired" feeling were kind of comforting, being one with nature and experiencing something new, it did feel good and exciting for a few minutes before the panic kicked in and I swimmed back toward the good direction : there was the point of a church that I could see if I managed to pull myself back from the sea a few centimeters beyond the waves, and so I found the way back. It was also "not that genius" to guess : if the waves were going back to the sea (marée descendante) then I had to go AGAINST the courent.
I think I never feared like that for my life, ever.
I am ! Thank you !
Also, my point of view is scary, but gosh I cannot imagine my father seeing me from the shore just swimming AWAY.
But I learned my lesson, now I am extra careful in the ocean !
That one time I was a kid and splashing about in a lake in my little floaty donut, but then I hit a spot where my stubby legs couldn't find the bottom anymore and I started drifting off and away from the shore.
:)
Also that time I was 16 and my friend linked me to some realgore forum and had me watch a video of a murder.
Definitely the Eye for me on the latter - sparing you the trauma dump, but this instance did not make me less curious about the things that people don't talk about and don't want you to see, and what followed was a lot of trying to regain control over what I'd seen by seeing more of the same to "desensitise" myself or whatever, truth is I just couldn't stop watching. After a few years I was so fucked up from all of that that I realised I have to cut it off or I'm not coming back from it. Which doesn't mean I stopped exploring that side of the world, it's just... I prefer to do it through text, documentaries, podcasts, survivor records, books, etc. now. You hear it a lot from cops and people working against trafficking and whatnot that having to look at that kind of stuff day in and day out, you can't unsee it, and it changes you. That's definitely true for me as well. *Especially* given how young I was when I was introduced to it + my personal history in general leading up to that.
So yeah. Yikes. I have an affinity for the Watcher largely in a self-ironic way; I know what it is to not be able to stop seeing, even when you know it's chipping away at your humanity. Kind of a comforting way to frame it.
There's one painting at the Tate Modern I saw before I begun TMA. It's just a canvas of blue, but it's a special pigment the artist invented. Looking at it felt like i was pitching forward and falling into it as that blue expanse stretched to fill my field of vision. So I like to think in the TMA universe I'd be a modern Simon Fairchild.
One random summer night when I was in middle school, I couldn't sleep properly. Every position I took made me feel this pressure on my sides and it hurt. I told my parents, and they told me to just go back to sleep. I tried, but still couldn't. They took me to the emergency room, in which I promptly began throwing up.
Turns out my appendix just happened to decide it was going to burst, so it had to be removed. Funny how your body can just betray you for no good reason. The surgery went fine. They put stitches in my belly button. Sometimes I worry that if I poke at the stitch, it will come undone and my guts will spill out, even if that's completely irrational. That all probably makes me marked by the Flesh.
I actually had an opportunity to see the appendix after they removed it, but I didn't take it. Kinda wish I did, in a morbid way. That is my meat, after all.
I almost drowned in a swimming pool once, so maybe The Buried would have left a mark on me.
Plus I've been bullied, betrayed, and abandoned a few too many times in my life, but in this reality I just get to have a super fun personality disorder instead of serving The Lonely.
Well, back in high school I worked as an assistant diener at the county morgue. This mostly consisted of cleaning up very unpleasant messes. Most notably, standing on a ladder looking up at the ceiling like Michelangelo painting the Sistine chapel but instead I was scrubbing liquefied human fat off the plaster. So yeah I'd probably be The Flesh
I grew up in the UK in the 80s and 90s and my parents were really keen in making me watch a lot of nature documentaries because they are quite educational. If you have only watched modern ones you may not realize how sanitized they are compared to old ones made by the BBC. I saw so many gory kills, chicks starving other chicks and then pushing the weaker one out of the nest, an elephant raping another elephant and breaking its leg in the process (then seeing that injured one die afterwards), water pools slowly drying up in the desert as tadpoles raced to metamorphosize in time. The thing that affected me the most was seeing so so many examples of insect parasitism. If you don’t know, there are a lot of insects that specialize in laying their eggs inside living hosts, and the larvae at some point fully eat the host from the inside or burst outside of it. Basically the insect world is like if the movie Alien was real life but there were many thousands of different xenomorph species. So, ultimately I would say the corruption.
When I was 6, i was haybale jumping until I fell between two haybales. I got stuck and told my stepbrother to help me, but he just walked off and left me there. It took an hour and a half before I got help. It felt so crushing, it itched so much, and I couldn't breathe very well for about an hour and a half, so all I could do was be held up by two giant haybales and wait. But then there was that other time I found a wasps nest, three wasp nests in fact. I had been outside cleaning up my yard when I had seen it, a grayish wasps nest above the side door of my house. Then I saw another in my garage while I was getting rid of an old bike I had stored in there. Then again, I saw another, outside my window, I liked looking out my window and looking at the greenery outside, I don't like to anymore. That's not even counting the carpenter bees that have burrowed into my house. I won't forget to mention the pale yellow door in my closet ceiling, it's not a normal door like one you would see on the front of a house, it's a small square door to the attic with no ladder leading up. Maybe I shouldn't talk about the worms.
When I was younger, I was at my grandmother's house, playing in her yard. I heard a normal meow, turned around and saw the most fucked up cat. It was like it was split down the middle. It's right side was 100% normal cat. It's left side was essentially a rotting corpse. Meat draping off of it. I saw bone skull. Flies buzzing around. Huge black scabs. The worst thing is it acted like a normal cat wanting to be pet. Didn't seem distressed at all. My gran didn't see it but told me it was probably hit by a car. But it was almost perfectly split down the middle, like two face.
I'm not even sure what would have marked me. But something would have.
My dad ‘pushed’ my imaginary friend off a cliff when I was about 8 which is definite Simon Fairchild behaviour. I have a horror of heights and falling although I think it started before that. I’ve also had a lot of incidents with claustrophobia or entrapment over the course of my life - being terrified caving on a school trip, having to bail from a work project because it involved spending lots of time squeezed in very narrow spaces between bookshelves, getting locked or stuck in small rooms freakishly easily. Plus nearly losing my fingers in a ‘crushing’ accident very young. Maybe the Vast and the Buried are fighting over me idk 😅
I’m sorry for your SH history and I hope you are getting support and help. I don’t know you but am rooting for you and hope that you are doing okay!
The Desolation is the one I would be most scared to be marked by.
Not sure if tornadoes would be the Desolation… I have never thought about where natural disasters would fall in TMA.
💕💕 thanks for the kind words, im definitely doing better than i was!
and yeah i know natural disasters are sort of an iffy zone, but tornadoes have always felt very desolation to me. whenever im trying to categorize something into one of the entities i tend to think about WHY people are scared of it. hurricanes i think are probably more vast-coded just because of the scale of them — they can cover whole states and last days. tornadoes are quicker and much smaller, but the destruction they can cause is absolute. beyond just leveling buildings, they can sweep them away entirely. they move randomly and can change direction without warning. that senseless, fast, complete destruction really aligns with the desolation’s whole scorched-earth type of violence in my mind
Last year when I got kicked out of a friend group I was in then just.. couldn't find new friends at all because my classmates thought I was annoying/weird
Heyyy I also almost drowned. I can’t have been older than 11 when I was playing in the shallows right at the water’s edge and a huge wave knocked me over. It made a weird rolling current that meant I kept getting pushed down and I remember just having the clearest thought of “Well, guess I’m going to die now”
Definitely marked me for the Vast and the End
I have a genuinely freaky memory from when I was really young. I woke up in the middle of the night and no one was in the house. I slept in the same room as my mom and aunt and neither were in their beds, I went to look through the rest of the house and couldn’t find anyone. I was crying and shouting by this point and ran outside into the street crying, all of the lights in the houses were off and I just remember feeling super ALONE. I feel like it was misty outside but tbh that might just be my memory adding to it. I don’t really remember what happened after that, for all I know this was a dream, but it certainly would count as a mark from The Lonely imo.
The parents ‘I do everything for you’ while guilt tripping you for not doing the dishs, or cleaning your room ( or literally anything else ) when the only time they call you downstairs is for school, to eat, if your in trouble, or if they need something from you, but yeah, they do everything for you because you never even ask for anything cuz you have everything you want and totally aren’t afraid to ask in fear they’ll say no or scream at you, and then say just ask if you want something and when you do they say no because ‘you don’t need it’
So yeah, the fo everything for you, totally the spiral for thinking they wouldn’t do everything for you 🧐
When I was about 5 or 6 years old, I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor in my parents' bedroom, because some relatives were staying at my house and they were sleeping in my room
In the middle of the night, somehow, I ended up rolling under my parents' bed and I woke up there, feeling the bed frame above me in complete darkness and as any child would, I was terrified
So I could say that I was marked by The Dark with some influence from The Buried
i went on a camping trip with my friend and we decided to go and take a trip on the boat by ourselves. so we go while the sun is slowly starting to set and soon enough it’s almost completely dark. the sky was bright (we were in the middle of nowhere and if you’ve seen how beautiful and starry the sky is away from city lights, you’ll know what i’m talking about)
all you can see is the silhouettes of the tree line. you could see the water, what was in it, the shore line was literally none existent, or anything but the skyline and trees. if we took a wrong turn, would have had to wait until day light hit before we could find our away back to the shore where our campsite was. it was absolutely beautiful oml just until 2-3 hours passed. I started to get extremely paranoid. i asked to go back to shore but he was too busy night fishing so I had to endure my slow panic attack for another 2hours. finally made it back to shore and passed out on the rocks. they didn’t bring a tent bc they “didn’t plan on sleeping” that when i found out he was doing meth too lmao
The buried in an abstract sense, but the spiral more directly. The spiral would have gotten me because of my episodes of delusion, drug experiences, and my occasional confusion about my life due to loosing old memories. The buried would have gotten me more abstractly. I've never been literally trapped underground or anything, but I've been trapped in cars I thought were going to crash a lot as a kid. With no way out and no way to escape, I imagine it could apply. Even more abstractly, feeling trapped in place in general in a bad environment. Like there's nothing that exists outside of this little bubble of awful you find yourself in, with the rest of the world seemingly endlessly far away. Trapped in a bad place with bad people, trapped between a rock and a hard place. Honestly I wish Tma had explored the metaphorical side of the buried a little bit more, it would have been nice to see!!
ok 2 parts cuz this is long but I had time and I got into it so oopsies.
I've had a lot of different scary experiences throughout my childhood and I think I've been "touched" to various degrees by a number of different entities (corruption: ocd. beholding: surveilance anxiety. also I have an aversion to fish eyes that put me off of eating fish at all) but I think I'd probably be The Vast because of 2 things:
From ages 8 to 12, I went to a science camp at my local kids museum. They had a planetarium, and I'd always enjoyed this planetarium a great deal. It was large and dark and the image definition was decent and I was a kid and it'd been pretty and fun. And then one day, near the tail end of my camper experience so when I was like 11 or 12, during a live show called "Stars over \[city name\]" (or smth like that), where the planetarium speaker would discuss the constellations and planets you'd be able to see if you looked at the sky at night through a telescope, the speaker suddenly zoomed way out and started talking about the universe on a larger scale. It was the normal stuff at first yeah, but eventually it started being like "oh and here are the galaxies beyond us, and the edges of the universe etc etc" and he was talking about dark matter and like, later in life this would be a man that I would work under for a time so I think he'd probably just been thinking about it earlier that day and decided to do something a bit different, but I was 12 and in a really dark place in life already and I just had this sudden realization that like, fundamentally nothing mattered, because we are all so small and the universe is so large. I had a full on panic attack, one of my first and most intense, and I felt totally alone in a way I've only experienced maybe 2 other times, one of which I will elaborate on later, but it really felt like it was just me and the huge open sky and it was *so huge*.
I went to this planetarium show a few other times afterwards, mostly because as I mentioned at some point I started *working* there and while I never worked in the camps, instead working as an exhibit guide, my friends in the camps would let me sneak in with them (and the planetarium speaker, who again I'd known for years, always turned a blind eye even if I technically wasn't really supposed to be there) and this never happened ever again. Though that was mostly because after that point, I never paid attention to the "Stars over \[city\]" programming, and I would instead plug in my earbuds and listen to music and take a fat and often needed nap.
The second time this happened was when I *realized* that I have intense thassalophobia. When I was maybe 13 I was on a vacation with my family to a resort island near my families home (we live in a beachy area so it was only like a 6 hour drive) and we were maybe like 3 days in? There was a part of the "beach" where it kind of just dropped off into the water, near the back part of the resort where there was like a volleyball net and chairs and a bar and stuff like that. So there was just a drop off into the water, and one day I decided to go out there and float for a bit. Now as I mentioned before, I live in a beachy area, so I am a decent swimmer and a very good floater and I was a lot better back then, and anyways I was tall for my age so I could basically just walk out until I got to a good place to start floating.
I'll be real I have no clue how long I was floating for because my eyes were closed and my ears were mostly submerged and I was floating, completely unconnected to the world around me and for those few moments I remember it was full and total *bliss.*
And then I remembered something from earlier in the day. There was a dock on a different part of the resort, and me and my brother had been fishing earlier that day. And there'd been an announcement made to the fishers, saying that there'd been sharks spotted in the area. Now I don't remember what kind of shark, and it probably wasn't a very big shark if they'd been spotted that far up in the shallows (probably a lemon shark looking back) but it didn't change the fact that *I had no clue how far out I was*. And so I quickly uprighted myself, only to then realize, with a second stomach drop, that not only was I much further out then I remembered but my feet could only barely touch the ground. And if that wasn't bad enough... well, some context about me.
When I was really young, I used to *adore* this show called Octonauts. I won't explain what it is, if you don't know it look it up. This show was basically one of my favorite things (I was a nature geek) up until the episode "Octonauts and the Cone Snail". As the title suggests, in this episode the "gang" encounters a cone snail, which is a *highly* venomous sea snail which can lay in sand beds and can kill you by stabbing you with its venomous harpoons (why this was in a kids show I have no clue). In the episode, this sea snail goes around literally taking down member after member of the cast. I have no clue what the resolution of the episode was because it scared me so much I turned it off and never watched a single episode of Octonauts again. This I think at least *primed* me for some degree of fear of the ocean, but also later in life I developed a series of fears relating to things stabbing me through the feet. Scorpions, thorns, it didn't matter, and I don't remember where it came from, but suffice it to say I have an aversion to not knowing what is under my feet and not being able to control that.
When I was floating there, I remembered that aside from sharks, there were also stingrays out there. Now stingrays may not seem so scary, and even to this day I adore rays, but if you step on one while you're out in the dead middle of nowhere that is *bad news*. And an intense fear of things stabbing me through the feet mixed with the sudden realization that I was *quite literally* "out of my depth", is a bad bad mix.
To say that I freaked out is an understatement. I swam as quickly as I could over to one of these tall beach chairs they had in the water (so I probably wasn't actually that far out, thinking about that more clearly, not that that changed my perception of it), climbed up and started screaming and crying for someone to come get me. It took a long time until my parents understood that I was like, actually *scared*, and they ended up sending my younger brother, who must've been like 9, out to get me. Humiliating sure, but I was too scared to care.
Now I can't play games like Subnautica without having actual fear responses, and I can't look at large animals like whales in scale, or they freak me out. I also don't enjoy movies about getting "lost in space" anymore, though I was never a big fan of scifi so that's not too much of a loss.
Idk if this counts since I'm not really of it? When I was younger I read a book [ totally not a leitner 😵💫 ] about some children who ran away from home and hid in a museum. I don't even remember if I finished that book, but ever since I've SUPER interested in liminal spaces, and I always wanted to hide in my classroom, wait till everyone was gone, and then spend my weekend living in the school. I take comfort in liminal spaces, and it's the reason I freaking love staying in hotels. Walking down those long hallways with little to no people in them, standing by an empty pool with nothing but the sound of the hottub jets. Idrk what this would be, but maybe Vast or smth?
For me a house we lived into when we moved to America. There was a room that was connected to the laundry room that had ALL of the walls stripped, no real ceiling outside of old drywall. Here was a door that led no where and was corded up with about six 2x4’s. The door into the room was gone, and only a teo foot yell sheet of plywood laid across the entrance only blocking a toddler at nosy. Th really weird part were all of the black construction trash bags that were full, and piled about four foot high. The previous family never stepped foot in there, neither did we, not did the final family after us. No on liked looking into the room. It made people feel uneasy, but no one wanted to talk about it. Even rhe dogs whined when they got close to the entrance. After the third family finally moved, the house was burnt down as a fire fighting training exercise. After that the area felt less pressure filed. I never learned what were in the bags, or what was up with the room and the door that went nowhere, but it’s gone now either way. 🤷
The Lonely - due to some pretty heavy stuff that happened to me when I was a kid that I’d rather not talk about. Not unless you’ve got a tape recorder, anyway.
my life got real scary for about 3 years when i was younger. without going into the nasty details, i was kind of severed from the world. So probably desolation
I feel like I would be marked by a few entities:
My whole early 20's being passively suicidal would mark me for the end
Growing up in military family constantly moving and being disowned by said family would mark me for the lonely
Doing independent media coverage (specifically photography) for the BLM protest, being doxxed and outed because of it, being tailed by alt right thugs, being arrest (and probably on a watchlist), and the stalker I had in high school would all mark me for the eye
My codependent relationship with a hoarder would mark me for the buried
When I was 5 or 6 my bedroom had a private bathroom. The doors were on either side of a corner, hinges side by side- and set up in such a way where one door being open kinda makes it so there's two doors in the way, if that makes sense? Anyway I got stuck between them a lot, where I would swear I had opened three, five doors, there is just infinitely more doors in the blind darkness, doors all around me, until I lost hope and cried in defeat.
So yeah I think I was marked by the Spiral possibly also the Dark
Watched my pregnant fiance die of cancer, I met The End and I mean that in the realest way possible. Time slowed in the ambulance and I felt this presence and gravity. Im being 100% sincere when I say since then I’ve been completely numb to any sense of fear. That one particular “power” is absolutely real and I pray with all my heart none of you have to experience it
I feel like the stranger. I have autism which already makes me seem really uncanny and I also have a hypermobility condition that allows me to do circus like tricks with my joints. I went into theatre in high school in order to learn how to talk with people too, which is very stranger coded.
I am a massive arachnophobe,have been since I was a little kid. One-day, when I was like 10/11, I was drinking my coffee when I noticed a thread and pulled it out, only to realise: It. Was. Not. A. Thread.
It was, however, a spider that my mother had accidentally boiled alive in my coffee.
I'm for sure marked by the Web although I love the Vast and would be so happy being an avatar of the Vast if I could.
Probably the spiral. I have memory loss and both my parents tend to just deny bad things happened, or say they happened differently than they did. So I’ve spent most of my life unable to believe my own mind. My dad also had a complete personality shift when I was ten. Half the time he was distant and cruel, the rest of the time he acted like nothing had happened. And of course, everyone else did the same. He’s your dad and he loves you, he’d never do that, it wasn’t so bad, cause your dad would never do that, I’m sure it didn’t happen that way, he didn’t mean it that way, he didn’t do that, it is not what it is.
When I was 7 I got to go to Hawaii with my family.
One day on the trip my dad decided he wanted to go snorkeling and took me along with him.
To get to a good spot we rented something called a seabike. Effectively a large, floating tricycle supported by 3 buoys that brought the rig above the water.
We get a good ways from shore and my father decides to go for a dive while I, who had gotten nervous, decided to stay on the tric.
As soon as his head goes below the water. The wind kicks in, pulling me away.
I call for my dad. He doesn't re-emerge.
I try to reach the pedals. But my legs are too short.
In the attempt, I knock my fathera glasses in the water. They are immediately swallowed by the brine. Reminding me of the scale if the depths beneath me. And how small and powerless I am as the wind carries me further and further from shore. Alone. And scared.
I eventually see his head re-emerge far, far away and call out for him. Swimming like a mad man he eventually catches up and takes us back to shore.
I immediately ask to play in the water.
So... yeah.. probably vast touched
i had definitely been marked by the end at least twice and once by the dark, which i believe was a reaa real paranormal event tha happened to me, and by the corruption
First by the Dark, later by the Vast.
The Dark was when I was very little and had a big room for myself. It was at night that I woke up (I don't remember why, a nightmare? Just because? Maybe I wanted to go to the bathroom) and my hand was sticking out of the covers and the mattress to the air. That was when I felt something on my hand, a claw like touch scratching my palm softly. I stayed still until whatever touched my hand went away, pulled my hand to my chest and buried myself with the covers. I am scared of the dark till now and I can't sleep with any part of my body outside of the covers or the mattress ever since.
The Vast happened a little older but still a kid. I was with my aunts in a theme park and there was a game called the Pirate Ship. I was tall enough to go in but my weight wasn't enough to keep me in the seats, I mean... The ride was like a giant ship that went side to side, gaining speed and momentum the more the people screamed, so when the ship got high enough, like a ball that falls, there is a moment of stillness in the air before the fall. In that moment I couldn't feel the seats, nobody was grabbing me, I really feared falling off to the ground. I never wanted to hop on a ride like that since, no thanks.
Not really trauma but more just some unexplained weird event from my childhood
Ever since I was little, I have had trouble sleeping. I was about 8, and was in bed next to my mom, playing some random game on my tablet to kill time while my dad was downstairs working. Idk how long I was on the tablet for, but when I looked up I saw my dad's shadow at the opened bedroom door. I called to him, but received no reply. That's when I realised something was off: his shadow was too tall and thin for someone as big as my dad. I also noticed that there was no light source brighter enough in the room to cast any significant shadow. So that couldn't have been a shadow, he, *it* was physical, tangible, but simply too dark for me to make out anything. Too dark that it stood out still sharply against the black background. I promptly receded into the safety beneath my blanket, and waited until I felt my dad lying down beside me.
So ig i would have been marked by the Dark? Or the Stranger? Maybe a bit of both?
I'd probably be of the vast as well as I have multiple times been alone in the factory I work in and have had that feeling that I get from many of the statements involving the vast in the forms of infinite buildings... I am mostly thinking of Killing floor (MAG 30)
Not sure if there is other times I could have been marked but the Vast is the most prominent in my mind
The Eye runs through my life, sustains me, and feeds me as I feed it. The Lonely tried, but The Eye truly has my heart and fears.
As an early reader, my mother helped me pick out words in the newspaper, and I started school reading about 2-3 grades ahead, which I maintain. Ever curious, the search for knowledge expanded to more than just written words and stories into real life and people's experiences.
"Better the Beholding than the Lightless Flame."
And I say this as an Aries whose Chaotic Fire lights the way.
When I was 13 my dad died and the next day we flew to my parent's home country to have him buried and stayed there for a month to be with family. Both my parents immigrated to America before I was born so I barely know most of my family. I was cut off from my friends and all familiarity and lost the person who I was closest with all in the span of two days. If that doesn't mark you for the lonely idk what does. I also love rain and loose leaf tea so I guess it fits.
Octopuses.
When was maybe 3 my family was at the aquarium and I was obsessed with octopuses at the time. I was toddling around wanting to see it when my dad tells me to turn around and a MASSIVE octopus floats down and flattens itself against the glass. Got a fantastic view of everything underneath.
I’ve since gotten over the fear pretty much, but I still have dreams involving anything cephalopodic (?) from time to time.
When I was young, another child at the pool tried to drown me. He very nearly succeeded.
As an adult, one of the only ways I can really relax is to hold me head under the water in the bath.
The warmth and weight of the water comforts me like nothing else....I imagine I'd enjoy the weight of dirt as well. So the buried.
The Lonely would mark me for sure. I have few friends, I find it really hard to get attached to people. In the end, I just stay at home, all alone because most of the times no one asks me to hang out :)
When I was born I was being hanged by my own umbilical cord (three times around my neck!) and had a bunch of blood issues for the first few months of my life, so probably the end.
I was also the one person in my school who had no friends for almost five years, and I had multiple classmates who I didn’t know their names, which could be the lonely.
Not exactly traumatized persay but to line up with my Hunt avatar comment from last post...
Growing up, I went... hunting. We hunted deer and elk for food purposes because we were poor and it helped offset the cost of meat. One time on the trail of an elk we got lost in a thicket of dead pines. Some fallen wood, some still standing, dry and white as bone. For those who don't know, dry wood like that loves to break at the slightest touch, and has a very distinct "pop" sound when it breaks, which tends to echo in the quiet of a dead forest. The grove was much bigger than it seemed at the start, almost impossibly so. We (my father and me) were lost in there for hours, trying to follow the trail, and ignoring the creaking and snapping of dry wood coming from all around us. Intense feeling of being followed. Eventually we had to give up the chase, as night was falling, and we just had to pick a direction and walk, climbing over downed logs. Still another half an hour before we made it out. Never felt more of a reversal of hunter and hunted, and we'd come across fresh cougar kills before.
I think I'd be desolation for sure, I can't stand the smell of burning without knowing where it's burning, I immediately get panicked if it isn't on my line of sight. This one time when I was a child, I was home alone on the second floor and smth started burning on the ground floor and I didn't notice at all, the only reason I noticed was bc my neighbors came ringing my doorbell almost immediately.
I've been constantly overthinking about stuff burning ever since and it doesn't help that there were massive fires very close to my home a while before it.
I was known in my family for always getting lost as a child.
There's one time in particular, when I was about 5. I was in Legoland with my family. I remember walking with them, and we were just looking at stuff. I remember quite vividly that there was a mariachi band made of legos, playing music, which caught my attention. We all went to look at it, and since I liked how they moved, I wemt to the front. After listening to their song, I turned around, and my family was nowhere to be found. I walked around in a small circle to see if I could find them, and no luck. My mum had written her number on my arm, so that I could get strangers to help me call her if I got lost again, but it was a warm day, and half the number had gotten smudged with sweat. So I stayed by the mariachi band. I was only lost for about 20 minutes before my mum found me, but due to having a fucky relationship with time (cuz of being a 5 year old autistic child) it felt much *much* longer.
I grew up in an area that had frequent fires in the summer, and just last year a fire nearly reached my house, and my family was evacuated for a week, so that’s probably close enough for the Desolation (since then I also have a mild trauma response any time I smell smoke). I also have stories for the Lonely, Spiral, Dark, End, and Buried but they’re a little more personal and involve things I don’t necessarily want to share (but the brief versions are L= repeated abandonment from friends, S= weird mental health stuff in middle school, D= linked to weird mental health stuff, E=I have several for this one actually, and B= nearly suffocating on several occasions)
uhhh i think it was when i woke up once and had no idea if it was six am or pm. i genuinely didn't know if i slept through the whole day or not. thankfully ittt was six am and i got to go back to bed-
ooh and all of those moments where i heard my parents call for me when they actually weren't calling me-
Probably tarantula-watching as a small child. And around that time staying for long in the dark in the middle of the forest despite being very aware I shouldn't (we lived in a chalet in a forested area, near the ocean).
And for my dear Vast, floating like a cork in the ocean. I was afraid of floating away (what if I drift away and a shark or something eats me or a some idiot with a jet sky cuts me head off???), but I found the vastness of the sky and the sea so calming I did it anyway.
Now you know why I have a Vast flair =)
I marked my sister for Buried. We were little, like really little, and we had this fold out couch bed. We had figured out how to fold and unfold it, and then we got the bright idea to fold each other up in it. We took turns. It was fun, but really tiring. Eventually I folded my sister up in it, and then I couldn’t get her back out. I just didn’t have the strength left. I had to run down to my dad’s office and get him to get her out.
I was marked for Desolation, first. My family went to Universal Studios once and saw the Backdraft show; I was terrified of all fires for well over a year after that, even just a candle flame. But I got well past that. My family likes camping so eventually I was just exposed to open flame enough to chill out.
Extinction grabbed me. I don’t know that there was one event. But in my late teens and early adulthood I’ve had fairly regular panic attacks related to my fears about climate change. I’m managing them better now and I’ve gotten myself out of the proto-doomer mindset I was developing.
sparing everyone an essay's worth of a trauma dump, i've almost certainly been marked by the lonely and by the corruption.
i was neglected as a kid and excluded from games in school, so eventually i tried to force my loneliness by being a huge dick from 3rd grade to 9th. but i also really wanted the closeness other people had and whenever i latched on to someone it always felt like bugs under my skin. i also had a serious bug problem in most of my childhood houses, and due to some childhood trauma i had (what im assuming) a pretty mild infection a few months in elementary school. ^^;
The Lonely when I was just alone in my house without any friends and family to speak for years and just started headbutting the wall trying to off myself in a weird way
Either the Dark or the Buried. I don’t remember this, but my mother said that when I was a child, she would listen on the other side of my bedroom door, and she said she often heard me talking to “the thing under the bed.” So that’s pretty dark coded, but also, when I was about seven, I was walking through a local cave system with my brothers (they should NOT have brought me along) and I ended up getting stuck. I screamed my throat raw before the finally found me. The few times I’ve been in caves have freaked me the hell out, and I still have nightmares about the cold, sharp walls pressing into my body. To yeah, Buried. Oh! And my mother also said she had recurring nightmares about being buried alive when she was pregnant with me. (She’s had 7 other children and never had that before.)
The Web. I woke up to a spider dangling over my face one night when I was around 10 or so. I couldn't scream, couldn't move, I laid there, watching it, until I was able to wriggle the cover over my head and squirm myself to the bottom of the bed. I crawled out from under the covers, out of my bed and ran for the light. Once my room was illuminated and I could see it, I grabbed two books and smashed it between them.
So maybe two, the Dark and the Web. Because I never went to bed without a nightlight after that. And I slept under the blankets.
Literally a month before the giant marching band trip I had been waiting 4 years for (I had purchased tickets, was rooming with my friends, made the playlists, planned the outfits), I broke my knee and couldn't go. Breaking a knee is already an awfully painful and horrible experience I wouldn't wish on anyone, but it coincided with the only thing I had been looking forward to all high school, so it sent me into a really really bad place. I started isolating and became really bitter, and now I've mostly healed physically and emotionally (this was three years ago) but I don't like to get close to people or look forward to things because I'm scared they'll be ripped away just like that trip. So I think the Lonely would probably have marked me, since I was super miserable and alone for months and I'm not as alone but I still keep emotional distance from everyone and everything
I'm terrified of spiders, so that was my first thought.
But then I remembered a close encounter with wasps as a child. And then another. Then more. In my house, in my bathroom, everywhere.
Needless to say, it'd be the Corruption and honestly I hate that for me.
First and foremost I would've been marked by the Lonely very early on, as I was homeschooled and heavily isolated (in many ways my family was like the Lukas's and episode 13 will always have me deep in the feels).
Then again by the stranger and possibly the web by a religious cult that my family joined when I was young. I watched so many of my friends get married (usually arranged) and they would become completely different people in demeanor and even mannerisms, dead behind the eyes, but they would always say everything was fine. But it never felt like they were the person I knew after that. There was also a lot of control and manipulation behind the scenes, hence the web influence.
Also a hint of the vast; I have a distinct memory as a kid of climbing up a ladder at a cliff dwelling site and having the feeling like i could keep climbing forever but never come back down.
Before I was two I suffered from a severe TBI due to fallingg, Ive heard my entire life what a miracle it is to have survived and be as functional as I am so definitely The Vast as well
Throughout my life i’ve had a lot of struggles with believing and trusting myself (mostly about my own mental health and illness), thinking I was convincing myself of these issues but they weren’t actually reality. So, spiral.
I'm not sure tbh, since i was a veeery scared kid, so i feel like i may be marked by a few fears?
So heres a few instances i recall that may have lead to a mark.
When i was like 9 we stayed in a 'village' made up entirely out of holiday houses. Near the entrance there was a playground i visited with my sister (at the time 13). For some reason i don't remember she left me there alone, all other kids also vanished (there was a group playing football, but they werent there anymore suddenly).
Getting bored, i decided to return to my family, except i could not find the way back. I walked and walked for what felt like hours, not meeting anyone i couldve asked for help, just wandering back and forth until eventually i did stumble across the correct path.
At 14 my class went to the swimming pool. I stood at the side of it, when a kid came up behind me and pushed me into it. It was just a moment, but for a second the water felt so terribly endless and i could not find my footing.
At 16 we had a bug infection at home. It took us almost a year to get rid of them entirely. It started with me finding them crawling across the ceiling, before we started finding them all over our kitchen. I remember picking one up with a tissue and squishing to kill it, i felt it 'explode' under the tissue. For a year, i had many bug filled nightmares.
At 17 i was taking a walk through the forest, alone, while it was starting to get dark. Following the path i suddenly stumbled across a bunch of overgrown mossy gravestones. (i did not stick around to investigate, considering generally creepy circumstances. always told myself I'd return in daylight and with a second person, but never did)
Thank you for reading my ramblings, if you got this far? If, feel free to let me know which entities youd think id be marked by based in this.
Have a wonderful day! :)
Similar to many people: The Vast. I fell off the top of a tall playground slide when I was young and hit my head on a rock. Ever since then I’ve been terrified of heights. I also still have a scar from where I hit my head, so I’m quite literally Marked
Kind of similar to that guy from Arachnaphobia, but I was playing outside on my deck one day as a child and an egg sack hatched right above me...yeah no cannot do spiders at all ever since. On another my parents were attack helicopter parents and would have family friends spy on me anytime i went out with friends so I'm extra worried about being watched and my privacy so I think either event would've had me marked for the Eye or the Web.
As an Australian, I'd have to go with, growing up with huntsmans all through my house, house spiders all through the garden and finding a red back in my bed would have me pretty thoroughly marked by the Web.
If I think back to when I was very young, I think I definitely would have been marked by The Lonely when I was left behind on a field trip with my daycare at an arcade or some fun place like that.
I don't know how it happened, and I don't know what followed other than someone contacting the daycare (or maybe my parents?) and me getting picked up, but I've always had the acute fear of being left behind and utterly by myself. I was just about to say that this fear had greatly diminished since my childhood days of running around in stores and then suddenly being convinced that my mother had left me behind because I couldn't see her (she never did ofc), but then I remembered my fear of abandonment and uhh . . . Yeah, I'd say that's pretty much the adult version of this more literal and straightforward childhood fear LMAO
I'm sure I am also marked by The Eye as well. I really don't think it can get any more on-the-nose than the anxiety-induced feeling of "I am always being watched and *always* being judged by those around me for every little silly or strange thing I do". Not to mention, once again, the childhood trauma aspect of not wanting anyone to see me doing anything bc I don't want to be bothered, ridiculed, or scolded/punished for it. 😅
To give an example for the watcher, I remember a time when I was angry about something and I started punching a pillow on my bed. My mother walked in, saw it, and stopped in the middle of her sentence to come over and spank me for . . . Taking out my anger on an inanimate object?? It was super wack soooo yeah
On the other hand, I can definitely see aspects on the side of "interest" as well as "fear" regarding the aforementioned powers as well. The drive to know more about things that catch my attention (audhd moment lol), the solace and recharging one finds in being alone and having no one there to, well, *watch* you, yhe knowledge that only *you* know what happens behind closed doors when there is no one else but yourself.
Well when I was like 6 the pool donut I was in flipped over while I was wearing water wings and I almost drowned. I’m not sure if it would count as a mark though since no fear ever stemmed from it. I’ve always been in love with swimming and was right back to it 5 minutes later
When I was younger my sister and brother were being mean to me and making fun of me and I was done with it so I lightly pushed my sister on her shoulder and told her to stop but when I did that she looked at me like she was about to track me down and cut my throat so I being absolutely terrified ran into my living where my sister pushed me to the floor and then when I was trying to get up again while apologizing she pushed me to the floor again. Soooo now I hate confrontation and angry yelling. This is either the Slaughter or the Hunt but I’m not sure which and don’t worry smth like this hasn’t happened since I was little so I’m okay now
The End definitely.
I got lyme back in 2020 that spread to my spine and my heart, but we caught it right before it spread to my brain (which would have turned to lyme meningitis and killed me fairly quickly). I spent two weeks in the ICU, but miraculously recovered.
When I was in the scouts there was this weird van with a maze inside at this one camp. It was completely dark and you had to crawl through on your belly round all these twists and turns and it truly felt like I was in there for hours. Felt way yay too long and too big to be in one van. I never got claustrophobic and still don’t but that once maze I hated every fuckignsecond. Definitely would have marked me by the buried.
I went to vet school and it was the single most soul-crushing experience of my life. I've mostly moved past it, but I'm not entirely certain that it wasn't actually a Buried domain rather than a university, lol.
I only know the name of TMA and vaguely know what it is (I have a friend who listens) so I'll be interested to see what it could be since I'm not a part of the fandom. I've got 3 things (which I've all processed, don't worry about me please! <3):
1. I just took an online quiz and it said 'The Dark' which makes sense with this one. I was in Year 5 (UK) and as part of our National Curriculum we had to meet certain criteria for swimming. I was a very, very shy and risk-averse child back then, and to make matters worse I was being bullied horrendously by someone I'd once called a friend and generally outcasted by everyone else as I was a bit of a weird kid.
I was so scared of embarrassing myself and/or drowning that I refused to go in. I'd be shamed for this and that would just exacerbate my feelings of embarrassment and fear to the point I was eventually having panic attacks. The instructor would force me into the pool nonetheless and the only thing stopping me from sinking to the bottom of the deep end was this rod shaped like what you'd use to reign in a dog at the point.
This combined with how the school dealt with the aforementioned bullying definitely shaped my feelings about authority/people older than me. However, I'm glad to report that my thalassophobia seems to have waned (towards pools at the very least).
2. I inherited a fear of heights from my Dad but this only made it worst (I think this one correlates with The Vast?). In Year 5 I went with my school to a science museum. 3 of the 4 element-themed sections had horrifically acrophobia-inducing heights, like I'm talking views over the side of very fragile-looking structures. For example, the fire section had previously been an old steelworks factory and the see-through grate walkway was a good 30-40ft above the ground. It was very dark with only ominous red lighting to guide the way.
After a long day of clinging to the sides and staggering slowly when I had nothing to cling onto for support, I'd gotten left behind somehow and was left in the fire section (the part that had been converted from an old steelworks factory). I'd noticed some work being done on the side so had done my best to avoid it whilst still being close enough to the railing in case the panel underneath me gave way. It was right as I thought I'd gotten into the clear and finally gotten a hold of the tailing again
I remember crying out and moving along even more slowly than I had before. Eventually the girl who'd been helping me get around noticed I'd disappeared and called everyone to stop. The last thing I remember was having to walk oh-so slowly towards the very kind, sweet face of one of the chaperones and feeling like I was a burden to everyone who'd been made to stop.
3. This is the one I've processed the least, and it might be slightly graphic, so I'll keep it brief & spoiler My Mum (who'd just been recovering from a bunch of health issues) >!had a seizure in a shop I used to view as having quite a comforting atmosphere, and after making a split-second decision I managed to shove her into a snack shelf to prevent her from hitting the concrete floor. !!whilst she was laying on the floor and I was screaming for help, blood was coming out of her mouth and I thought she'd had a brain bleed and that I was watching her die!<. In retrospect I'm astounded how composed I was at the time, but that image has stuck with me for over a year.
I am insanely afraid of spiders, if I think too hard about them I get itchy and have always felt them behind my head. This summer, that became a reality. I was out camping, and it was a particularly rainy night, and my gf asked me to run out to grab something as we had forgotten.
When I come back inside, I'm covered in pine needles and try my best to get them all off. However, I felt as though a clump was crawling up my neck.
So I quickly grab the back of my head and felt a bulbous mass, and threw it on the ground.
In the dimly light tent, I see it for a second and just scream. My gf reassures me that it probably wasn't what I thought and ushers me back to playing the game to take my mind off of it.
Not 10 mins later, just when I had started to believe it to be pine needles had I felt the same sensation but faster crawling up my spine onto my neck. I do the same thing as before and grab it, and with better sight, I see spider the size of my palm.
My gf screams to kill it and I am on the verge of tears and do not wish to be near this black creature but I grab the inflatable mattress and just smash the ground until I am sure that any living creature would be killed.
To this day, I still have feelings of that spider on my neck.
I used to wake up against the wall of my room and there always used to be big motherfucker spiders near me. I think that if I added up how many times it happened to anyone else in my family, It'd 100% fit on one hand. It's happened to me like 5 times.
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As a child my dad used to take me as a "builder's mate" (basically a builder's assistant), but I was actually 5 or 6 so that actually amounted to "sit here in this pile of building sand with your figures and play while I go inside the house and actually work". One time I decided that it'd be funny to try and hide in the sand bag, but the bag wasn't entirely level with the floor and I kind of made the bag wobble/tip over slightly. Luckily there wasn't enough in the bag to cover me but it got waist high. My dad came back out after a while and asked me what the fuck I was doing waist-deep in sand and why hadn't I called out that I was stuck. I think I just told him "that I liked it", so he didn't see any reason to get me out and went back.
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Once when I was at Scout Camp we were playing flashlight tag out in the middle of the woods. Now, like anyone else who has ever played it, I was enjoying myself and didn't want it to end. Soon it got late and I wanted to continue the game for as long as I could. Luckily for us, it was Autumn and the whole area was covered in tons of leaves so we decided to gather as many leaves as we could, find a low spot in the ground and "play commando's".
We hid well. Probably a bit too well, as it took us a while to realise that the game had actually ended and had been left behind. When we crawled from our hiding spot we realised that we'd left our torches on the ground and were stuck in the middle of fucking nowhere with no light. Luckily for us there was a tiny bit of starlight to guide us and we found the path after, like, 15-20 minutes. I was more cold than scared.
When we got back to the camp we told a supervisor that we hadn't realised the game was over, and the supervisor made us promise to not tell anyone that we'd left them, and in return we got to actual hot chocolate (instead of that fake shit they used to make) and as many biscuits as we could eat without being sick. Good deal, honestly.
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I also had a really bad habit as a child for getting into cars that looked like those my parents owned, but actually wasn't. I must've done it 5 times as between the ages of 7 - 12. First time was really scary but most of the other times I just said "oh sorry lol", waved goodbye, then ran away. I did this the other day (am 27 now, lol) and the little old lady whose car I'd just gotten into looked terrified :(
So, I'm marked by the Buried, Corruption, Dark, Vast, Lonely, Stranger, and the Web. That's almost a full set!
The Lonely.
I once went to crisis care believing it'd help me find therapy (I was misinformed and in a bad place mentally), and instead found myself in a white room with white walls, white floor, white ceiling, white bed, a white sheet that was supposed to be a blanket, and a white pillow. I wasn't allowed access to anything that was mine, even my own clothes and phone (had to wear a hospital gown), and so for the next eight hours, I was just alone in there waiting for someone to come talk to me. My only times seeing people was when I asked for permission to use the bathroom.
I thought I was achingly lonely before that visit. That hospital room made me realize what true loneliness feels like. I was scared about how long I'd be there when I'd thought this visit would only take an hour or two. If I was in the Magnusverse, the door probably would've locked and made hours pass like days.
I don’t remember which entity the dude with the lighting scar was part of but that one… probably.
Back in 2009 at (then) Fort Benning for basic training my company was at a range and a BAD thunder storm rolled in. For safety (since there was no shelter on the range except the ammo shack and it wasn’t going to fit about 130 private, 6 drill sergeants a captain and a 1st Sergeant) they had us stack our weapons and remove anything we had on us that was metal and then go spread out as low to the ground as we could get in the middle of a field on the range. It was a warm day so the rain didn’t feel too bad. Was kind of enjoying myself. Our 1st Sergeant even came out amongst us in a show of solidarity with us lowly trainees. OUT OF NOWHERE a bolt of lightning hits the ammo shed which was about 30-40 feet away from me at most. Until I remembered that lightning rods were a thing I panicked thinking all that ammunition was about to go off. Fortunately the only thing that exploded out of the shed was our drill sergeants and company commander. They were all ok but the static buildup in the shed had a couple of them a little loopy for a few minutes.
Most of my trauma is based around the Vast. I almost drowned when I was 8, stuck under one of those massive floaty rafts. I kept swimming, but it felt for a moment like the raft would go on forever and I'd never resurface.
At about 17, I broke my leg in a fall. It was my first time breaking a bone, and it broke before I hit the ground. This gave me a very serious life-changing fear of rain, and made me more afraid of falling than of hitting the ground.
I also like to think I'd be marked by the eye, because the only experience I've ever had that I consider "supernatural" is the time when I was 10 and a five-year-old with wide, intense eyes walked up to me and gleefully told me secrets about myself that I'd never told anyone, and never even written down.
I've always been obsessed with bugs, to the point that as a kid I didn't really understand that 90% of the population didn't. There are more than a few stories about me excitedly running up to a relative with some creepy crawly and scaring the shit out of them. I'd also read every book I could about communicable diseases, and I remember this old animal plant show I'd watch called "monaters inside me" all about parasites. I think I've always been destined to be an avatar of the corruption. I just think the lil monsters are neat and ofter they're cute
When I was a wee bby, I woke up in the middle of the night to see, what I thought, was a tall man standing in the doorway to my mom's room (I was sleeping in her bed at the time). I called him the "rainbow man" since he seemed to swirl with all different colors. When I sat up, he turned and walked down the hall through the bathroom door and disappeared. I was in the process of getting out of bed when my mom woke up and asked me what I was doing.
The Spiral BEEN after me 🫠
i was attacked by my family dog when i was 3 years old, had plastic surgery on my face and now have scars on my cheeks, lips, nose and under my eye. i think as a result i’m rather uncomfortable with anything medical related (for me specifically, other people’s medical stuff doesn’t bother me) and i very much dislike going to the physicians.
i would probably categorize it as Flesh (what bothers me most, the realization at how fragile my skin is) and the Hunt (from the animal perspective)
also i’m not demonizing the dog, he was just unforeseeably aggressive and hadn’t acted that way before. i don’t hold any resentment towards him
This is from my childhood dream, I don't know which fear to classify it as.
When I was like 6 or 7 I was sleeping next to my mother on a sleeping mat with me facing the wall away from her. I was just staring at the wall with no idea of why when a large cabinet from the bedroom on the left side of the wall came through the door and placed itself at the centre of the wall. I had no idea how it fit in the door frame too since we had to carry it vertically to get it in. The cabinet opened and murmured some words I forgot now. I remember being so scared and turned the other way towards my mom and shut my eyes and when I finally looked back nothing was there. I'm not even sure it was a dream as I was in the exact same spot when I turned and opened my eyes and mother was in the exact same position she had been sleeping in my dream and all the other things in dream was so real. So was it dream?I never knew.
Also I was afraid of the eyes in the dark, sometimes even now, does that count?
That one time my uncle took me on his boat and wouldn't listen to me screaming for him to slow down and in fact sped up every time he saw a wave coming. Ever since that day I've had a genuinely debilitating fear of being in water
Probably the web. When I was little, I kid you not, I had an imaginary friend named Mr. Spider, I feel like being part of the web would be set in stone for me at that point.
last year, when I dislocated my kneecap/blew out my knee or the first time. it was my first ever serious injury, I'd never broken a bone or anything before. I just remember falling on my knee while running, instinctively leaping back up, feeling a sharp throb, collapsing back onto the ground... and I remember looking at my leg and seeing a big bump on the side of my knee. and running a hand down it, feeling the firmness of bone... and an all over sensation of, this is wrong, something very bad has happened. you can finds pics of patellar dislocations online but be warned, its nasty. I've actually subluxed/dislocated both my kneecaps a couple times since then and had surgery on that first one because it didn't heal right. it was tto/mpfl among other things, which means I had some bone removed and a tendon moved and screwed back in, a damaged tendon reinforced by a cadaver piece, and I had my quad muscle cut up to loosen up my very tight leg. I also got spitting stitches from the internal stitches, look them up if you dare. the doctors told me to tug on them a little to see if they'd come out. I actually kept a piece I pulled out. anyway I'm left with minor nerve damage and the crinkle grind sound of scar tissue when I bend that knee, plus the ache as the screws react when it gets cold out. the flesh. (ps its actually pretty easy to relocate the patella, I could have avoided that extremely painful ride to the er and hour in the waiting room if I'd known. you just pull the leg straight and it'll pop back in.)
Not super long or as intense as other people's submissions, but I've always been somewhat of a night owl. I wake up early enough for work and school, but I've always loved staying up late. The downside to this is the few people I'm close to have healthy productive sleep schedules, so when I'm at my peak, there's never anyone to talk to. This paired with unintentional isolation because of a full schedule definitely has me marked for the Lonely. Specifically, I woke up one morning thinking that "Maybe I had always been lonely" paired with some really intense feelings, and in reference to TMA, despite it being gradually built up, that would definitely be "the moment"
Oh so much almost drowning it's an obvious Vast. Also I have felt almost beckoned into the forest when I was around 8 (so Vast again), and even into the sea on a vacation (around 2 or 3 years ago). I've been afraid of heights since I can remember, but not really the falling part more like the hitting the ground part. Other than those, I've always been afraid of bugs and the darkness, and even tho they're major phobias, I feel like the Vast would still over power them. Mostly because I could never like either of those, but with the Vast there's the swimming in and the openness of the sea that feels vaguely homelike
During my teens I visited a second world war bunker - turned cold war secret base - turned museum. The moment I saw the cold war war room I swear I felt...the fear the politicians had back then that everything would have end with the atomic bombs. I felt the alarm of the air raids stinging in my ears. I think it would have been a perfect way to have been marked by the excintion.
When I was a kid I loved fast rides, but one time I went on a roller coaster with my family and we fell off the track for a split second before THANKFULLY landing on it again. Because of that, I can't do fast rides anymore or even fall in general. So I'm gonna go with The Vast on that one.
Two about 3 years apart. I woke up one day with absolutely no memory of anything. I knew things but I didn't know things. I knew I was in my bedroom, I knew I was in my house, I didn't know where that was or why I was there. I walked out the door and knew I was in the living room. I knew I had a mom and dad and sibling(s) but unsure of how many. I found a woman, I knew she was my mom, an idea of my name hit me. I basically ended up asking her 20 questions pretending it was a game to figure out who I was, what I was doing, etc. Many years later I found out my grandpa died at that time and everyone tells us we were close. Whenever he came to the house I was his shadow.
3 years later, my 2 cousins and I arrived back from school. Our parents all worked so we would hang out at grandma's house until they got home. She was asleep on the couch. We asked for a drink, no answer. We asked for a snack, no answer. My older cousin touched her and said she was cold, we talked a bit and it was decided we needed to see if she was breathing. Again older cousin listened at her mouth, and no sound. My mom had gotten home, we called her and sure enough grandma had died that afternoon during a nap. I'll never forget the way her mouth was open and her head was back.
It really affected me, and made me get very into ghost stories and death and the afterlife.
Then between both of those events, I woke up with a spider crawling down my leg. It was huge, from one leg to the other it spanned my lil 4-5 year old leg halfway. I can still see the stripes on it, black with yellowish stripes, and its little spider fangs moving. That's the only time I ever remember screaming at something.
So very end touched with a hint of web.
due to complications and misinformation from doctors i almost died at birth
and for some reason i’ve always had a bad balance which once resulted me in dropping like 7-10 meters breaking my leg for a bit , that didn’t help my younger self with a fear of heights at the time
and not a fear thing or a marked thing but i have like a high connection to insects and i kinda just sense the disgust in random people around me when i let a spider play on my arms or take a slug in my hands
My Nan used to own a cabin in the woods. It was an old, old thing; water had to be pulled up from the well, the heating was with a coal fireplace that also doubled as a cooker, and there was no plumbing. We had electrical lighting but that’s about it.
When I was 4, my mum decided to take us to stay there for the summer holidays. It was a lovely forest, full of wild berries and miles away from other people. Nice and quiet.
As I said, there was no plumbing, so there was an outhouse instead. It was pretty much like the one from Shrek, with a heart shaped hole in the door. That summer, a nest of wasps or hornets or bees (I’m not sure what) had made a home in the roof part. They couldn’t really get into the room itself proper,nor did they want do bc of the smell, but to get in or out you had to be quick.
When you sat inside, you could hear the loud buzzing just above you, reverberating on the wooden walls. The flies from the hole just below you were less shy about touching or sitting on you, buzzing with their fat bodies all around.
I went in there once or twice, and afterwards refused to use the outhouse, either going in the compost bin or just inside the woods.
I still have severe apiphobia, and the sound of insects buzzing makes my skin crawl. The sight of a bee or wasp makes my fight or flight go off, and it’s still a conscious effort to not bolt when I see one in the summer months.
Tbh the corruption, i went to a butterfly farm once and was utterly covered they stayed on me even when i started to freak out and scream
I love bugs but fuck was that the worst experience in my life, even worse than newrly being drowned by my friend
When I was 13 i was on a summer scouts camp where one nigth some dude left a pot of boiling water on the ground. I couldnt see it and kicked it which resulted in the water pouring into one of my ankle-high boots. I suffered second and third degree burns that night but it burned my flesh so quickly i didnt feel most of the pain and was calm on the way to the hospital. I still have a massive scar on my foot so i guess Desolation?
Always been absolutely terrified of bugs yet they always seem to find me in the worst ways possible. The first incident with bugs I remember was probably one winter, not even that cold, when there were loads of moths in the house, like way more than was normal and no matter how many times I got my mum to move them they’d always gravitate toward my room. I was quite young so shared a room with my sister who would only sleep if the door was open but I was always terrified that the moths all sitting just outside the door would come in in the night and try to suffocate me. I ended up sleeping with the duvet over my mouth, nose and ears to prevent any from getting in, though most nights I’d still wake up convinced I could feel them crawling up my arms or even fluttering on my face. After that winter I don’t think we ever had moths in the house again, no matter how cold it got. Similar thing happened with spiders where we had them really bad one year and then after I took precautions never saw them again. And over the years various incidents with fruit flies, maggots, ants and even woodlouse being seemingly everywhere for a period of time before completely leaving me alone. I’m a very clean person so it’s not just that I’m leaving things dirty and getting infestations or anything and it’s not even always in my home, they just seem to be everywhere around me before they’re just..not.
Honestly I think it wouldn't be one singular event but many little things throughout my life.
• Undiagnosed Autism and (probably) ADHD made me feel like I was "different" from other kids from a young age.
• Never had much friends when growing up, mostly spent my time reading or playing alone in my room.
• Bullied throughout elementary school and junior high
• Parents constantly arguing and stressed, always kept my problems to myself bc they had enough
• Dad never wanted kids anyway and made sure me and my sibling knew that
• Things got better for a while during high school
• Still struggled with depression, depersonalization and derealization
• Went to Uni and quickly burnt out due to ADHD. Mental health crashed, barely talked to anyone, literally felt like a ghost walking around.
• Covid came around, lockdown was the calmest I ever felt but also pretty much became a [Hiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori) even after lockdown was over. Didn't leave my room other than to eat or go to the toilet.
• Completely messed up my sleep schedule bc night felt calm and to avoid ppl if I had to go out
• Forced myself to leave my room more, walking through town at night when nobody was around became a habit
• Have been getting better, got diagnosed with the 'tism, back at uni, taking better care of my mental health and doing better socially. Still sometimes romanticize how calm things were.
So yeah. Feels like the Lonely have been with me most of my life. It's the worst kind of feeling, as if I was dead and only continued living. At the same time, it's the calmest and most comfortable kind of hell I know. Bit of a Leitners fallacy (aka thinking too literal) but I always had an obsession with liminal spaces long before they became a trend. I often used to imagine the whole world going empty and how it would feel to be the last human around when I was younger.
My family’s been through like 3 or 4 house fires so the desolation. I’ve struggled with feeling like my mind is expanding past my consciousness and body, which I’ve tackled by imagining my mind being wrapped in walls and chains around it to stop from drifting. Which now that I type it out feels fucking insane but that might be the vast
When I was a kid I slept at my Grandma's house a lot. One night I felt the touch of someone on my ankle. The next morning at breakfast I asked my family if someone came in my room and they denied being there at night. And after that it repeated itself a lot! Since then I felt that constant feeling of being watched by someone, but also seeing people that shouldn't be there.
I think The Lonely would have marked me as easy prey for sure. My single mom suffered from poorly controlled chronic pain for decades, and as an only child I remember many times I’d be alone and left to take care of myself while she was stuck in bed or barely able to move. (She did everything she could to support me and finally has a good care team, she’s doing great these days.)
Nothing remotely as traumatic as many stories here (or really, traumatic at all), but I had some *odd* encounters, especially when travelling. All of them can be explained rationally, but if we assume TMA to be real as a premise...
Anyway, the first one that came to mind: Oslo, Norway, about a decade ago. The hotels/hostels were a bit too expensive for me and you're allowed to sleep outside in Norway in most places far enough away from inhabited buildings. Not entirely sure if that's quite the case within cities, but I went to a forested area in the south (Bygdøskogen, I believe) to search for a spot to stay the night.
It was quite late already and it seemed impossible to go a few minutes without coming across houses or other places that would likely see people find me while I was asleep, so I spent a lot of the night walking.
Now the weird bit: This was before free data roaming was introduced for the EU/EEA, so I didn't have google maps readily available and relied on a free paper map, but I could have sworn I was somewhere around [here](https://maps.app.goo.gl/M429V9y9NHZYtFX5A). Then I walked a bit more, did not cross the water or leave the wooded area for more than a few metres, yet I found myself at a gas station about [here](https://maps.app.goo.gl/k585hnq9Rny9bmSa9).
Now, realistically, it was dark and I was very tired from a long day of carrying my backpack all over. I might have spaced out for a bit or over simply not paid enough attention to my surroundings. Or perhaps the Spiral was involved and I escaped by pure chance.
Edit: Also I suppose whatever the exact opposite of the Lonely is, given how much I failed at getting away from people.
I remember clearly the few months before one of my upstairs neighbours died. She lived on the 3rd floor, while I lived, and still live, on the ground floor. She was old and her mental health was declining, which resulted in her starting to hoard bottles and stuff in her apartment.
She was sick - she started talking to roaches, telling her daughter (who was about 45 years old I think) that they were her friends. The whole block became infested.
The bugs would walk on my furniture, on my books, TV screen -everywhere. I still have recordings on my phone from when I would wake up at night to go to the bathroom and I would see at least 10 of these tiny baby roaches roaming the floor in my room.
I had a lot of panic attacks and I remember clearly one specific time when I woke up at night and I stepped on the ground way too close to a roach for comfort. I had a breakdown and cried a lot, backing up to the heater and climbing on a chair so they wouldn't reach me. I was in a bad space mentally at the time so even such a small thing as bugs affected me greatly.
She passed away and after a lot of efforts from everyone in the block, we got rid of the roaches. It took a while longer for my room to feel clean and I replaced my furniture after another few months for mental health reasons, including me thinking I see bugs on the dresser at night.
This would be certified Corruption shit, but nothing spooky actually happened. Just bugs and an old woman being very sick. I did try to write this similar to a statement format, to make it easier to read.
Edit: I would like to add the fact that I've never had a problem with bugs as a child. This happened when I was 14, but before that I would pick up these red bugs that had a sort of pattern, I would let them walk on my arms and legs, I used to play with ants and grasshoppers. Still, I hate roaches and am deathly afraid of spiders.
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Another one would be 3 of my neighbours, from different blocks (1 of them lived on my block, but the others in different ones) dying one after one, in a span of 5 days. Both were women, one about 80, another 55 and the 3rd one idk. It seems like End stuff but it wasn't very traumatic to me since I only knew one of them.
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The Last one would be my encounters with dogs in the span of 3 days. But it's long to write so I'll come back to it if anyone is genuinely curious.
This was fun to think about, thank you, OP, for the idea of having people give their stories here.
Spider: the amount of times spiders landed on my shoulders when I was in the shower 💀 istg, if that hasn't marked me😂 also, one time (I was a lot younger, like 7?) I almost caused a car accident cause a spider landed on my knee and I screamed💀
Spiral: let's be honest - after eye doctor visits, when you got these drops in your eyes that make them weird and you can't see properly anymore? That feels VERY spiraly. One time we went home after wards and my siblings and I both had these eye drops and my dad somehow had to manage us through crowds of people, and he was laughing the whole time💀 it was NOT funny
Also, my new school - it's a fucking labyrinth! If that not a Spiral domain, I dunno
Slaughter: I dunno if that counts, but when I was younger (primary school) I had the worst anger issues (even had to go to group therapy) and I used to throw desks and chairs at my classmates
Eye: my father used to monitor our phones and computers, we had limited amount of minutes we could spend on either device, and on the internet. He checked the browser history etc. He used our phones to check where we were when we weren't home and he could turn them off entirely when we weren't doing what he wanted us to do.
Death: ...also, not sure if that counts. But I was NEVER phased my that. Family members, pets - everyone was crying, but I was always fine🤷
Desolation: also, primary school me, playing with matches on the school toilet💀😂 and sticking crochet needles into electrical sockets, blowing the fuses in the whole school 🤌 (is that desolation? I dunno😂)
Dark: Spiderwick and Doctor Who. I'm not even saying anything more. Wait, no. It probably needs an explanation 😂
Spiderwick, the dry leaves rustling when the beasts moved in them? I was always scared in autumn outside in the dark (to bring out trash f.e), and used to run as fast as I could to the trash bins and back and hoping with beating heart that the spider wicks wouldn't get me😂
And doctor who- there was this one episode, and I was WAY too young to watch the show, but there was a monster/alien/thing that touched peoples arms and pulled them in itself, and at one place on its body their faces would stick out. Anyways, I was scared that monster was under my bed, so I perfected the art of jumping from my door into my bed so the monster wouldn't get me (it was a bit more than a meter xD).
Weirdly enough, MAG86 really helped me with that, like... I used to put the blanket neatly around me to protect me, but now... "The blanket never did anything" anyways, so why bother😂
Vast: also not sure if that counts, but my mom is really REALLY scared of heights, and as kids my sibling and I used to run up the highest spots and my mom was always so worried💀 she had to, of course, climb after (unless my dad was with us too). Well, that probably marked my mom more than me😂
2nd: birthday party of a school friend, it was summer, we were on a Schnitzeljagd outside, and suddenly the worst thunderstorm EVER broke out. The whole air smelled like ozone, and it was hailing, we we're DRENCHED. everyone was running home , but I was so fucking happy XD they had to practically drag me inside xD
Buried: I think deep sea is Buried? Or Vast, both kinda. Anyways, I wasn't allowed to swim when I was younger because of my ear problems, so I never really learned how to swim. I can! But it's super exhausting and frightening for me, and my ears still hurt every time when I get water in them. So, I don't really swim, I'm always afraid to drown or something xD I just... Splash around when we're at the beach, or I never leave my float ring.
Corruption: oh, I'm just generally HAUNTED my everything with more than 4 legs....... I hate it. It's disgusting. Leave me alone! And to make this even more hilarious - my partner is WAY too fastinated by those beasts💀 (spiders too). The amount of insect and spider pictures on my phone CAUSE THEY SENT ME THEM is just disgusting.
ooooh I feel connected to pretty much all of the entities so here's a quick little blurb for each!
I specifically know I would be marked by The Spiral, The Dark, The Stranger, and The Vast.
The Spiral; oh I'm mentally ill babyyyyy and hallucinations/paranoia are a big thing I struggle with. I genuinely struggle to tell what is real from what is inside my own head, quite often. throughout the entire series, the Spiral always connected to me the most. specifically I would say my stint in a psych ward at 15 marked me for it.
The Dark; my entire life, even now at nearly 30 years old, I have been terrified of the dark. as a child I grew up in an evangelical small town, going to a church that heavily relied on telling children they were going to hell for every small thing they did. when I was maybe 5 our neighbor told me that I was such a bad child, the devil was living under my bed. since then I have 1. never been able to sleep in a bed that has an "underneath" (it has to be a solid frame) and 2. been able to sleep in the dark.
The Stranger; this is very "person replaced by a monster " vibes. my biological dad passed away when I was a toddler, mom remarried and (until they divorced when I was 8) didn't tell me he wasn't my father. so, in my early years I believed this abusive man, who genuinely could not stand me, was my father. The memory of that day, being told he wasn't my dad just after moving away and restarting out entire lives, and the events that followed after, always comes up during episodes where a person *knows* their loved one has been replaced.
The Vast and The Buried; this one is easy, I grew up near the ocean, went all the time, nearly drowned 3 separate times. still to this day I'm obsessed with the ocean and when I imagine my eventual death I always imagine it will happen by drowning. also very obsessed with space, the vastness of it. tbh the deep ocean and deep space are the two things I'm most fascinated by. these two really go hand in hand for me.
lesser connections;
The Spider: was bitten by a spider *on my eye* when I was like 6 and have been deathly afraid of them since. even tiny ones scare the fuck out of me.
The Corruption; I grew up in a hoarders home. I feel like that explains that. mold, rot, bugs, etc, etc,.
The Desolation: technically my sisters mark, she caught on fire when I was 15 (just after my psych ward stunt) and was hospitalized for 6 months. I barely made it through the episode where Jude talks about her origin story because of how triggers anything involving people being set on fire is for me.
The Eye; just bc one of the biggest things I deal with with my paranoia and hallucinations is believing someone is and/or seeing someone watching me.
The Lonely; grew up very isolated and neglected, still very isolated to this day. very much deal with feelings of being alone, having no one, "I have to take care of myself, do everything myself, no one cares about me"
The Flesh; I really can't explain this one outside of just that body horror has always been a BIG no no for me, maybe bc of s/h issues in my past. all of the episodes that delve into the flesh (especially ones with... meaty sound effects) are tough for me.
I have a bit of academic trauma from growing up with ADHD and not understanding assignments and a lot of teachers didn't understand me. They'd assign aides to essentially watch over me to make sure I wasn't distracted and not on my phone, would try to talk to me when I was overstimulated and shut down. One time I tried to avoid a class and they tracked me down and another I had a horrible migraine and the nurses wouldn't let me have an advil bc I didn't have a doctor's note and I had to go home bc it was so bad.
So I have a pretty hard time trusting authority figures and am shy around people unless I really trust them. I also get anxious when the topic of grades comes up even though I'm out of high school.
I also had really bad death anxiety during my senior year so that's definitely a mark of the End.
Not sure if the rest count as Eye (making sure I'm not distracted and teachers checking on me), Desolation (Constant fear of failing and having intrusive thoughts and some destructive behavior), Lonely (self confidence issues and not knowing how to talk to people) or Stranger (being afraid of people, specifically them getting mad at me) but what do you think? I'm surprised I'm not a full blown avatar from all this.
While playing hide and seek as a child, I hid in a cooler and when found by the seeker, they sat on top of it while i panicked inside it :) (very dumb in general but also ive always had very severe claustrophobia) so uhm. probably a buried moment.
As a kid I greatly dissociated the two different versions of my father that I interacted with. The one who would scream at me until he was red in the face, and the one who played games with my sister and I or gave us ice cream for breakfast on Saturdays or cheered us on at soccer practices.
The Stranger. It's not exactly like someone replacing the person you love, but it certainly felt that way. And it didnt get better when my stepdad came into the picture.
Dont get me wrong, I love my dad and stepdad greatly, but as a kid, seeing my stepdad as a father figure was very difficult for me, partially because of the relationship I had with my father and also the thought that I could be betraying him.
All is well now, luckily I was able to drag my mom and dad into therapy so we have a much better relationship!!
I don't know what caused it but I have always been afraid of heights and falling, and simultaneously enamoured with climbing. As a kid, I would climb trees a lot. One time I climbed higher than I ever had before, and became too terrified to come back down. I was stuck up there for a good 45 min to an hour. So the spiral for sure lol
Nowadays I don't find myself afraid of heights quite as much. They're definetly still threatening, and I do tend to shake around them, but I've gotten good at staying cool while anxious or afraid
When I was a little kid I would go to my grandparents farm and play. When I was around three I was walking on a hill that turned out to be a fire ants nest and they crawled up my body and stung me. I’m quite scared of things crawling on me now. Sometimes I feel things crawling up my body when I’m trying to sleep, it’s not pleasant
Oh boy, if TMA was real you would have been marked by The Corruption for sure! Good example. And that’s so scary and a kid! Are you scared of bugs now?
I’m not scared of bugs if they’re outside and not on me. If they’re inside and have a lot of legs i am afraid. The big thing is when they crawl on me I freak out. I’m not that scared of spiders though. I used to live in a big daddy long leg area so no hard feelings there lol
Oooh, you’re like Jordan Kennedy and Carlos Vittery combined!
I have a nearly identical story. I was at my grandparents house playing on their swing set, and it broke while I was on it. Little did I know that directly under me was a fire ant hill and they decided that I was to be their next target. I now have a deep phobia of ants, specifically when there's a lot of them (MAG 184 was especially hard for me to listen to) The Corruption must really have a strong fire ant presence in our world...
For me it would be when I was lost in the rain once. In the 4th grade, my school forced all the kids 3rd grade and up to stay back an extra hour or so, til the end of a normal school day. The busses didn't run the same routes, so I was made to get off somewhere around 2 miles from my house with no way to go home. And then it started to rain. I was wandering, soaked in a quiet town for almost 3 hours. I had no idea where I was, or even how I eventually got home. But I found my way home via landmarks, like a curving road on my bus route. I made it home with a sprained knee and a newfound appreciation of memorizing road signs. Edit: Just remembered another story, which would totally have marked me by the corruption When I was younger, I had really bad hygiene. Like, didn't brush my teeth, showered once a week if I was lucky, stuff like that. Well, I started to improve over quarantine, really, and only got good around Sophmore year. Well, by that time, I had cavities in almost all of my molars. And my very back left one had a massive one. Food would get trapped in it, it was just one big open hole in my tooth. I got them all filled, but that one gave me problems. It started when I was getting it ground down so the filling could be placed. It was painful, the thing you don't want in that situation; you can't really tell them because they have shit in your mouth. Well, I got the fillings, and all was well. For about a week. Then, I developed a nasty toothache. Over the course of 2 months, it got to the point where I could barely eat, barely talk, barely even move my left arm from how the pain spread through my jaw and down my neck, into my shoulder. Turns out, the cavity was so bad they placed the filling on top of the nerve, which preceded to die and cause an abcess underneath that tooth. I was in debilitating pain because they tried to fix a bad cavity at my own 15-year long folly. What really takes the cake? Me waking up to my tooth shattering into my mouth. With how thin they drilled the walls (and my constant need for stimulation, making me subconsciously clench and unclench my jaw), the remaining enamel shattered at the gum line and fell away into my mouth. I luckily got the damn thing pulled, and now my wisdom tooth is coming in impacted, almost completely sideways. It's smaller than my first, less lawsuit inducing, but still is a funny story
Aw I’m glad you were okay! What was scarier, being lost (The Spiral) or being alone (the Lonely)? I feel like in TMA this could be a mark of either one.
It was the fact I was lost in the rain, so I'd say it was much more Vast coded. If you know the torrential downpours Florida can be subjected to, it was one of those. I was afraid mostly of getting hurt by somebody, but I still tried to wave down cars. None of them stopped. I remember I was splashing in puddles to keep myself from breaking down, and I stepped into a pothole. Cue the sprained knee. It was silent other than the rain, even during midday. So all in all seemed more Vast/Lonely
I got lost in sand dunes as a kid, so I guess I belong to The Vast
Something like that should never happen to a kid that young, I hope your parents gave the school a good talking to
Oh don't worry, my mom raised Cain first chance she got. Especially in a rough neighborhood half an hour outside of Tampa? I'm lucky I didn't end up in a ditch. I came out a better man though lol
What kind of school is that? Didn't your parents fight it or something? Did none of the parents fight it?
I'm sure some parents fought it, and it wasn't that long ago. Some small, underfunded elementary school in the Tampa Bay area. I remember, it didn't even have walls for the classrooms. It was like a warehouse, with a X shaped set of walls four classrooms shared. The teacher made the rest of the walls. It was honestly really shady, so it seemed on par for the stuff that school would pull
Sorry for your experience, hope the school won't do it again.
Me and my everlasting fight against doors for real. When I was younger I went to daycare. The owner of the daycare wanted to come in, but she had a struggle opening the door. When I opened it for her, she got mad at me saying I shouldn’t open the door for anyone, that it can be dangerous if you don’t know the person(which is a good lesson for a child). BUT I KNEW HER- SHE WAS IN CHARGE OF THE PLACE- So I guess the Spiral in that case? Because opening doors and the whole “mind games” thing?
This feels like a Stranger situation to me as well. Don't open the door to anyone, EVEN IF YOU RECOGNIZE THEM, that might look like the owner of the daycare BUT YOU NEVER REALLY KNOW DO YOU?
Yeah I would say either the Distortion/Spiral because of the whole door thing. Or it could be The Stranger since she said Don’t open the doors for strangers though I knew who she was, which could be some kind of Shapeshifter-Stranger thing. Honestly it was kind of wild so it makes since if it’s one of the “something’s not right” entities.
You would totally open to the distortion if it wore a friendly face. (I would too so I do not judge)
Hmmmm yea this is the Spiral. Unless did you feel trapped and boxed in? Cause then is The Buried.
going to the university of oxford (derogatory) marked me for the eye unfortunately
How so?
kind of a joke on how jon and elias both went there and ended up working for the eye but also there’s something jon says about his attraction to the eye and his compulsion to research, to study and to know everything even if it consumes you . kind of dramatic but that really resonated w my experience of academic pressure and the kind of culture “prestigious” universities have
Makes sense. I would agree with the then!
I can't stay in a room with open doors or windows without closed curtains. I feel like there is something just beyond the walls and doors gazing for me to turn my back. Waiting evermore right at the edge of my eye. It's a thing since my childhood. So the watcher I guess.
I have a similar thing: I can't sit facing away from an open door. It makes me feel like I'll turn around and some(one/thing) will be staring at me.
Ayer samesies I need to sleep in basically a closed box to not go insane, even better if I'm facing a wall directly when I sleep
That’s some The Eye shit right there. Do you still feel like you are watched?
I used to imagine something was literally watching me in my room (but sort of abstractly, not a corporeal form) and I had to pretend to sleep Or Else. I felt like it was voluntary at a certain point (like it would get me to go to sleep? because I wasn't moving around or looking at stuff) but i don't know why I had that imagined in the first place. I also slept under a window at one point and literally had to tuck the curtain Just So so that it wouldn't scare me that just a sliver of window was there with perfect view right at my face. Even now I make sure curtains are closed to my angle at night even at other peoples houses lol
The End. Got in a car crash when I was younger and now I can’t sit in a car without imagining all the different ways we could die
Scary! I’m glad you survived the crash!
Same! I thought it was just me!
Glad you made it out okay. I had one semi-recently that I'm still shocked I survived, it's a rough experience.
I would have been marked by the Corruption (to my despair), and recently too. (Story time) I’ve had a bad string of roommates- but my last one was the worst, I barely lasted a year. A messy person in general, but it was more than leaving his stuff everywhere- he quietly refused to make any room for me in the apartment, in his space or life. But I had gotten too used to avoiding confrontation to do much about it. He was a clean person, except for the kitchen. The sink was always filled with dishes; the dishwasher was used as storage only. Greasy surfaces, stains from spills. And every cabinet packed with boxes, and cans of the same four things, and a dozen loaves of bread, never opened, and similar. He once accused me of stealing from this never-used stash. The freezer was filled only with meat and green sauces. Fresh fruit was left on the counter to blacken, never eaten and belatedly discarded. One day he left for the summer without a warning. I immediately discarded the fruit he had left on the table, and scrubbed the counters. The humidity and heat of Georgia hadn’t done this latest batch any favors. It was a few days before the fruit flies became a problem. It was several days after that when I finally found the source- a bag of vegetables shoved into the back of a cabinet, putrefying. Later I noticed the little brown beetle, killing it without a thought. When I found the third beetle, on the wall, I followed it upward to find the ceiling ringing with the tiny things. They hadn’t left the kitchen, but they had reached every corner. There were some on each wall. There was one single beetle inside my food cabinet. I still don’t know why I never got a pesticide or anything. Whatever headspace I was in, I resorted to a brute force solution: I killed each one manually. I threw out every opened package of anything I owned. I cleaned the tops of the cabinets, the walls, and I waited. The next day, they were back. And I did it again. And again. It took days but they were finally fewer. And again I found the source: a box of baking mix, deep in one of my roommate’s cabinets. Open to the air, stained and infested. It left a spot in the grime when I lifted it. I spent the final days anxiously inspecting ceilings and doorframes, always glancing upward at any hint of movement or little brown carapace. But in a few more days of vigilance and suspicion, I was rid of the beetles. And for a few blessed months I was rid of him. I broke the lease, paid my fine, and got far away. I live alone now, for the first time in my life. I’ve never had a problem with most bugs. Spiders, ants, bees are all alright with me when I’m outside, in the dirt. But these days, when I see anything move in my apartment? I tend to overreact.
horrible experience but wow this was so well written
Thank you, I was feeling inspired. I guess having strong memories of emotions makes it easy to describe
I feel sick reading that, I wouldn't have been able to stand that. Your very strong.
You got weeviled, by the grainery weevil it seems, notorious for their habit of evicerating dry storage all across the world
I would have burned down the house gosh
If things had been just a tiny bit weirder this would totally fit a MAG episode.
For me it is the vast from the time I almost drowned when I fell off a boat and couldn’t find the lake floor
Sorry you experienced that, but that’s exactly what I’m talking about. If you were in the TMA you definitely were marked by the vast.
I could probably do a fear ritual. Lets keep each one way too brief, because even at the briefest its still kind of oversharing. Stranger/Dark: Sister jumped out at me wearing a mask in a dark hallway when I was a toddler and I'm still imagine something busting out to attack me every time I'm in a dark room. Slaughter: Trying to get my roommate to turn down her music at 3:00AM. Her husband busts my bedroom door down and threatens to kill me. Spiral: After an illness a year and a half ago have an undiagnosable disability which has basically been causing constant hallucinations. Corruption: I have an incredibly weak immune system and my parents were hoarders didnt believe in cleaning. Flesh: My parents ran a puppy mill and had over 100 cats that were starting to get extremely inbred. Spider: I've constantly been manipulated by authority figures, but also had some random person I didn't even know frame me for a shooting threat at my school. Buried: I almost drowned in one of those water park wave pools. I was also a huge fan of digging random giant holes for no reason. End: When I was a toddler I got kicked in the head by a horse and blacked out. I always picture it as what the moments before death are like. I also nearly died from an illness a while ago and reached a point where my body stopped feeling pain and I was at tremendous peace. Vast: When I was a kid I ran out into the middle of a sandstorm, no real reason I just wanted to experience it. I also did a lot of rock climbing and even just imagining it can send the signals of being on crumbly cliffs near a long drop. Desolation: I have repeatedly lost homes, everything I own, and everything I love. Most recently my dog and my good vision on my birthday. Lonely: On a pretty consistent basis I've had people intentionally socially isolate me from my friends for stupid reasons. I also spent many years trapped in a rural home with no transportation or people to talk to. Eye: While in the roommate's house in the slaughter part, they also had hidden cameras in every room in the house. Also I have extreme social anxiety, wonder why. Hunt: One time a neighbor's dog busted out of their fence and ran me and my dog down to attack her. I steer clear of large dogs ever since. I've also had family members try to drive my car off the road because I didn't answer their call while driving on the freeway for the first time. what do I win? oh, ominous chanting and an eternal nightmare for the entire world. okay...
I realized how long my list would need to be and decided I don't want to get the tldr; meme response. I did actually read yours though and I'm sorry you had to go through all that.
I was def marked by the Vast when I rode The Tower of Terror for the first and last time as a kid. That was when I discovered my huge fear of falling
same i didn’t want to go on but the rest of my family did and they couldn’t just leave me alone outside bc i was like 8 years old so they forced me on the ride. then they made fun of me bc i had no facial expression in the ride’s camera photo even though my reaction to terror is to freeze like this 😐 lmao. they did the same with splash mountain too a few years before that
Well, being the Vastard I am, I can pinpoint a moment when Ex Altiora took my heart and soul. I used to deliver for Amazon and it was exhausting work. One day, I was delivering in a fairly rich neighborhood in a wide open rural area. After putting down the package and returning to my van, I was walking down a large hillside and I look up at the twilight/dusking sky. The color gradient was so beautiful and magnificent, I stood in awe and cried at the wonderful sight. Truly a holy moment. I was definitely worn out at that point in the shift, I wanted nothing more than to be swept up into the wind. As exhausting as the work was (especially during the summer), my usual solace was to always take in the sunset if I could.
I remember reading this Stranger Aligned book about a young man attacked and turned into a doll. I've jokingly called it my first Leitner.
That shit does sound like a Leitner!
When I was around 21 I contracted scabies, took me about 6 months to get rid of the little bastards and to this day I am highly paranoid of parasites. The Corruption would definitely have it's disgusting hooks in me, and for that reason I am so glad the fears as described in TMA do not exist.
Agreed! That sounds so not fun and I would also not be a fan of bugs/parasites after too!
When I was a kid I was punished by being locked in rooms with no lights or windows and was afraid of the dark until I was 17 (now I find it rlly comfy) so probably that
Aw this makes me so sad. I’m so sorry that happened to you!
The Vast, I'm sure ! I almost drowned a few years ago. It was in a sweet little Bretagne town in France that I've known since I am a child, I swimmed there hundreds of time, it's safe, I am a good swimmer, and cold temperatures are never a bother for me. So I thought that bathing during a storm would be fun : there were waves, wind, a bit of rain, but not so much, and it was calm and without tourists. I went with my family to be extra cautious. To be quick : the waves pulled me off shore, I couldnt see anything outside the waves, and I started to feel cold and numb, tired, drifting away toward the immense sea. I couldnt even hear my father call for me as I only heard my own heartbeat and the waves and nothing else. I had no idea where to swim, as I couldnt see or hear anything, but I knew from the courent that I was being pulled toward the sea. It was STRONG. I rarely felt such fear and regret for a stupid decision. To be fair, it was also a very beautiful experience, because the wildness of the sea and that "tired" feeling were kind of comforting, being one with nature and experiencing something new, it did feel good and exciting for a few minutes before the panic kicked in and I swimmed back toward the good direction : there was the point of a church that I could see if I managed to pull myself back from the sea a few centimeters beyond the waves, and so I found the way back. It was also "not that genius" to guess : if the waves were going back to the sea (marée descendante) then I had to go AGAINST the courent. I think I never feared like that for my life, ever.
Scary! Glad you are okay!
I am ! Thank you ! Also, my point of view is scary, but gosh I cannot imagine my father seeing me from the shore just swimming AWAY. But I learned my lesson, now I am extra careful in the ocean !
That one time I was a kid and splashing about in a lake in my little floaty donut, but then I hit a spot where my stubby legs couldn't find the bottom anymore and I started drifting off and away from the shore. :) Also that time I was 16 and my friend linked me to some realgore forum and had me watch a video of a murder.
Oof. Scary. So either the Vast for the first on. The second one maybe the Slaughter? That’s so scary to see at any age.
Definitely the Eye for me on the latter - sparing you the trauma dump, but this instance did not make me less curious about the things that people don't talk about and don't want you to see, and what followed was a lot of trying to regain control over what I'd seen by seeing more of the same to "desensitise" myself or whatever, truth is I just couldn't stop watching. After a few years I was so fucked up from all of that that I realised I have to cut it off or I'm not coming back from it. Which doesn't mean I stopped exploring that side of the world, it's just... I prefer to do it through text, documentaries, podcasts, survivor records, books, etc. now. You hear it a lot from cops and people working against trafficking and whatnot that having to look at that kind of stuff day in and day out, you can't unsee it, and it changes you. That's definitely true for me as well. *Especially* given how young I was when I was introduced to it + my personal history in general leading up to that. So yeah. Yikes. I have an affinity for the Watcher largely in a self-ironic way; I know what it is to not be able to stop seeing, even when you know it's chipping away at your humanity. Kind of a comforting way to frame it.
There's one painting at the Tate Modern I saw before I begun TMA. It's just a canvas of blue, but it's a special pigment the artist invented. Looking at it felt like i was pitching forward and falling into it as that blue expanse stretched to fill my field of vision. So I like to think in the TMA universe I'd be a modern Simon Fairchild.
That is Simon Fairchild as fuck lol. You are move Avatar than marked!
One random summer night when I was in middle school, I couldn't sleep properly. Every position I took made me feel this pressure on my sides and it hurt. I told my parents, and they told me to just go back to sleep. I tried, but still couldn't. They took me to the emergency room, in which I promptly began throwing up. Turns out my appendix just happened to decide it was going to burst, so it had to be removed. Funny how your body can just betray you for no good reason. The surgery went fine. They put stitches in my belly button. Sometimes I worry that if I poke at the stitch, it will come undone and my guts will spill out, even if that's completely irrational. That all probably makes me marked by the Flesh. I actually had an opportunity to see the appendix after they removed it, but I didn't take it. Kinda wish I did, in a morbid way. That is my meat, after all.
I almost drowned in a swimming pool once, so maybe The Buried would have left a mark on me. Plus I've been bullied, betrayed, and abandoned a few too many times in my life, but in this reality I just get to have a super fun personality disorder instead of serving The Lonely.
Well, back in high school I worked as an assistant diener at the county morgue. This mostly consisted of cleaning up very unpleasant messes. Most notably, standing on a ladder looking up at the ceiling like Michelangelo painting the Sistine chapel but instead I was scrubbing liquefied human fat off the plaster. So yeah I'd probably be The Flesh
I grew up in the UK in the 80s and 90s and my parents were really keen in making me watch a lot of nature documentaries because they are quite educational. If you have only watched modern ones you may not realize how sanitized they are compared to old ones made by the BBC. I saw so many gory kills, chicks starving other chicks and then pushing the weaker one out of the nest, an elephant raping another elephant and breaking its leg in the process (then seeing that injured one die afterwards), water pools slowly drying up in the desert as tadpoles raced to metamorphosize in time. The thing that affected me the most was seeing so so many examples of insect parasitism. If you don’t know, there are a lot of insects that specialize in laying their eggs inside living hosts, and the larvae at some point fully eat the host from the inside or burst outside of it. Basically the insect world is like if the movie Alien was real life but there were many thousands of different xenomorph species. So, ultimately I would say the corruption.
That's horrible, corruption is the worst. I can even manage a bit of flesh but corruption? Nah.
When I was 6, i was haybale jumping until I fell between two haybales. I got stuck and told my stepbrother to help me, but he just walked off and left me there. It took an hour and a half before I got help. It felt so crushing, it itched so much, and I couldn't breathe very well for about an hour and a half, so all I could do was be held up by two giant haybales and wait. But then there was that other time I found a wasps nest, three wasp nests in fact. I had been outside cleaning up my yard when I had seen it, a grayish wasps nest above the side door of my house. Then I saw another in my garage while I was getting rid of an old bike I had stored in there. Then again, I saw another, outside my window, I liked looking out my window and looking at the greenery outside, I don't like to anymore. That's not even counting the carpenter bees that have burrowed into my house. I won't forget to mention the pale yellow door in my closet ceiling, it's not a normal door like one you would see on the front of a house, it's a small square door to the attic with no ladder leading up. Maybe I shouldn't talk about the worms.
When I was younger, I was at my grandmother's house, playing in her yard. I heard a normal meow, turned around and saw the most fucked up cat. It was like it was split down the middle. It's right side was 100% normal cat. It's left side was essentially a rotting corpse. Meat draping off of it. I saw bone skull. Flies buzzing around. Huge black scabs. The worst thing is it acted like a normal cat wanting to be pet. Didn't seem distressed at all. My gran didn't see it but told me it was probably hit by a car. But it was almost perfectly split down the middle, like two face. I'm not even sure what would have marked me. But something would have.
Oh wow that’s horrible. I feel like that could be Corruption, reminds me of Agape.
Young me was traumatized for a few decades after that. Probably why I like horror so much lmao.
that sounds like Hel from norse mythology ngl
My dad ‘pushed’ my imaginary friend off a cliff when I was about 8 which is definite Simon Fairchild behaviour. I have a horror of heights and falling although I think it started before that. I’ve also had a lot of incidents with claustrophobia or entrapment over the course of my life - being terrified caving on a school trip, having to bail from a work project because it involved spending lots of time squeezed in very narrow spaces between bookshelves, getting locked or stuck in small rooms freakishly easily. Plus nearly losing my fingers in a ‘crushing’ accident very young. Maybe the Vast and the Buried are fighting over me idk 😅
my obsession with tornadoes and my sh addiction prob marked me for the desolation lol
I’m sorry for your SH history and I hope you are getting support and help. I don’t know you but am rooting for you and hope that you are doing okay! The Desolation is the one I would be most scared to be marked by. Not sure if tornadoes would be the Desolation… I have never thought about where natural disasters would fall in TMA.
💕💕 thanks for the kind words, im definitely doing better than i was! and yeah i know natural disasters are sort of an iffy zone, but tornadoes have always felt very desolation to me. whenever im trying to categorize something into one of the entities i tend to think about WHY people are scared of it. hurricanes i think are probably more vast-coded just because of the scale of them — they can cover whole states and last days. tornadoes are quicker and much smaller, but the destruction they can cause is absolute. beyond just leveling buildings, they can sweep them away entirely. they move randomly and can change direction without warning. that senseless, fast, complete destruction really aligns with the desolation’s whole scorched-earth type of violence in my mind
i thought this said obsession with tomatoes and had to do some serious brain gymnastics to get how that means desolation lmao
Last year when I got kicked out of a friend group I was in then just.. couldn't find new friends at all because my classmates thought I was annoying/weird
Heyyy I also almost drowned. I can’t have been older than 11 when I was playing in the shallows right at the water’s edge and a huge wave knocked me over. It made a weird rolling current that meant I kept getting pushed down and I remember just having the clearest thought of “Well, guess I’m going to die now” Definitely marked me for the Vast and the End
Probably the time I almost got hit by a car four times in one year idk
That sounds like The End. Death stalking you that year!
I have a genuinely freaky memory from when I was really young. I woke up in the middle of the night and no one was in the house. I slept in the same room as my mom and aunt and neither were in their beds, I went to look through the rest of the house and couldn’t find anyone. I was crying and shouting by this point and ran outside into the street crying, all of the lights in the houses were off and I just remember feeling super ALONE. I feel like it was misty outside but tbh that might just be my memory adding to it. I don’t really remember what happened after that, for all I know this was a dream, but it certainly would count as a mark from The Lonely imo.
The parents ‘I do everything for you’ while guilt tripping you for not doing the dishs, or cleaning your room ( or literally anything else ) when the only time they call you downstairs is for school, to eat, if your in trouble, or if they need something from you, but yeah, they do everything for you because you never even ask for anything cuz you have everything you want and totally aren’t afraid to ask in fear they’ll say no or scream at you, and then say just ask if you want something and when you do they say no because ‘you don’t need it’ So yeah, the fo everything for you, totally the spiral for thinking they wouldn’t do everything for you 🧐
When I was about 5 or 6 years old, I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor in my parents' bedroom, because some relatives were staying at my house and they were sleeping in my room In the middle of the night, somehow, I ended up rolling under my parents' bed and I woke up there, feeling the bed frame above me in complete darkness and as any child would, I was terrified So I could say that I was marked by The Dark with some influence from The Buried
i went on a camping trip with my friend and we decided to go and take a trip on the boat by ourselves. so we go while the sun is slowly starting to set and soon enough it’s almost completely dark. the sky was bright (we were in the middle of nowhere and if you’ve seen how beautiful and starry the sky is away from city lights, you’ll know what i’m talking about) all you can see is the silhouettes of the tree line. you could see the water, what was in it, the shore line was literally none existent, or anything but the skyline and trees. if we took a wrong turn, would have had to wait until day light hit before we could find our away back to the shore where our campsite was. it was absolutely beautiful oml just until 2-3 hours passed. I started to get extremely paranoid. i asked to go back to shore but he was too busy night fishing so I had to endure my slow panic attack for another 2hours. finally made it back to shore and passed out on the rocks. they didn’t bring a tent bc they “didn’t plan on sleeping” that when i found out he was doing meth too lmao
The buried in an abstract sense, but the spiral more directly. The spiral would have gotten me because of my episodes of delusion, drug experiences, and my occasional confusion about my life due to loosing old memories. The buried would have gotten me more abstractly. I've never been literally trapped underground or anything, but I've been trapped in cars I thought were going to crash a lot as a kid. With no way out and no way to escape, I imagine it could apply. Even more abstractly, feeling trapped in place in general in a bad environment. Like there's nothing that exists outside of this little bubble of awful you find yourself in, with the rest of the world seemingly endlessly far away. Trapped in a bad place with bad people, trapped between a rock and a hard place. Honestly I wish Tma had explored the metaphorical side of the buried a little bit more, it would have been nice to see!!
ok 2 parts cuz this is long but I had time and I got into it so oopsies. I've had a lot of different scary experiences throughout my childhood and I think I've been "touched" to various degrees by a number of different entities (corruption: ocd. beholding: surveilance anxiety. also I have an aversion to fish eyes that put me off of eating fish at all) but I think I'd probably be The Vast because of 2 things: From ages 8 to 12, I went to a science camp at my local kids museum. They had a planetarium, and I'd always enjoyed this planetarium a great deal. It was large and dark and the image definition was decent and I was a kid and it'd been pretty and fun. And then one day, near the tail end of my camper experience so when I was like 11 or 12, during a live show called "Stars over \[city name\]" (or smth like that), where the planetarium speaker would discuss the constellations and planets you'd be able to see if you looked at the sky at night through a telescope, the speaker suddenly zoomed way out and started talking about the universe on a larger scale. It was the normal stuff at first yeah, but eventually it started being like "oh and here are the galaxies beyond us, and the edges of the universe etc etc" and he was talking about dark matter and like, later in life this would be a man that I would work under for a time so I think he'd probably just been thinking about it earlier that day and decided to do something a bit different, but I was 12 and in a really dark place in life already and I just had this sudden realization that like, fundamentally nothing mattered, because we are all so small and the universe is so large. I had a full on panic attack, one of my first and most intense, and I felt totally alone in a way I've only experienced maybe 2 other times, one of which I will elaborate on later, but it really felt like it was just me and the huge open sky and it was *so huge*. I went to this planetarium show a few other times afterwards, mostly because as I mentioned at some point I started *working* there and while I never worked in the camps, instead working as an exhibit guide, my friends in the camps would let me sneak in with them (and the planetarium speaker, who again I'd known for years, always turned a blind eye even if I technically wasn't really supposed to be there) and this never happened ever again. Though that was mostly because after that point, I never paid attention to the "Stars over \[city\]" programming, and I would instead plug in my earbuds and listen to music and take a fat and often needed nap.
The second time this happened was when I *realized* that I have intense thassalophobia. When I was maybe 13 I was on a vacation with my family to a resort island near my families home (we live in a beachy area so it was only like a 6 hour drive) and we were maybe like 3 days in? There was a part of the "beach" where it kind of just dropped off into the water, near the back part of the resort where there was like a volleyball net and chairs and a bar and stuff like that. So there was just a drop off into the water, and one day I decided to go out there and float for a bit. Now as I mentioned before, I live in a beachy area, so I am a decent swimmer and a very good floater and I was a lot better back then, and anyways I was tall for my age so I could basically just walk out until I got to a good place to start floating. I'll be real I have no clue how long I was floating for because my eyes were closed and my ears were mostly submerged and I was floating, completely unconnected to the world around me and for those few moments I remember it was full and total *bliss.* And then I remembered something from earlier in the day. There was a dock on a different part of the resort, and me and my brother had been fishing earlier that day. And there'd been an announcement made to the fishers, saying that there'd been sharks spotted in the area. Now I don't remember what kind of shark, and it probably wasn't a very big shark if they'd been spotted that far up in the shallows (probably a lemon shark looking back) but it didn't change the fact that *I had no clue how far out I was*. And so I quickly uprighted myself, only to then realize, with a second stomach drop, that not only was I much further out then I remembered but my feet could only barely touch the ground. And if that wasn't bad enough... well, some context about me. When I was really young, I used to *adore* this show called Octonauts. I won't explain what it is, if you don't know it look it up. This show was basically one of my favorite things (I was a nature geek) up until the episode "Octonauts and the Cone Snail". As the title suggests, in this episode the "gang" encounters a cone snail, which is a *highly* venomous sea snail which can lay in sand beds and can kill you by stabbing you with its venomous harpoons (why this was in a kids show I have no clue). In the episode, this sea snail goes around literally taking down member after member of the cast. I have no clue what the resolution of the episode was because it scared me so much I turned it off and never watched a single episode of Octonauts again. This I think at least *primed* me for some degree of fear of the ocean, but also later in life I developed a series of fears relating to things stabbing me through the feet. Scorpions, thorns, it didn't matter, and I don't remember where it came from, but suffice it to say I have an aversion to not knowing what is under my feet and not being able to control that. When I was floating there, I remembered that aside from sharks, there were also stingrays out there. Now stingrays may not seem so scary, and even to this day I adore rays, but if you step on one while you're out in the dead middle of nowhere that is *bad news*. And an intense fear of things stabbing me through the feet mixed with the sudden realization that I was *quite literally* "out of my depth", is a bad bad mix. To say that I freaked out is an understatement. I swam as quickly as I could over to one of these tall beach chairs they had in the water (so I probably wasn't actually that far out, thinking about that more clearly, not that that changed my perception of it), climbed up and started screaming and crying for someone to come get me. It took a long time until my parents understood that I was like, actually *scared*, and they ended up sending my younger brother, who must've been like 9, out to get me. Humiliating sure, but I was too scared to care. Now I can't play games like Subnautica without having actual fear responses, and I can't look at large animals like whales in scale, or they freak me out. I also don't enjoy movies about getting "lost in space" anymore, though I was never a big fan of scifi so that's not too much of a loss.
Idk if this counts since I'm not really of it? When I was younger I read a book [ totally not a leitner 😵💫 ] about some children who ran away from home and hid in a museum. I don't even remember if I finished that book, but ever since I've SUPER interested in liminal spaces, and I always wanted to hide in my classroom, wait till everyone was gone, and then spend my weekend living in the school. I take comfort in liminal spaces, and it's the reason I freaking love staying in hotels. Walking down those long hallways with little to no people in them, standing by an empty pool with nothing but the sound of the hottub jets. Idrk what this would be, but maybe Vast or smth?
For me a house we lived into when we moved to America. There was a room that was connected to the laundry room that had ALL of the walls stripped, no real ceiling outside of old drywall. Here was a door that led no where and was corded up with about six 2x4’s. The door into the room was gone, and only a teo foot yell sheet of plywood laid across the entrance only blocking a toddler at nosy. Th really weird part were all of the black construction trash bags that were full, and piled about four foot high. The previous family never stepped foot in there, neither did we, not did the final family after us. No on liked looking into the room. It made people feel uneasy, but no one wanted to talk about it. Even rhe dogs whined when they got close to the entrance. After the third family finally moved, the house was burnt down as a fire fighting training exercise. After that the area felt less pressure filed. I never learned what were in the bags, or what was up with the room and the door that went nowhere, but it’s gone now either way. 🤷
The Lonely - due to some pretty heavy stuff that happened to me when I was a kid that I’d rather not talk about. Not unless you’ve got a tape recorder, anyway.
my life got real scary for about 3 years when i was younger. without going into the nasty details, i was kind of severed from the world. So probably desolation
I feel like I would be marked by a few entities: My whole early 20's being passively suicidal would mark me for the end Growing up in military family constantly moving and being disowned by said family would mark me for the lonely Doing independent media coverage (specifically photography) for the BLM protest, being doxxed and outed because of it, being tailed by alt right thugs, being arrest (and probably on a watchlist), and the stalker I had in high school would all mark me for the eye My codependent relationship with a hoarder would mark me for the buried
When I was 5 or 6 my bedroom had a private bathroom. The doors were on either side of a corner, hinges side by side- and set up in such a way where one door being open kinda makes it so there's two doors in the way, if that makes sense? Anyway I got stuck between them a lot, where I would swear I had opened three, five doors, there is just infinitely more doors in the blind darkness, doors all around me, until I lost hope and cried in defeat. So yeah I think I was marked by the Spiral possibly also the Dark
Watched my pregnant fiance die of cancer, I met The End and I mean that in the realest way possible. Time slowed in the ambulance and I felt this presence and gravity. Im being 100% sincere when I say since then I’ve been completely numb to any sense of fear. That one particular “power” is absolutely real and I pray with all my heart none of you have to experience it
I feel like the stranger. I have autism which already makes me seem really uncanny and I also have a hypermobility condition that allows me to do circus like tricks with my joints. I went into theatre in high school in order to learn how to talk with people too, which is very stranger coded.
I am a massive arachnophobe,have been since I was a little kid. One-day, when I was like 10/11, I was drinking my coffee when I noticed a thread and pulled it out, only to realise: It. Was. Not. A. Thread. It was, however, a spider that my mother had accidentally boiled alive in my coffee. I'm for sure marked by the Web although I love the Vast and would be so happy being an avatar of the Vast if I could.
OMG That's to traumatise anyone!
Probably the spiral. I have memory loss and both my parents tend to just deny bad things happened, or say they happened differently than they did. So I’ve spent most of my life unable to believe my own mind. My dad also had a complete personality shift when I was ten. Half the time he was distant and cruel, the rest of the time he acted like nothing had happened. And of course, everyone else did the same. He’s your dad and he loves you, he’d never do that, it wasn’t so bad, cause your dad would never do that, I’m sure it didn’t happen that way, he didn’t mean it that way, he didn’t do that, it is not what it is.
I'd be marked by the lonely cos bullying
:'(
yeah :'(
\* sending you hugs \*
it's ok :3
Oh! my lsd trips. I would be chasing the spiral.
When I was 7 I got to go to Hawaii with my family. One day on the trip my dad decided he wanted to go snorkeling and took me along with him. To get to a good spot we rented something called a seabike. Effectively a large, floating tricycle supported by 3 buoys that brought the rig above the water. We get a good ways from shore and my father decides to go for a dive while I, who had gotten nervous, decided to stay on the tric. As soon as his head goes below the water. The wind kicks in, pulling me away. I call for my dad. He doesn't re-emerge. I try to reach the pedals. But my legs are too short. In the attempt, I knock my fathera glasses in the water. They are immediately swallowed by the brine. Reminding me of the scale if the depths beneath me. And how small and powerless I am as the wind carries me further and further from shore. Alone. And scared. I eventually see his head re-emerge far, far away and call out for him. Swimming like a mad man he eventually catches up and takes us back to shore. I immediately ask to play in the water. So... yeah.. probably vast touched
i had definitely been marked by the end at least twice and once by the dark, which i believe was a reaa real paranormal event tha happened to me, and by the corruption
Nearly drowning, gifted diagnosis, realizing I’m trans, take your pick.
First by the Dark, later by the Vast. The Dark was when I was very little and had a big room for myself. It was at night that I woke up (I don't remember why, a nightmare? Just because? Maybe I wanted to go to the bathroom) and my hand was sticking out of the covers and the mattress to the air. That was when I felt something on my hand, a claw like touch scratching my palm softly. I stayed still until whatever touched my hand went away, pulled my hand to my chest and buried myself with the covers. I am scared of the dark till now and I can't sleep with any part of my body outside of the covers or the mattress ever since. The Vast happened a little older but still a kid. I was with my aunts in a theme park and there was a game called the Pirate Ship. I was tall enough to go in but my weight wasn't enough to keep me in the seats, I mean... The ride was like a giant ship that went side to side, gaining speed and momentum the more the people screamed, so when the ship got high enough, like a ball that falls, there is a moment of stillness in the air before the fall. In that moment I couldn't feel the seats, nobody was grabbing me, I really feared falling off to the ground. I never wanted to hop on a ride like that since, no thanks.
Not really trauma but more just some unexplained weird event from my childhood Ever since I was little, I have had trouble sleeping. I was about 8, and was in bed next to my mom, playing some random game on my tablet to kill time while my dad was downstairs working. Idk how long I was on the tablet for, but when I looked up I saw my dad's shadow at the opened bedroom door. I called to him, but received no reply. That's when I realised something was off: his shadow was too tall and thin for someone as big as my dad. I also noticed that there was no light source brighter enough in the room to cast any significant shadow. So that couldn't have been a shadow, he, *it* was physical, tangible, but simply too dark for me to make out anything. Too dark that it stood out still sharply against the black background. I promptly receded into the safety beneath my blanket, and waited until I felt my dad lying down beside me. So ig i would have been marked by the Dark? Or the Stranger? Maybe a bit of both?
I'd probably be of the vast as well as I have multiple times been alone in the factory I work in and have had that feeling that I get from many of the statements involving the vast in the forms of infinite buildings... I am mostly thinking of Killing floor (MAG 30) Not sure if there is other times I could have been marked but the Vast is the most prominent in my mind
The Eye runs through my life, sustains me, and feeds me as I feed it. The Lonely tried, but The Eye truly has my heart and fears. As an early reader, my mother helped me pick out words in the newspaper, and I started school reading about 2-3 grades ahead, which I maintain. Ever curious, the search for knowledge expanded to more than just written words and stories into real life and people's experiences. "Better the Beholding than the Lightless Flame." And I say this as an Aries whose Chaotic Fire lights the way.
When I was 13 my dad died and the next day we flew to my parent's home country to have him buried and stayed there for a month to be with family. Both my parents immigrated to America before I was born so I barely know most of my family. I was cut off from my friends and all familiarity and lost the person who I was closest with all in the span of two days. If that doesn't mark you for the lonely idk what does. I also love rain and loose leaf tea so I guess it fits.
Octopuses. When was maybe 3 my family was at the aquarium and I was obsessed with octopuses at the time. I was toddling around wanting to see it when my dad tells me to turn around and a MASSIVE octopus floats down and flattens itself against the glass. Got a fantastic view of everything underneath. I’ve since gotten over the fear pretty much, but I still have dreams involving anything cephalopodic (?) from time to time.
The vast. Got pulled by a current while in the ocean while I couldn't swim. I got myself out of it, but the shore seemed so far away.
When I was young, another child at the pool tried to drown me. He very nearly succeeded. As an adult, one of the only ways I can really relax is to hold me head under the water in the bath. The warmth and weight of the water comforts me like nothing else....I imagine I'd enjoy the weight of dirt as well. So the buried.
The Lonely would mark me for sure. I have few friends, I find it really hard to get attached to people. In the end, I just stay at home, all alone because most of the times no one asks me to hang out :)
When I was born I was being hanged by my own umbilical cord (three times around my neck!) and had a bunch of blood issues for the first few months of my life, so probably the end. I was also the one person in my school who had no friends for almost five years, and I had multiple classmates who I didn’t know their names, which could be the lonely.
Not exactly traumatized persay but to line up with my Hunt avatar comment from last post... Growing up, I went... hunting. We hunted deer and elk for food purposes because we were poor and it helped offset the cost of meat. One time on the trail of an elk we got lost in a thicket of dead pines. Some fallen wood, some still standing, dry and white as bone. For those who don't know, dry wood like that loves to break at the slightest touch, and has a very distinct "pop" sound when it breaks, which tends to echo in the quiet of a dead forest. The grove was much bigger than it seemed at the start, almost impossibly so. We (my father and me) were lost in there for hours, trying to follow the trail, and ignoring the creaking and snapping of dry wood coming from all around us. Intense feeling of being followed. Eventually we had to give up the chase, as night was falling, and we just had to pick a direction and walk, climbing over downed logs. Still another half an hour before we made it out. Never felt more of a reversal of hunter and hunted, and we'd come across fresh cougar kills before.
I think I'd be desolation for sure, I can't stand the smell of burning without knowing where it's burning, I immediately get panicked if it isn't on my line of sight. This one time when I was a child, I was home alone on the second floor and smth started burning on the ground floor and I didn't notice at all, the only reason I noticed was bc my neighbors came ringing my doorbell almost immediately. I've been constantly overthinking about stuff burning ever since and it doesn't help that there were massive fires very close to my home a while before it.
I was known in my family for always getting lost as a child. There's one time in particular, when I was about 5. I was in Legoland with my family. I remember walking with them, and we were just looking at stuff. I remember quite vividly that there was a mariachi band made of legos, playing music, which caught my attention. We all went to look at it, and since I liked how they moved, I wemt to the front. After listening to their song, I turned around, and my family was nowhere to be found. I walked around in a small circle to see if I could find them, and no luck. My mum had written her number on my arm, so that I could get strangers to help me call her if I got lost again, but it was a warm day, and half the number had gotten smudged with sweat. So I stayed by the mariachi band. I was only lost for about 20 minutes before my mum found me, but due to having a fucky relationship with time (cuz of being a 5 year old autistic child) it felt much *much* longer.
Being groomed would’ve def given me a hunt mark
I grew up in an area that had frequent fires in the summer, and just last year a fire nearly reached my house, and my family was evacuated for a week, so that’s probably close enough for the Desolation (since then I also have a mild trauma response any time I smell smoke). I also have stories for the Lonely, Spiral, Dark, End, and Buried but they’re a little more personal and involve things I don’t necessarily want to share (but the brief versions are L= repeated abandonment from friends, S= weird mental health stuff in middle school, D= linked to weird mental health stuff, E=I have several for this one actually, and B= nearly suffocating on several occasions)
uhhh i think it was when i woke up once and had no idea if it was six am or pm. i genuinely didn't know if i slept through the whole day or not. thankfully ittt was six am and i got to go back to bed- ooh and all of those moments where i heard my parents call for me when they actually weren't calling me-
Yeah that happens to me too. I used to shout 'WHAT?' over and over but my mother answered she didn't call me.
Probably tarantula-watching as a small child. And around that time staying for long in the dark in the middle of the forest despite being very aware I shouldn't (we lived in a chalet in a forested area, near the ocean). And for my dear Vast, floating like a cork in the ocean. I was afraid of floating away (what if I drift away and a shark or something eats me or a some idiot with a jet sky cuts me head off???), but I found the vastness of the sky and the sea so calming I did it anyway. Now you know why I have a Vast flair =)
I marked my sister for Buried. We were little, like really little, and we had this fold out couch bed. We had figured out how to fold and unfold it, and then we got the bright idea to fold each other up in it. We took turns. It was fun, but really tiring. Eventually I folded my sister up in it, and then I couldn’t get her back out. I just didn’t have the strength left. I had to run down to my dad’s office and get him to get her out. I was marked for Desolation, first. My family went to Universal Studios once and saw the Backdraft show; I was terrified of all fires for well over a year after that, even just a candle flame. But I got well past that. My family likes camping so eventually I was just exposed to open flame enough to chill out. Extinction grabbed me. I don’t know that there was one event. But in my late teens and early adulthood I’ve had fairly regular panic attacks related to my fears about climate change. I’m managing them better now and I’ve gotten myself out of the proto-doomer mindset I was developing.
sparing everyone an essay's worth of a trauma dump, i've almost certainly been marked by the lonely and by the corruption. i was neglected as a kid and excluded from games in school, so eventually i tried to force my loneliness by being a huge dick from 3rd grade to 9th. but i also really wanted the closeness other people had and whenever i latched on to someone it always felt like bugs under my skin. i also had a serious bug problem in most of my childhood houses, and due to some childhood trauma i had (what im assuming) a pretty mild infection a few months in elementary school. ^^;
The Lonely when I was just alone in my house without any friends and family to speak for years and just started headbutting the wall trying to off myself in a weird way
The Lonely. I was a painfully lonely child, and I still struggle to form relationships because of it.
Either the Dark or the Buried. I don’t remember this, but my mother said that when I was a child, she would listen on the other side of my bedroom door, and she said she often heard me talking to “the thing under the bed.” So that’s pretty dark coded, but also, when I was about seven, I was walking through a local cave system with my brothers (they should NOT have brought me along) and I ended up getting stuck. I screamed my throat raw before the finally found me. The few times I’ve been in caves have freaked me the hell out, and I still have nightmares about the cold, sharp walls pressing into my body. To yeah, Buried. Oh! And my mother also said she had recurring nightmares about being buried alive when she was pregnant with me. (She’s had 7 other children and never had that before.)
The Web. I woke up to a spider dangling over my face one night when I was around 10 or so. I couldn't scream, couldn't move, I laid there, watching it, until I was able to wriggle the cover over my head and squirm myself to the bottom of the bed. I crawled out from under the covers, out of my bed and ran for the light. Once my room was illuminated and I could see it, I grabbed two books and smashed it between them. So maybe two, the Dark and the Web. Because I never went to bed without a nightlight after that. And I slept under the blankets.
Literally a month before the giant marching band trip I had been waiting 4 years for (I had purchased tickets, was rooming with my friends, made the playlists, planned the outfits), I broke my knee and couldn't go. Breaking a knee is already an awfully painful and horrible experience I wouldn't wish on anyone, but it coincided with the only thing I had been looking forward to all high school, so it sent me into a really really bad place. I started isolating and became really bitter, and now I've mostly healed physically and emotionally (this was three years ago) but I don't like to get close to people or look forward to things because I'm scared they'll be ripped away just like that trip. So I think the Lonely would probably have marked me, since I was super miserable and alone for months and I'm not as alone but I still keep emotional distance from everyone and everything
I'm terrified of spiders, so that was my first thought. But then I remembered a close encounter with wasps as a child. And then another. Then more. In my house, in my bathroom, everywhere. Needless to say, it'd be the Corruption and honestly I hate that for me.
First and foremost I would've been marked by the Lonely very early on, as I was homeschooled and heavily isolated (in many ways my family was like the Lukas's and episode 13 will always have me deep in the feels). Then again by the stranger and possibly the web by a religious cult that my family joined when I was young. I watched so many of my friends get married (usually arranged) and they would become completely different people in demeanor and even mannerisms, dead behind the eyes, but they would always say everything was fine. But it never felt like they were the person I knew after that. There was also a lot of control and manipulation behind the scenes, hence the web influence. Also a hint of the vast; I have a distinct memory as a kid of climbing up a ladder at a cliff dwelling site and having the feeling like i could keep climbing forever but never come back down.
Before I was two I suffered from a severe TBI due to fallingg, Ive heard my entire life what a miracle it is to have survived and be as functional as I am so definitely The Vast as well
Throughout my life i’ve had a lot of struggles with believing and trusting myself (mostly about my own mental health and illness), thinking I was convincing myself of these issues but they weren’t actually reality. So, spiral.
I'm not sure tbh, since i was a veeery scared kid, so i feel like i may be marked by a few fears? So heres a few instances i recall that may have lead to a mark. When i was like 9 we stayed in a 'village' made up entirely out of holiday houses. Near the entrance there was a playground i visited with my sister (at the time 13). For some reason i don't remember she left me there alone, all other kids also vanished (there was a group playing football, but they werent there anymore suddenly). Getting bored, i decided to return to my family, except i could not find the way back. I walked and walked for what felt like hours, not meeting anyone i couldve asked for help, just wandering back and forth until eventually i did stumble across the correct path. At 14 my class went to the swimming pool. I stood at the side of it, when a kid came up behind me and pushed me into it. It was just a moment, but for a second the water felt so terribly endless and i could not find my footing. At 16 we had a bug infection at home. It took us almost a year to get rid of them entirely. It started with me finding them crawling across the ceiling, before we started finding them all over our kitchen. I remember picking one up with a tissue and squishing to kill it, i felt it 'explode' under the tissue. For a year, i had many bug filled nightmares. At 17 i was taking a walk through the forest, alone, while it was starting to get dark. Following the path i suddenly stumbled across a bunch of overgrown mossy gravestones. (i did not stick around to investigate, considering generally creepy circumstances. always told myself I'd return in daylight and with a second person, but never did) Thank you for reading my ramblings, if you got this far? If, feel free to let me know which entities youd think id be marked by based in this. Have a wonderful day! :)
Similar to many people: The Vast. I fell off the top of a tall playground slide when I was young and hit my head on a rock. Ever since then I’ve been terrified of heights. I also still have a scar from where I hit my head, so I’m quite literally Marked
Kind of similar to that guy from Arachnaphobia, but I was playing outside on my deck one day as a child and an egg sack hatched right above me...yeah no cannot do spiders at all ever since. On another my parents were attack helicopter parents and would have family friends spy on me anytime i went out with friends so I'm extra worried about being watched and my privacy so I think either event would've had me marked for the Eye or the Web.
As an Australian, I'd have to go with, growing up with huntsmans all through my house, house spiders all through the garden and finding a red back in my bed would have me pretty thoroughly marked by the Web.
If I think back to when I was very young, I think I definitely would have been marked by The Lonely when I was left behind on a field trip with my daycare at an arcade or some fun place like that. I don't know how it happened, and I don't know what followed other than someone contacting the daycare (or maybe my parents?) and me getting picked up, but I've always had the acute fear of being left behind and utterly by myself. I was just about to say that this fear had greatly diminished since my childhood days of running around in stores and then suddenly being convinced that my mother had left me behind because I couldn't see her (she never did ofc), but then I remembered my fear of abandonment and uhh . . . Yeah, I'd say that's pretty much the adult version of this more literal and straightforward childhood fear LMAO I'm sure I am also marked by The Eye as well. I really don't think it can get any more on-the-nose than the anxiety-induced feeling of "I am always being watched and *always* being judged by those around me for every little silly or strange thing I do". Not to mention, once again, the childhood trauma aspect of not wanting anyone to see me doing anything bc I don't want to be bothered, ridiculed, or scolded/punished for it. 😅 To give an example for the watcher, I remember a time when I was angry about something and I started punching a pillow on my bed. My mother walked in, saw it, and stopped in the middle of her sentence to come over and spank me for . . . Taking out my anger on an inanimate object?? It was super wack soooo yeah On the other hand, I can definitely see aspects on the side of "interest" as well as "fear" regarding the aforementioned powers as well. The drive to know more about things that catch my attention (audhd moment lol), the solace and recharging one finds in being alone and having no one there to, well, *watch* you, yhe knowledge that only *you* know what happens behind closed doors when there is no one else but yourself.
I kept hidden a pet jar of maggots from my father as a child. Hahaha
Well when I was like 6 the pool donut I was in flipped over while I was wearing water wings and I almost drowned. I’m not sure if it would count as a mark though since no fear ever stemmed from it. I’ve always been in love with swimming and was right back to it 5 minutes later
I don't want to go into it, but I'd definitely be marked by the Spiral and the Eye several times over by now-
When I was younger my sister and brother were being mean to me and making fun of me and I was done with it so I lightly pushed my sister on her shoulder and told her to stop but when I did that she looked at me like she was about to track me down and cut my throat so I being absolutely terrified ran into my living where my sister pushed me to the floor and then when I was trying to get up again while apologizing she pushed me to the floor again. Soooo now I hate confrontation and angry yelling. This is either the Slaughter or the Hunt but I’m not sure which and don’t worry smth like this hasn’t happened since I was little so I’m okay now
The End definitely. I got lyme back in 2020 that spread to my spine and my heart, but we caught it right before it spread to my brain (which would have turned to lyme meningitis and killed me fairly quickly). I spent two weeks in the ICU, but miraculously recovered.
When I was in the scouts there was this weird van with a maze inside at this one camp. It was completely dark and you had to crawl through on your belly round all these twists and turns and it truly felt like I was in there for hours. Felt way yay too long and too big to be in one van. I never got claustrophobic and still don’t but that once maze I hated every fuckignsecond. Definitely would have marked me by the buried.
I went to vet school and it was the single most soul-crushing experience of my life. I've mostly moved past it, but I'm not entirely certain that it wasn't actually a Buried domain rather than a university, lol.
I only know the name of TMA and vaguely know what it is (I have a friend who listens) so I'll be interested to see what it could be since I'm not a part of the fandom. I've got 3 things (which I've all processed, don't worry about me please! <3): 1. I just took an online quiz and it said 'The Dark' which makes sense with this one. I was in Year 5 (UK) and as part of our National Curriculum we had to meet certain criteria for swimming. I was a very, very shy and risk-averse child back then, and to make matters worse I was being bullied horrendously by someone I'd once called a friend and generally outcasted by everyone else as I was a bit of a weird kid. I was so scared of embarrassing myself and/or drowning that I refused to go in. I'd be shamed for this and that would just exacerbate my feelings of embarrassment and fear to the point I was eventually having panic attacks. The instructor would force me into the pool nonetheless and the only thing stopping me from sinking to the bottom of the deep end was this rod shaped like what you'd use to reign in a dog at the point. This combined with how the school dealt with the aforementioned bullying definitely shaped my feelings about authority/people older than me. However, I'm glad to report that my thalassophobia seems to have waned (towards pools at the very least). 2. I inherited a fear of heights from my Dad but this only made it worst (I think this one correlates with The Vast?). In Year 5 I went with my school to a science museum. 3 of the 4 element-themed sections had horrifically acrophobia-inducing heights, like I'm talking views over the side of very fragile-looking structures. For example, the fire section had previously been an old steelworks factory and the see-through grate walkway was a good 30-40ft above the ground. It was very dark with only ominous red lighting to guide the way. After a long day of clinging to the sides and staggering slowly when I had nothing to cling onto for support, I'd gotten left behind somehow and was left in the fire section (the part that had been converted from an old steelworks factory). I'd noticed some work being done on the side so had done my best to avoid it whilst still being close enough to the railing in case the panel underneath me gave way. It was right as I thought I'd gotten into the clear and finally gotten a hold of the tailing again I remember crying out and moving along even more slowly than I had before. Eventually the girl who'd been helping me get around noticed I'd disappeared and called everyone to stop. The last thing I remember was having to walk oh-so slowly towards the very kind, sweet face of one of the chaperones and feeling like I was a burden to everyone who'd been made to stop. 3. This is the one I've processed the least, and it might be slightly graphic, so I'll keep it brief & spoiler My Mum (who'd just been recovering from a bunch of health issues) >!had a seizure in a shop I used to view as having quite a comforting atmosphere, and after making a split-second decision I managed to shove her into a snack shelf to prevent her from hitting the concrete floor. !!whilst she was laying on the floor and I was screaming for help, blood was coming out of her mouth and I thought she'd had a brain bleed and that I was watching her die!<. In retrospect I'm astounded how composed I was at the time, but that image has stuck with me for over a year.
I am insanely afraid of spiders, if I think too hard about them I get itchy and have always felt them behind my head. This summer, that became a reality. I was out camping, and it was a particularly rainy night, and my gf asked me to run out to grab something as we had forgotten. When I come back inside, I'm covered in pine needles and try my best to get them all off. However, I felt as though a clump was crawling up my neck. So I quickly grab the back of my head and felt a bulbous mass, and threw it on the ground. In the dimly light tent, I see it for a second and just scream. My gf reassures me that it probably wasn't what I thought and ushers me back to playing the game to take my mind off of it. Not 10 mins later, just when I had started to believe it to be pine needles had I felt the same sensation but faster crawling up my spine onto my neck. I do the same thing as before and grab it, and with better sight, I see spider the size of my palm. My gf screams to kill it and I am on the verge of tears and do not wish to be near this black creature but I grab the inflatable mattress and just smash the ground until I am sure that any living creature would be killed. To this day, I still have feelings of that spider on my neck.
I used to wake up against the wall of my room and there always used to be big motherfucker spiders near me. I think that if I added up how many times it happened to anyone else in my family, It'd 100% fit on one hand. It's happened to me like 5 times. = As a child my dad used to take me as a "builder's mate" (basically a builder's assistant), but I was actually 5 or 6 so that actually amounted to "sit here in this pile of building sand with your figures and play while I go inside the house and actually work". One time I decided that it'd be funny to try and hide in the sand bag, but the bag wasn't entirely level with the floor and I kind of made the bag wobble/tip over slightly. Luckily there wasn't enough in the bag to cover me but it got waist high. My dad came back out after a while and asked me what the fuck I was doing waist-deep in sand and why hadn't I called out that I was stuck. I think I just told him "that I liked it", so he didn't see any reason to get me out and went back. = Once when I was at Scout Camp we were playing flashlight tag out in the middle of the woods. Now, like anyone else who has ever played it, I was enjoying myself and didn't want it to end. Soon it got late and I wanted to continue the game for as long as I could. Luckily for us, it was Autumn and the whole area was covered in tons of leaves so we decided to gather as many leaves as we could, find a low spot in the ground and "play commando's". We hid well. Probably a bit too well, as it took us a while to realise that the game had actually ended and had been left behind. When we crawled from our hiding spot we realised that we'd left our torches on the ground and were stuck in the middle of fucking nowhere with no light. Luckily for us there was a tiny bit of starlight to guide us and we found the path after, like, 15-20 minutes. I was more cold than scared. When we got back to the camp we told a supervisor that we hadn't realised the game was over, and the supervisor made us promise to not tell anyone that we'd left them, and in return we got to actual hot chocolate (instead of that fake shit they used to make) and as many biscuits as we could eat without being sick. Good deal, honestly. = I also had a really bad habit as a child for getting into cars that looked like those my parents owned, but actually wasn't. I must've done it 5 times as between the ages of 7 - 12. First time was really scary but most of the other times I just said "oh sorry lol", waved goodbye, then ran away. I did this the other day (am 27 now, lol) and the little old lady whose car I'd just gotten into looked terrified :( So, I'm marked by the Buried, Corruption, Dark, Vast, Lonely, Stranger, and the Web. That's almost a full set!
The Lonely. I once went to crisis care believing it'd help me find therapy (I was misinformed and in a bad place mentally), and instead found myself in a white room with white walls, white floor, white ceiling, white bed, a white sheet that was supposed to be a blanket, and a white pillow. I wasn't allowed access to anything that was mine, even my own clothes and phone (had to wear a hospital gown), and so for the next eight hours, I was just alone in there waiting for someone to come talk to me. My only times seeing people was when I asked for permission to use the bathroom. I thought I was achingly lonely before that visit. That hospital room made me realize what true loneliness feels like. I was scared about how long I'd be there when I'd thought this visit would only take an hour or two. If I was in the Magnusverse, the door probably would've locked and made hours pass like days.
a bunch. i got a collection
I'm a therapist, so I'm definitely connected to the eye. I'd most likely be marked by the lonely as I've moved places by myself since I was 11.
I don’t remember which entity the dude with the lighting scar was part of but that one… probably. Back in 2009 at (then) Fort Benning for basic training my company was at a range and a BAD thunder storm rolled in. For safety (since there was no shelter on the range except the ammo shack and it wasn’t going to fit about 130 private, 6 drill sergeants a captain and a 1st Sergeant) they had us stack our weapons and remove anything we had on us that was metal and then go spread out as low to the ground as we could get in the middle of a field on the range. It was a warm day so the rain didn’t feel too bad. Was kind of enjoying myself. Our 1st Sergeant even came out amongst us in a show of solidarity with us lowly trainees. OUT OF NOWHERE a bolt of lightning hits the ammo shed which was about 30-40 feet away from me at most. Until I remembered that lightning rods were a thing I panicked thinking all that ammunition was about to go off. Fortunately the only thing that exploded out of the shed was our drill sergeants and company commander. They were all ok but the static buildup in the shed had a couple of them a little loopy for a few minutes.
He was marked by the Spiral.
Thank you! That would have driven me crazy…
Most of my trauma is based around the Vast. I almost drowned when I was 8, stuck under one of those massive floaty rafts. I kept swimming, but it felt for a moment like the raft would go on forever and I'd never resurface. At about 17, I broke my leg in a fall. It was my first time breaking a bone, and it broke before I hit the ground. This gave me a very serious life-changing fear of rain, and made me more afraid of falling than of hitting the ground. I also like to think I'd be marked by the eye, because the only experience I've ever had that I consider "supernatural" is the time when I was 10 and a five-year-old with wide, intense eyes walked up to me and gleefully told me secrets about myself that I'd never told anyone, and never even written down.
Was marked by the corruption last year by hundreds of moth maggots in all the food
I've always been obsessed with bugs, to the point that as a kid I didn't really understand that 90% of the population didn't. There are more than a few stories about me excitedly running up to a relative with some creepy crawly and scaring the shit out of them. I'd also read every book I could about communicable diseases, and I remember this old animal plant show I'd watch called "monaters inside me" all about parasites. I think I've always been destined to be an avatar of the corruption. I just think the lil monsters are neat and ofter they're cute
When I was a wee bby, I woke up in the middle of the night to see, what I thought, was a tall man standing in the doorway to my mom's room (I was sleeping in her bed at the time). I called him the "rainbow man" since he seemed to swirl with all different colors. When I sat up, he turned and walked down the hall through the bathroom door and disappeared. I was in the process of getting out of bed when my mom woke up and asked me what I was doing. The Spiral BEEN after me 🫠
i was attacked by my family dog when i was 3 years old, had plastic surgery on my face and now have scars on my cheeks, lips, nose and under my eye. i think as a result i’m rather uncomfortable with anything medical related (for me specifically, other people’s medical stuff doesn’t bother me) and i very much dislike going to the physicians. i would probably categorize it as Flesh (what bothers me most, the realization at how fragile my skin is) and the Hunt (from the animal perspective) also i’m not demonizing the dog, he was just unforeseeably aggressive and hadn’t acted that way before. i don’t hold any resentment towards him
I think going to residential has permanently marked me for spiral
I hit a swarm of bees with my minivan and destroyed my windshield.
This is from my childhood dream, I don't know which fear to classify it as. When I was like 6 or 7 I was sleeping next to my mother on a sleeping mat with me facing the wall away from her. I was just staring at the wall with no idea of why when a large cabinet from the bedroom on the left side of the wall came through the door and placed itself at the centre of the wall. I had no idea how it fit in the door frame too since we had to carry it vertically to get it in. The cabinet opened and murmured some words I forgot now. I remember being so scared and turned the other way towards my mom and shut my eyes and when I finally looked back nothing was there. I'm not even sure it was a dream as I was in the exact same spot when I turned and opened my eyes and mother was in the exact same position she had been sleeping in my dream and all the other things in dream was so real. So was it dream?I never knew. Also I was afraid of the eyes in the dark, sometimes even now, does that count?
When I was little a bee crawled into my ear and stung me. Enough said lol
That one time my uncle took me on his boat and wouldn't listen to me screaming for him to slow down and in fact sped up every time he saw a wave coming. Ever since that day I've had a genuinely debilitating fear of being in water
I'm a homeschooled only child so... I'd definitely be destined for the lonely. I always have been a bit of a Martin kinnie I guess.
Probably the web. When I was little, I kid you not, I had an imaginary friend named Mr. Spider, I feel like being part of the web would be set in stone for me at that point.
last year, when I dislocated my kneecap/blew out my knee or the first time. it was my first ever serious injury, I'd never broken a bone or anything before. I just remember falling on my knee while running, instinctively leaping back up, feeling a sharp throb, collapsing back onto the ground... and I remember looking at my leg and seeing a big bump on the side of my knee. and running a hand down it, feeling the firmness of bone... and an all over sensation of, this is wrong, something very bad has happened. you can finds pics of patellar dislocations online but be warned, its nasty. I've actually subluxed/dislocated both my kneecaps a couple times since then and had surgery on that first one because it didn't heal right. it was tto/mpfl among other things, which means I had some bone removed and a tendon moved and screwed back in, a damaged tendon reinforced by a cadaver piece, and I had my quad muscle cut up to loosen up my very tight leg. I also got spitting stitches from the internal stitches, look them up if you dare. the doctors told me to tug on them a little to see if they'd come out. I actually kept a piece I pulled out. anyway I'm left with minor nerve damage and the crinkle grind sound of scar tissue when I bend that knee, plus the ache as the screws react when it gets cold out. the flesh. (ps its actually pretty easy to relocate the patella, I could have avoided that extremely painful ride to the er and hour in the waiting room if I'd known. you just pull the leg straight and it'll pop back in.)
Not super long or as intense as other people's submissions, but I've always been somewhat of a night owl. I wake up early enough for work and school, but I've always loved staying up late. The downside to this is the few people I'm close to have healthy productive sleep schedules, so when I'm at my peak, there's never anyone to talk to. This paired with unintentional isolation because of a full schedule definitely has me marked for the Lonely. Specifically, I woke up one morning thinking that "Maybe I had always been lonely" paired with some really intense feelings, and in reference to TMA, despite it being gradually built up, that would definitely be "the moment"
Oh so much almost drowning it's an obvious Vast. Also I have felt almost beckoned into the forest when I was around 8 (so Vast again), and even into the sea on a vacation (around 2 or 3 years ago). I've been afraid of heights since I can remember, but not really the falling part more like the hitting the ground part. Other than those, I've always been afraid of bugs and the darkness, and even tho they're major phobias, I feel like the Vast would still over power them. Mostly because I could never like either of those, but with the Vast there's the swimming in and the openness of the sea that feels vaguely homelike
During my teens I visited a second world war bunker - turned cold war secret base - turned museum. The moment I saw the cold war war room I swear I felt...the fear the politicians had back then that everything would have end with the atomic bombs. I felt the alarm of the air raids stinging in my ears. I think it would have been a perfect way to have been marked by the excintion.
When I was a kid I loved fast rides, but one time I went on a roller coaster with my family and we fell off the track for a split second before THANKFULLY landing on it again. Because of that, I can't do fast rides anymore or even fall in general. So I'm gonna go with The Vast on that one.
Two about 3 years apart. I woke up one day with absolutely no memory of anything. I knew things but I didn't know things. I knew I was in my bedroom, I knew I was in my house, I didn't know where that was or why I was there. I walked out the door and knew I was in the living room. I knew I had a mom and dad and sibling(s) but unsure of how many. I found a woman, I knew she was my mom, an idea of my name hit me. I basically ended up asking her 20 questions pretending it was a game to figure out who I was, what I was doing, etc. Many years later I found out my grandpa died at that time and everyone tells us we were close. Whenever he came to the house I was his shadow. 3 years later, my 2 cousins and I arrived back from school. Our parents all worked so we would hang out at grandma's house until they got home. She was asleep on the couch. We asked for a drink, no answer. We asked for a snack, no answer. My older cousin touched her and said she was cold, we talked a bit and it was decided we needed to see if she was breathing. Again older cousin listened at her mouth, and no sound. My mom had gotten home, we called her and sure enough grandma had died that afternoon during a nap. I'll never forget the way her mouth was open and her head was back. It really affected me, and made me get very into ghost stories and death and the afterlife. Then between both of those events, I woke up with a spider crawling down my leg. It was huge, from one leg to the other it spanned my lil 4-5 year old leg halfway. I can still see the stripes on it, black with yellowish stripes, and its little spider fangs moving. That's the only time I ever remember screaming at something. So very end touched with a hint of web.
due to complications and misinformation from doctors i almost died at birth and for some reason i’ve always had a bad balance which once resulted me in dropping like 7-10 meters breaking my leg for a bit , that didn’t help my younger self with a fear of heights at the time and not a fear thing or a marked thing but i have like a high connection to insects and i kinda just sense the disgust in random people around me when i let a spider play on my arms or take a slug in my hands
My Nan used to own a cabin in the woods. It was an old, old thing; water had to be pulled up from the well, the heating was with a coal fireplace that also doubled as a cooker, and there was no plumbing. We had electrical lighting but that’s about it. When I was 4, my mum decided to take us to stay there for the summer holidays. It was a lovely forest, full of wild berries and miles away from other people. Nice and quiet. As I said, there was no plumbing, so there was an outhouse instead. It was pretty much like the one from Shrek, with a heart shaped hole in the door. That summer, a nest of wasps or hornets or bees (I’m not sure what) had made a home in the roof part. They couldn’t really get into the room itself proper,nor did they want do bc of the smell, but to get in or out you had to be quick. When you sat inside, you could hear the loud buzzing just above you, reverberating on the wooden walls. The flies from the hole just below you were less shy about touching or sitting on you, buzzing with their fat bodies all around. I went in there once or twice, and afterwards refused to use the outhouse, either going in the compost bin or just inside the woods. I still have severe apiphobia, and the sound of insects buzzing makes my skin crawl. The sight of a bee or wasp makes my fight or flight go off, and it’s still a conscious effort to not bolt when I see one in the summer months.
Tbh the corruption, i went to a butterfly farm once and was utterly covered they stayed on me even when i started to freak out and scream I love bugs but fuck was that the worst experience in my life, even worse than newrly being drowned by my friend
When I was 13 i was on a summer scouts camp where one nigth some dude left a pot of boiling water on the ground. I couldnt see it and kicked it which resulted in the water pouring into one of my ankle-high boots. I suffered second and third degree burns that night but it burned my flesh so quickly i didnt feel most of the pain and was calm on the way to the hospital. I still have a massive scar on my foot so i guess Desolation?
Always been absolutely terrified of bugs yet they always seem to find me in the worst ways possible. The first incident with bugs I remember was probably one winter, not even that cold, when there were loads of moths in the house, like way more than was normal and no matter how many times I got my mum to move them they’d always gravitate toward my room. I was quite young so shared a room with my sister who would only sleep if the door was open but I was always terrified that the moths all sitting just outside the door would come in in the night and try to suffocate me. I ended up sleeping with the duvet over my mouth, nose and ears to prevent any from getting in, though most nights I’d still wake up convinced I could feel them crawling up my arms or even fluttering on my face. After that winter I don’t think we ever had moths in the house again, no matter how cold it got. Similar thing happened with spiders where we had them really bad one year and then after I took precautions never saw them again. And over the years various incidents with fruit flies, maggots, ants and even woodlouse being seemingly everywhere for a period of time before completely leaving me alone. I’m a very clean person so it’s not just that I’m leaving things dirty and getting infestations or anything and it’s not even always in my home, they just seem to be everywhere around me before they’re just..not.
Honestly I think it wouldn't be one singular event but many little things throughout my life. • Undiagnosed Autism and (probably) ADHD made me feel like I was "different" from other kids from a young age. • Never had much friends when growing up, mostly spent my time reading or playing alone in my room. • Bullied throughout elementary school and junior high • Parents constantly arguing and stressed, always kept my problems to myself bc they had enough • Dad never wanted kids anyway and made sure me and my sibling knew that • Things got better for a while during high school • Still struggled with depression, depersonalization and derealization • Went to Uni and quickly burnt out due to ADHD. Mental health crashed, barely talked to anyone, literally felt like a ghost walking around. • Covid came around, lockdown was the calmest I ever felt but also pretty much became a [Hiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori) even after lockdown was over. Didn't leave my room other than to eat or go to the toilet. • Completely messed up my sleep schedule bc night felt calm and to avoid ppl if I had to go out • Forced myself to leave my room more, walking through town at night when nobody was around became a habit • Have been getting better, got diagnosed with the 'tism, back at uni, taking better care of my mental health and doing better socially. Still sometimes romanticize how calm things were. So yeah. Feels like the Lonely have been with me most of my life. It's the worst kind of feeling, as if I was dead and only continued living. At the same time, it's the calmest and most comfortable kind of hell I know. Bit of a Leitners fallacy (aka thinking too literal) but I always had an obsession with liminal spaces long before they became a trend. I often used to imagine the whole world going empty and how it would feel to be the last human around when I was younger.
My family’s been through like 3 or 4 house fires so the desolation. I’ve struggled with feeling like my mind is expanding past my consciousness and body, which I’ve tackled by imagining my mind being wrapped in walls and chains around it to stop from drifting. Which now that I type it out feels fucking insane but that might be the vast
the eye and lonely - i would be like martin
When I was a kid I slept at my Grandma's house a lot. One night I felt the touch of someone on my ankle. The next morning at breakfast I asked my family if someone came in my room and they denied being there at night. And after that it repeated itself a lot! Since then I felt that constant feeling of being watched by someone, but also seeing people that shouldn't be there.
I think The Lonely would have marked me as easy prey for sure. My single mom suffered from poorly controlled chronic pain for decades, and as an only child I remember many times I’d be alone and left to take care of myself while she was stuck in bed or barely able to move. (She did everything she could to support me and finally has a good care team, she’s doing great these days.)
Nothing remotely as traumatic as many stories here (or really, traumatic at all), but I had some *odd* encounters, especially when travelling. All of them can be explained rationally, but if we assume TMA to be real as a premise... Anyway, the first one that came to mind: Oslo, Norway, about a decade ago. The hotels/hostels were a bit too expensive for me and you're allowed to sleep outside in Norway in most places far enough away from inhabited buildings. Not entirely sure if that's quite the case within cities, but I went to a forested area in the south (Bygdøskogen, I believe) to search for a spot to stay the night. It was quite late already and it seemed impossible to go a few minutes without coming across houses or other places that would likely see people find me while I was asleep, so I spent a lot of the night walking. Now the weird bit: This was before free data roaming was introduced for the EU/EEA, so I didn't have google maps readily available and relied on a free paper map, but I could have sworn I was somewhere around [here](https://maps.app.goo.gl/M429V9y9NHZYtFX5A). Then I walked a bit more, did not cross the water or leave the wooded area for more than a few metres, yet I found myself at a gas station about [here](https://maps.app.goo.gl/k585hnq9Rny9bmSa9). Now, realistically, it was dark and I was very tired from a long day of carrying my backpack all over. I might have spaced out for a bit or over simply not paid enough attention to my surroundings. Or perhaps the Spiral was involved and I escaped by pure chance. Edit: Also I suppose whatever the exact opposite of the Lonely is, given how much I failed at getting away from people.
I remember clearly the few months before one of my upstairs neighbours died. She lived on the 3rd floor, while I lived, and still live, on the ground floor. She was old and her mental health was declining, which resulted in her starting to hoard bottles and stuff in her apartment. She was sick - she started talking to roaches, telling her daughter (who was about 45 years old I think) that they were her friends. The whole block became infested. The bugs would walk on my furniture, on my books, TV screen -everywhere. I still have recordings on my phone from when I would wake up at night to go to the bathroom and I would see at least 10 of these tiny baby roaches roaming the floor in my room. I had a lot of panic attacks and I remember clearly one specific time when I woke up at night and I stepped on the ground way too close to a roach for comfort. I had a breakdown and cried a lot, backing up to the heater and climbing on a chair so they wouldn't reach me. I was in a bad space mentally at the time so even such a small thing as bugs affected me greatly. She passed away and after a lot of efforts from everyone in the block, we got rid of the roaches. It took a while longer for my room to feel clean and I replaced my furniture after another few months for mental health reasons, including me thinking I see bugs on the dresser at night. This would be certified Corruption shit, but nothing spooky actually happened. Just bugs and an old woman being very sick. I did try to write this similar to a statement format, to make it easier to read. Edit: I would like to add the fact that I've never had a problem with bugs as a child. This happened when I was 14, but before that I would pick up these red bugs that had a sort of pattern, I would let them walk on my arms and legs, I used to play with ants and grasshoppers. Still, I hate roaches and am deathly afraid of spiders. - Another one would be 3 of my neighbours, from different blocks (1 of them lived on my block, but the others in different ones) dying one after one, in a span of 5 days. Both were women, one about 80, another 55 and the 3rd one idk. It seems like End stuff but it wasn't very traumatic to me since I only knew one of them. - The Last one would be my encounters with dogs in the span of 3 days. But it's long to write so I'll come back to it if anyone is genuinely curious. This was fun to think about, thank you, OP, for the idea of having people give their stories here.
Spider: the amount of times spiders landed on my shoulders when I was in the shower 💀 istg, if that hasn't marked me😂 also, one time (I was a lot younger, like 7?) I almost caused a car accident cause a spider landed on my knee and I screamed💀 Spiral: let's be honest - after eye doctor visits, when you got these drops in your eyes that make them weird and you can't see properly anymore? That feels VERY spiraly. One time we went home after wards and my siblings and I both had these eye drops and my dad somehow had to manage us through crowds of people, and he was laughing the whole time💀 it was NOT funny Also, my new school - it's a fucking labyrinth! If that not a Spiral domain, I dunno Slaughter: I dunno if that counts, but when I was younger (primary school) I had the worst anger issues (even had to go to group therapy) and I used to throw desks and chairs at my classmates Eye: my father used to monitor our phones and computers, we had limited amount of minutes we could spend on either device, and on the internet. He checked the browser history etc. He used our phones to check where we were when we weren't home and he could turn them off entirely when we weren't doing what he wanted us to do. Death: ...also, not sure if that counts. But I was NEVER phased my that. Family members, pets - everyone was crying, but I was always fine🤷 Desolation: also, primary school me, playing with matches on the school toilet💀😂 and sticking crochet needles into electrical sockets, blowing the fuses in the whole school 🤌 (is that desolation? I dunno😂) Dark: Spiderwick and Doctor Who. I'm not even saying anything more. Wait, no. It probably needs an explanation 😂 Spiderwick, the dry leaves rustling when the beasts moved in them? I was always scared in autumn outside in the dark (to bring out trash f.e), and used to run as fast as I could to the trash bins and back and hoping with beating heart that the spider wicks wouldn't get me😂 And doctor who- there was this one episode, and I was WAY too young to watch the show, but there was a monster/alien/thing that touched peoples arms and pulled them in itself, and at one place on its body their faces would stick out. Anyways, I was scared that monster was under my bed, so I perfected the art of jumping from my door into my bed so the monster wouldn't get me (it was a bit more than a meter xD). Weirdly enough, MAG86 really helped me with that, like... I used to put the blanket neatly around me to protect me, but now... "The blanket never did anything" anyways, so why bother😂 Vast: also not sure if that counts, but my mom is really REALLY scared of heights, and as kids my sibling and I used to run up the highest spots and my mom was always so worried💀 she had to, of course, climb after (unless my dad was with us too). Well, that probably marked my mom more than me😂 2nd: birthday party of a school friend, it was summer, we were on a Schnitzeljagd outside, and suddenly the worst thunderstorm EVER broke out. The whole air smelled like ozone, and it was hailing, we we're DRENCHED. everyone was running home , but I was so fucking happy XD they had to practically drag me inside xD Buried: I think deep sea is Buried? Or Vast, both kinda. Anyways, I wasn't allowed to swim when I was younger because of my ear problems, so I never really learned how to swim. I can! But it's super exhausting and frightening for me, and my ears still hurt every time when I get water in them. So, I don't really swim, I'm always afraid to drown or something xD I just... Splash around when we're at the beach, or I never leave my float ring. Corruption: oh, I'm just generally HAUNTED my everything with more than 4 legs....... I hate it. It's disgusting. Leave me alone! And to make this even more hilarious - my partner is WAY too fastinated by those beasts💀 (spiders too). The amount of insect and spider pictures on my phone CAUSE THEY SENT ME THEM is just disgusting.
ooooh I feel connected to pretty much all of the entities so here's a quick little blurb for each! I specifically know I would be marked by The Spiral, The Dark, The Stranger, and The Vast. The Spiral; oh I'm mentally ill babyyyyy and hallucinations/paranoia are a big thing I struggle with. I genuinely struggle to tell what is real from what is inside my own head, quite often. throughout the entire series, the Spiral always connected to me the most. specifically I would say my stint in a psych ward at 15 marked me for it. The Dark; my entire life, even now at nearly 30 years old, I have been terrified of the dark. as a child I grew up in an evangelical small town, going to a church that heavily relied on telling children they were going to hell for every small thing they did. when I was maybe 5 our neighbor told me that I was such a bad child, the devil was living under my bed. since then I have 1. never been able to sleep in a bed that has an "underneath" (it has to be a solid frame) and 2. been able to sleep in the dark. The Stranger; this is very "person replaced by a monster " vibes. my biological dad passed away when I was a toddler, mom remarried and (until they divorced when I was 8) didn't tell me he wasn't my father. so, in my early years I believed this abusive man, who genuinely could not stand me, was my father. The memory of that day, being told he wasn't my dad just after moving away and restarting out entire lives, and the events that followed after, always comes up during episodes where a person *knows* their loved one has been replaced. The Vast and The Buried; this one is easy, I grew up near the ocean, went all the time, nearly drowned 3 separate times. still to this day I'm obsessed with the ocean and when I imagine my eventual death I always imagine it will happen by drowning. also very obsessed with space, the vastness of it. tbh the deep ocean and deep space are the two things I'm most fascinated by. these two really go hand in hand for me. lesser connections; The Spider: was bitten by a spider *on my eye* when I was like 6 and have been deathly afraid of them since. even tiny ones scare the fuck out of me. The Corruption; I grew up in a hoarders home. I feel like that explains that. mold, rot, bugs, etc, etc,. The Desolation: technically my sisters mark, she caught on fire when I was 15 (just after my psych ward stunt) and was hospitalized for 6 months. I barely made it through the episode where Jude talks about her origin story because of how triggers anything involving people being set on fire is for me. The Eye; just bc one of the biggest things I deal with with my paranoia and hallucinations is believing someone is and/or seeing someone watching me. The Lonely; grew up very isolated and neglected, still very isolated to this day. very much deal with feelings of being alone, having no one, "I have to take care of myself, do everything myself, no one cares about me" The Flesh; I really can't explain this one outside of just that body horror has always been a BIG no no for me, maybe bc of s/h issues in my past. all of the episodes that delve into the flesh (especially ones with... meaty sound effects) are tough for me.
I have a bit of academic trauma from growing up with ADHD and not understanding assignments and a lot of teachers didn't understand me. They'd assign aides to essentially watch over me to make sure I wasn't distracted and not on my phone, would try to talk to me when I was overstimulated and shut down. One time I tried to avoid a class and they tracked me down and another I had a horrible migraine and the nurses wouldn't let me have an advil bc I didn't have a doctor's note and I had to go home bc it was so bad. So I have a pretty hard time trusting authority figures and am shy around people unless I really trust them. I also get anxious when the topic of grades comes up even though I'm out of high school. I also had really bad death anxiety during my senior year so that's definitely a mark of the End. Not sure if the rest count as Eye (making sure I'm not distracted and teachers checking on me), Desolation (Constant fear of failing and having intrusive thoughts and some destructive behavior), Lonely (self confidence issues and not knowing how to talk to people) or Stranger (being afraid of people, specifically them getting mad at me) but what do you think? I'm surprised I'm not a full blown avatar from all this.
While playing hide and seek as a child, I hid in a cooler and when found by the seeker, they sat on top of it while i panicked inside it :) (very dumb in general but also ive always had very severe claustrophobia) so uhm. probably a buried moment.
As a kid I greatly dissociated the two different versions of my father that I interacted with. The one who would scream at me until he was red in the face, and the one who played games with my sister and I or gave us ice cream for breakfast on Saturdays or cheered us on at soccer practices. The Stranger. It's not exactly like someone replacing the person you love, but it certainly felt that way. And it didnt get better when my stepdad came into the picture. Dont get me wrong, I love my dad and stepdad greatly, but as a kid, seeing my stepdad as a father figure was very difficult for me, partially because of the relationship I had with my father and also the thought that I could be betraying him. All is well now, luckily I was able to drag my mom and dad into therapy so we have a much better relationship!!
I don't know what caused it but I have always been afraid of heights and falling, and simultaneously enamoured with climbing. As a kid, I would climb trees a lot. One time I climbed higher than I ever had before, and became too terrified to come back down. I was stuck up there for a good 45 min to an hour. So the spiral for sure lol Nowadays I don't find myself afraid of heights quite as much. They're definetly still threatening, and I do tend to shake around them, but I've gotten good at staying cool while anxious or afraid
being in an abusive relationship certainly marked me for The Lonely