My greatest fear in the entire world is clowns. I have been afraid of them since I could remember, I think I have always been afraid of them in some sense. However, it was not until I was around the age of five that my fear was rooted so deeply in me.

My siblings had me watch the movie IT that is based on the book by Stephen King. Watching this movie led to me going to school and telling everyone that my dad was going to kill me whenever I saw him next. This obviously alarmed my teacher, she had no clue what the full story was and called my mom to come up to the school right away.

My mom picked me up and we proceeded to go meet my dad for lunch to get to the bottom of this issue. I was extremely terrified of seeing my own dad that day simply because I feared that he was going to turn into a clown and then kill me. After talking with my parents I understood that my dad was not and would never harm me. That incident did open up my family's eyes to how severe my fear of clowns was.

Over time I finally put a name to this fear that I constantly would struggle with, coulrophobia. It has always been something I have had to struggle with throughout my entire life, even before I watched the movie IT. My fear has always been there and seems to still not be going away any time soon.

The worst time to have my fear of clowns is during Halloween. Even though it is my favorite holiday it comes with the never-ending torment from clowns. I have had so many occurrences with clowns during this time of the year. No matter if it is someone in a Halloween store dressed up as a clown, a clown in a haunted house, or even seeing clown decorations. All of these scare me at some level.

The clowns that most people find ridiculous for me to even remotely be scared of are the cartoon clowns. Like the one that is the bad guy in one of the episodes of Scooby-Doo Where Are You!

After I have any encounter that has to do with a clown or I have a moment of pure panic about thinking that a clown is going to be able to get to me, anything and everything basically scares me. Being in the dark, in an elevator or even in a hallway alone makes goosebumps cover my body.

I used to have this bad habit when I was the only one at home and I wanted to go take a shower, I would lock every door and then proceed to peek my head out of the shower curtain every few minutes to make sure that I was indeed still alone. Doing this meant that there was no clown there to get me because in my mind a clown would be there waiting for me, to get in the shower or for me to be alone and strike.

The moral of the story is that no matter how many times I face my fear it will still be there with me at the end of the day and most likely will be for the rest of my life. Even my entire family knows about my fear and knows that it is not something to mess around with.

Fears are a part of everyone, some fears we may not understand why we have them, like my fear of clowns, but we must live with them anyway.