This is a story that I have been eager to share for a long time. I hope you find it to be insightful, creative, eye-opening, and even a little humorous.

When I was a child, Easter had been the absolutely most dreaded holiday. My great grandfather had died on Easter when I was really young, the bunny was freaky as hell, and the candy isn't even that good. I didn't get the whole easter basket thing, it seemed unnecessary in my mind. The worst of it all? The easter grass. My cat was obsessed with the Easter grass. He would always eat a ton of it, and then get really sick. Then who had to clean it up? You guessed it. The only thing I liked about Easter was I got to see my family, and go to church (if everyone got up early enough, which happened on average about every 5 years).

Easter is actually pretty irrelevant to the story. This story is about a phobia. A dreadful, extreme, horrendous, horrifying, repulsive fear of jellybeans. There are all sorts of fancy names for phobias. Here's just a couple of the best ones I found: bogyphobia (fear of boogers), consecotaleophobia (fear of chopsticks), epistaxiophobia (fear of bloody noses), hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia (fear of long words, how ironic!), xanthophobia (fear of the color yellow)

These are all legitimate, widely-recognized phobias, which means someone at some point must have had this fear (I hope the person with bogyphobia never catches a cold)

Ok, for those of you who are wondering where this is going, here's where the REAL story starts:

Whether or not we know it, we have all been affected by addiction at some point in our lives, whether it be a single situation or the course of a life event. Maybe the cashier at the grocery store is working a double shift to make enough to cover their next fix, or we have a close family or friend battling with the disease and we just don't know it. We all have been affected by it in some way. Myself, I have been affected by this since the day I was born. I have seen drugs time and time again find their way into the lives of the people I love and take over their lives, control their day to day living, until they are no longer the person I once knew. 

When you're just a kid, this is a really freaking scary reality to be living in. The person you're with is fine when you see them in the morning, then they're acting funny around lunch time, and then are just over-the-moon excited about everything at night when you're trying to catch some z's. But the next morning, they might not be fine. You are constantly living in uncertainty and on edge about every little thing, every single day. You also live in denial. You see people on the news getting in trouble, committing crimes, dying of drugs. And you think to yourself: this person that I love has behaviors and words that line up to what this guy is saying and doing. Bt there's no way that the person I love would ever do that stuff! It seems impossible. When I became a little bit older, like middle school, I let curiosity get the best of me. I discovered that someone that I loved had a drug problem, an addiction.

I kept it to myself, because I didn't want anything bad to happen to them. I knew what they were doing was wrong, and I knew if I asked them about it they would lie. And I couldn't tell anyone else, so I let it eat away at me for close to 10 years. 

In the span of those 10 years, I developed a fear of anything that resembled a pill. Anything you can think of that was small and went in your mouth, I was deathly afraid of. The example that I use is jellybeans. Because I was so young and was trying to conceptualize this big scary problem all on my own, I unknowingly and unintentionally generalized 'drugs' to jellybeans. I thought that jellybeans meant death, because of what I saw the pills doing to this person I loved. For 10 years I didn't take any medicine, prescription or over the counter. As a kid, I was so afraid that this drug-ridden life was my future, that it was going to happen to me. If it happened to this person that I loved and looked up to, then it was bound to happen to me. So the only way I could guarantee that not to happen was to stay away from everything that resembled a pill.

This definitely affected my day to day life and probably had an impact on my health and development. It became such an issue that I avoided anyone who ate jellybeans, and avoided places where jellybeans would be. I would stay in my room for as long as possible on Easter morning, praying that there wouldn't be jellybeans in my basket, and that the person I loved would be a 'normal self' that day. I judged people who would take ibuprofen for headaches, and thought they were going to end up just like the person I loved, while I buried my head into a pillow and sobbed until I fell asleep to make my headaches go away, which sometimes took all day. Looking back now, I realize this was a giant misconception, as it is completely appropriate and sometimes necessary to treat headaches with ibuprofen.

So what does addiction look like to a child? It is a very scary, confusing, and not an ideal reality to be living in. But it is their normal, it's what you know and are used to. It doesn't make you love the person any less, it makes you appreciate them more. Because you never know what could happen to them the next day, or if they are going to get a 'bad batch' of something. I didn't realize the ramifications of living with this until I was much older. But I am sharing this, because I hope to help people realize that kids are smarter than you think! They know if something is off, even if you try to hide it from them. That was probably the worst part, was not being able to talk about it with the person. I was petrified, and felt so alone and isolated. 

So how do we address and explain the issue of addiction to a child? 

It starts with a conversation. I sure would have appreciated having someone to talk to and being told the truth, instead of having to hold the reality inside me and let it fester for years. It is a really hard and tricky thing to address, and the abuser isn't going to make the first move. If there is a loved one or close family member who could have a conversation with the child, that would be beneficial to their understanding of what is going on.

I don't fear jellybeans.