Right about the time I was around six years old or so is when I first realized that indeed I would one day suffer some form or other of one or more neuroses. At the time I was too young to fathom the true implications of this mental prediction of mine other than that I knew it would happen some day and that I had best start preparing for the moment as soon as possible. Already at that young age I was suffering one phobia or other, minimal and repressed, though occurring and reoccurring nonetheless.
One example was my extreme fear of anything mechanized, especially those objects containing wheels. An example was the rumble of an occasional car in the distance. I would dash indoors and hide in a closet before the evil metallic construction made its way down the road and past my house. In my mind I could imagine the creature pausing for a moment directly in front of my house, peering into the front windows in search of the next innocent child victim. Then again if I hid long enough, the machine would abandon its search and continue down the hill. As an extra precaution, I would wait an extra ten minutes to make doubly sure it was safe before I dared venture outside again. Often enough right at the moment I opened the front door, there would occur yet another car's rumble off in the distance, and I would have to run inside again to repeat the whole process all over again. Ten, fifteen or even twenty times a day, a kind of weird repetition neurosis. My very first (conscious) cracks in reality's way.
Later as I aged I figured that the best policy was just to ignore things and hope it would not happen. Even much later is when the first cracks of unreality appeared on the mirror of so-called reality. Cracks opening up and spreading and encompassing everything around them like one gigantic spider web. So much so that eventually it became almost impossible to tell the difference between the real and the unreal, where the cracks were and where they were not. Everything seemed like a cracked mirror. This makes life a bit more challenging but also frustrating.
Like it is a matter of life and death which it is not.
