Today was a slightly scary day for me, and the story revolves around a slightly irrational fear of lightning, which I will delve into with more detail. This is a real story, and it happened just today.
It was a nice day, so I decided to bike to the library and pick up a few books and spend an hour or two reading there. The time passes fast, as I do enjoy reading a lot, and it gets dark even before I notice. I check my watch and it's only 7:30 PM, yet it was still dark outside. I think in my mind, "Huh, that's strange, usually the sun sets around 9 PM, not 7:30." So then I proceed to assume that my watch might've been behind or inaccurate by the margin of an hour or two, yet I still thought it was unlikely and strange.
I exit the library, and notice the sky is extremely cloudy and dark, this being crucial information that I did not yet know about when I was in the library. I obviously jump to the most logical conclusion- it's about to start raining, and from the looks of the sky, raining VERY hard. I started to panic a little, because though I've never been particularly scared of thunder or lightning at all (until today), I realized that it's possible for something bad to happen, albeit unlikely, but still possible. I've never really had any bad experiences with severe thunderstorms because I'm usually in my house or in a car when they happen. So I decide to bike home as soon as possible, before the rain would start to turn into a torrential downpour. 5 minutes pass, and it's simply a light drizzle, but I notice that the rain is slowly yet gradually picking up the pace.
Here's the part which genuinely had me a bit scared of thunder and lightning for pretty much the first time in my life, and also the first time I genuinely thought I would get struck by lightning.
After the 5 minute mark, I hear a rumble in the clouds, a sign of a thunderstorm, and then the rain starts pouring very hard. I realize that I cannot keep biking, because I still have around 8 minutes of distance left to bike. I was biking through a neighbourhood that I'm familiar with, and desperately tried to find a house with an outer roof I could take shelter under. (Hard to explain what I mean by this, but basically those side-roofs attached to the side of houses, where it's like shelter for your car but it's an open area similar to a parking lot) The rain at this point is a deafening roar, and the thunder rumbles turn into thunder bombs. The constant flashes of lightning, as if there's a paparazzi taking hundreds of photos of me a second. I realize that this might take half an hour, or even an hour to settle. I think to myself, this isn't that bad. But then I'm proven wrong, when I see an extremely bright flash of light and an almost deafening, RESONATING sound of thunder which I could feel in the very core of my body, it was louder than even the loudest of bomb explosions, genuinely, it caused my heart rate to instantly start beating extremely fast.
Why was I scared, you may ask, but think about the conditions. I'm not even in full shelter, I have temporary shelter under a side-roof, and most of all, I'm panicking about the bomb explosion sounds from this thunder. It genuinely frightened me, and even though the chances of getting hit by lightning are nearly 1 in 500,000, I think anyone would develop an irrational fear of possibly being struck by lightning when you can vividly hear the lightning so close to you, sounding off like a detonated bomb in a warzone. And it's' not like the bomb sounds were just once every five minutes, it was nearly once every few seconds.
I tried to calm myself down by rationalizing the situation and telling myself, calm down, there's literally no chance you get hit by lightning, it's incredibly unlikely. But honestly logic had no place in my mind at that moment, I couldn't hear anything but the thunder claps. After 30-40 minutes, the storm subsided, and the rain was a light drizzle, and I made my way home.
TL;DR I just felt like I had to document my scary experience with thunderstorms somewhere tbh, and this site is definitely one of the last places to put an experience like the one I had today, because of obvious baiters and idiots on the site, but to those of you who aren't braindead baiters, I'm just genuinely curious of any similar experiences you might have had with thunderstorms, lightning, or any natural phenomena? Like maybe tsunamis, earthquakes, avalanches, etc.
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