I Can't Feel Fear

hi friends my name is amelia i have an extremely rare genetic disorder this condition is so rare that there are only 400 known cases of it in the whole world and i'm one of them i'm sure you will be shocked when you find out what it is you might not even believe it by the way you can subscribe to this channel now if you would like to know when new videos get uploaded and if you like my story please don't forget to like this video first i want to tell you about something that happened to me when i was six because that was the first time my parents realized there was something going on with me there was a forest near where we lived sometimes we would go camping there on one of those trips as my mom was preparing dinner my dad and i went to gather wood that we could use to start a fire suddenly we heard my mom scream naturally my dad ran back to her right away it turned out that a giant snake had climbed onto the table and was sitting there right next to the food my dad told my mom honey don't panic i'll get rid of it right now but all he could do was to try to shoe the snake away by making strange noises meanwhile i had noticed that the snake was next to the chocolate cake so without even thinking about it i walked up to the snake and grabbed it by the back of the head then i tossed it away while my parents stared at me in disbelief the snake was probably as shocked as they were it quickly disappeared into the forest when my mom screamed what did you do i just said it was going to eat our cake of course what i did was incredibly dangerous if the snake had bitten me i could have gotten sick or even died so how could i have done something so brave even though i was only six years old i only did it because i'm not able to feel fear i'm not scared of anything it might sound nice when i put it that way but this is a genetic disorder and it's definitely not something to envy people have six emotions one joy two sadness three disgust four surprise five anger and six fear all these emotions are created by the brain the brain decides which emotion we should experience depending on the situation we're in but what happens if your brain is not familiar with one of these six emotions that's right you can't experience it this is the problem with people like me our brains simply don't know what fear is that means i'm the most fearless person you'll ever meet but it's not something i can be proud of because being fearless is much more dangerous than you might imagine it leads to unpleasant things happening to me on a few occasions i have even had close encounters with death there's a park not far away from my school sometimes my friends go there after school to sit around and chat one time a man snatched a purse from a woman who was sitting on the bench next to us and started running away just as he ran by us i stuck my foot out the man tripped and fell on his face and the purse went flying from his hand of course she was very happy about what i had done she thanked me again and again but at the same time what i did was way too dangerous for someone my age the man could have had a knife or even a gun and he could have hurt me in so many ways for stopping him that day was just one of the examples of the type of dangerous situations my fearlessness disorder could put me in so was i able to change my behavior as a result of this of course not because i don't know what fear is bad experiences like these unfortunately don't have any effect on me no matter what i go through i keep acting without any fear some of you might say okay you might have no sense of fear then you should use your mind in such situations protect yourself even if you don't feel fear unfortunately this is not possible i've heard that normally when people are scared their hearts pound faster their breath gets shorter and their palms get sweaty i don't understand that i should be afraid because none of these things are happening to my body otherwise i'm not stupid my iq level is pretty normal there's no problem with my memory either i don't forget the bad things that happen to me but despite all this when i see a giant spider i grab it with my bare hands without even thinking about it it doesn't occur to me to protect myself because my brain does not signal for me to be afraid that's why i can casually do all these things that can seem foolish to you of course there are courageous people out there but as you figured out this disorder is not the same thing as being brave it's so much more than that for example when crossing the street you should be checking to see if there are any cars coming people who have my disorder even have trouble with something so basic unfortunately most of the time i step out into the street without looking i'll tell you something even weirder do you go near wild animals knowing they could rip you to pieces unfortunately people like me might during my first year of junior high we went on a class trip to the zoo after a while we came to the tiger enclosure we saw that there were two adult tigers and a cub along with them the little tiger was of course super cute suddenly i had an irresistible urge to pet it there was a wall and a moat separating us from the tigers i thought that i could jump down swim across the moat and then pet that little tiger as much as i wanted so i decided to go for it and started climbing over the wall thankfully the teacher saw what i was doing and was able to grab me before i jumped down amelia what are you doing are you insane she screamed because i didn't think i'd done anything wrong i was trying to explain myself by saying i was just going to pet the cub and leave after this incident my parents took me to a therapist they knew i was a brave kid but this was a little bit too much the therapist asked me a lot of questions about similar incidents that had happened to me in the past afterwards he told my parents it seems like amelia's problem is not psychological and referred them to a neurologist i learned that it was neurologists who specialize in issues related to the brain in the neurology department they ran many tests on me for example in one test the doctor showed me photos of people's faces and asked me how that person was feeling for the first photo i said he's laughing so he's happy for the next one she's crying so she's sad in the third photo there was a woman who was screaming i said she's screaming so and i was quiet i realized this sounds unbelievable but when i see the face of someone who's afraid i can't understand that they are afraid my brain is not only unable to create the feeling of fear but it also doesn't register that other people are afraid because it doesn't have any idea what this emotion called fear is since my brain doesn't know it i don't know it either after these tests neurologists gave me a definitive diagnosis no fear disorder since this was a very rare genetic disorder i became a case study in medical literature from time to time scientists come to visit me and perform new tests research on this disorder continues since its cause is still unknown as you might have guessed there's no treatment for it either i will have to live with it for the rest of my life so are there any advantages to having this disorder thankfully yes i don't experience any fears that make life harder for people for example i've never been scared of taking exams and that has always had a positive effect on my grades i don't have a fear of public speaking either since i'm so comfortable i always end up speaking on behalf of the students in parent-teacher meetings i also don't have any phobias such as the fear of enclosed spaces or the fear of clowns and i will never have them finally i always sleep like a baby when flying i'm never afraid no matter how badly the plane shakes while going through turbulence once while flying through a storm i saw lightning striking one of the plane's engines i laughed and told my mom about it she told me amelia you don't have to say these things to me not everyone is as brave as you are my friends have told me fear can be pleasurable in certain situations of course i'm missing out on all of that for instance i don't like horror movies because they don't scare me and i'm not scared of ghosts or zombies or vampires scientists who are doing research on my disorder placed electrodes on my head and made me watch scenes from the scariest movies thanks to those electrodes that could see what was happening in my brain in real time the tests demonstrated that there was no activity in the part of my brain related to fear this was something to be expected but now it was scientifically recorded another thing that everybody loves and i don't is riding roller coasters i gave in to peer pressure once and rode one even though i knew i wouldn't be scared they lost their voices from screaming so hard i on the other hand just got bored and looked around now you know my story with all its details fear keeps us away from danger that's why it's important for our survival but despite all the drawbacks would you still want to switch places with me please leave a message in the comments thank you for listening to me sharing all this with you felt really good bye you

Channel: That's My Story

Views: 1,142,011

Rating: 4.8404627 out of 5

Keywords: personal stories, story, experience, animation, short film, stories, animated stories, real life, fear, disorder, mental, psychology

Id: egmMbQQM3wM

Length: 9min 14sec (554 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 28 2020