Personal Narrative: Robotic Pool Cleaners

Around age 5 to 10, I went to my grandparent’s house every weekend and non-school night to swim in their sizable swimming pool. It has a 15-ft deep end, a separate hot tub, a slide (not a particularly safe one, but still fun), and a diving board. However, the only thing that I couldn’t stand about it was their robotic pool cleaner. The very cleaner that would soil my playtime and send me into terrified hysterics.
My fear of the cleaner was so intense, I managed to get my sister to be terrified of it too. We both would observe its pathing around the pool, what days my grandfather would take it out for maintenance, and pray for the occasion when our mother would join us in our aquatic arcadia so that we could enjoy ourselves in safety. Seeing this off-white beast would fill me with adrenaline and send me into what seemed like a panic attack, especially during its moments of attempting to entangle me in its spine-like tail or when it would climb the walls of the pool with witchcraft and spray water from the aforementioned tail that I avoided as if it possessed corrosive properties. The fear of the cleaner persisted with me for years at that pool, until it began to die off once I started to become more busy with things such as school as I got older and had less and less time for
going to the pool. But even when I did have free time, my newer interests were beginning to replace toys and outdoor activities with addictive video games, the expanding frontier known as the internet, the dawn of the smartphone, the usual commodities teenagers start doing. Additionally, on a less interesting note; I eventually learned it was a pool cleaner and it wasn’t trying to kill me, so there’s that too.
I believe the triggering factor for my pool cleaner phobia most likely stemmed from watching “Jaws” with my grandmother during one of her horror movie nights.
Now, the pool cleaner was by no means a 20-ft man-eating fish with teeth, but the idea of something else being in the water with me, that something being able to maneuver independently with grace, all the while remaining mysterious, waiting to strike at its powerless victims at the right moments. Another thing that was presumably a factor was my chronic fear of the unknown that still persists with me to this day. At the time, as a child, not knowing what this thing in the water, was absolutely frightening to my guileless
psyche.
Reflecting back on this at age 20, it's fairly amusing to me. To look back on the fact that I was afraid of that “dreaded” pool cleaner. However, when I reach the part where the cleaner fear coincided with the archaic one of the unknown. It upsets me that it is still a problem that continues to plague me as a young adult to this day. At the very least, it is more rational than believing that a pool cleaner will suck you up and transport you to one of the circles of Hell straight out of “Inferno”. On a more positive note; this is simply another fear that I must overcome, something that my older self must now prevail the fact that one cannot know everything as my younger self did to that ridiculous pool cleaner.
To conclude all of this, my phobia of the pool cleaner may have been silly. But to me personally, it symbolizes to me that a lot of what starts our fears is the fact that we are not going to know everything about well, everything. Which segways into my own issues(s) with the unknown. I know on a logical level that I will not be able to figure out every single aspect of the universe, though on a another one it is still an ongoing work in progress for me to accept and to live with that fear. If I am capable of overcoming one fear, even if it took years, then what is another?