A childhood belief about general

When I was 8 I liked the show Courage the Cowardly Dog and in one episode there was an evil monster mole and in one episode there was an evil talking monster gerbil. Watching those episodes made me fear gerbils and moles. Back then when I was afraid of something even the mention of it would scare me, and the other second graders were very amused by my fear of two animals just because of a cartoon. So they would try to scare me by saying "mole" all the time and one of the books in the classroom had a huge picture of a gerbil in it and they would shove the picture in my face and they would talk about moles and gerbils all the time. Then that summer I became obsessed with a video game that had a mole in it. I thought the mole was cool and it became my favorite character in the video game, and that stopped my fear of moles, and my fear of gerbils stopped at the same time my fear of moles stopped. Of course when school started again I had to go tell all of the mean kids who tortured me with moles and gerbils last year that I wasn't afraid of them anymore so they could SHUT UP.