there are two other reasons -- scars baked into my memory -- that I might wall up and refuse to engage with something.
they are both my parents.
why I might be scared to commit to anything I cannot do on my own from outside my home: when I was young and at the arcade, I had a really good pinball round going. dad, however, was getting bored, and leaned on the table. after causing it to tilt and end my ball, he simply said "c'mon, there are other people behind you waiting for a turn. let's go." the lesson I learned from that was my prolonged success only wastes his time and he will not avoid disrupting it.
why I might be scared to dive into something new: much later, around 7 or 8 years ago now, I decided to try to learn a more advanced mode in Zelda 3 Rando: Overworld Glitches. doing this without the boots means I have to just get the brief movements correct. doing this on a gamecube controller means the stick snaps back and clicks every movement. my mother eventually comes and quietly shuts my door; the noise was giving her a headache. I cannot mute my hardware, so I just as quietly decided this was something I was not allowed to do. the lesson I learned here (and from various smaller interactions in the past) is if I try something that would produce a new noise, I will be upsetting my mother.
Furthermore she will not hesitate to question, with anxiety in her voice, if I up and decide to go out somewhere/sometime not familiar to my habits, and she has, while I was a legal adult, called random contacts of mine in the middle of the night just because I decided to stay the night somewhere else and come home in the morning instead. (I did not have a mobile phone yet at this point)
In summary, I am afraid my dad will just pull the plug on anything I'm trying to focus on, and my mother will yank on the emotional leash she has me on, so I hole myself up and refuse to do anything that involves being scheduled and somebody relying on me to be there.
