AITA for deliberately triggering someone I knew had a bird phobia
Ok, so, this is going to need some context. As a child, I struggled with undiagnosed ADHD which led to teachers and group leaders finding me a very difficult kid to work with, and a couple of them really didn't like me. Also, this happened when I was seven. If you think that automatically doesn't make me the AH, at least read the rest of the story.
I was part of the girl scouts (not really, it was more of an off brand girl scouts, but for clarity we'll stick with GS). I didn't really like it, but my parents made me do it. GS was led partially by this lady, let's call her Mrs. Jennifer. Mrs. Jennifer didn't like me. I don't know how I knew this, but call it a kid's intuition. My mom later confirmed that this was true from how she had seen Mrs. Jennifer interact with me later.
Anyways, this particular day we were going to do a nature walk, and all of the different age groups were all together. A bunch of these girls I had never seen before. So I'm standing near a group of older girls, when one of them mentions that Mrs. Jennifer doesn't like birds. I was baffled by this. And then another girl chimes in that she heard that Mrs. Jennifer is even scared of feathers. Now this was just plain confusing for a seven year old. I had no knowledge of phobias, and it seemed entirely impossible to me for a grown woman to be scared of a feather. Well, we go on the nature walk, look at cool plants and rocks and yes, we saw some birds. We were told to collect one thing on the nature walk that we would take with us to show to the group and write down in our notebooks.
If you guessed that I picked up a feather, you would be correct. However, I don't think I picked it up out of spite or anything, I just thought the feather was pretty and I was going to show it to everyone and document it. So we get back to the group, and Mrs. Jennifer wants to see everything we've collected. That was when I remembered what the older girls had said, and I wanted to test it, not believing for a minute that it was true. Well, I hold up my feather, and ladies and gentlemen, when I say all hell broke loose, I mean it.
Mrs. Jennifer shrieked and jumped back like I had just socked her in the face. My dad, who had been standing a bit off to the side, said afterwards that it looked like I had just hit her. Parents can rushing over, and I don't remember much of what happened after. No one got mad at me, because they all assumed I didn't know about her phobia. I was very shocked by her reaction, because apparently the older girls had been right, but I still didn't know why anyone would react like that. I still felt unbearably guilty for a couple months though.
Anyways Reddit, AITA for deliberately triggering someone I knew had a bird phobia?