Is it normal that I find cats to be intimidating?

When I was a kid my parents were viewing a home open and I went and sat on a couch, startling a cat that had been hiding beneath it. It reached out and with both its claws scratched down the back of both my legs. The incident left me with deep shock and I felt unease around cats right up through my 20s and my family never kept cats; we were always dog people.

Then one day I was living with a mate and he had a street cat that used to come visit, he would feed it and sometimes it would stay the night. At first it was terrified of me - it would see me, it’s eyes would go wide and it’d piss bolt out of the room. Then one night it surprised me when out of the blue it jumped up into my lap and started kneading up against me.

Just this earned trust broke so many barriers and to this day I still miss and think about that cat and how it completely won my heart. I think maybe you confront the fear in order to move past it, stroke a cat sometime