2 posts tagged “irrational fear”

I hate being afraid of bugs, I really do.  I recognize it as objectively irrational, but still cannot calm the terror that wells up inside me.  I've said it before, but I always feel compelled to reiterate.  This is not a girly "ew, gross!" type of thing... I get very worked up when people imply I need to just "get over it".  Oh trust me, I've tried.  I've begun breaking down the fear a little, realizing which situations/bugs/etc cause the reaction more strongly and which I can talk myself down from.  This has helped a little, but sometimes the bugs still best me.

If you want some background reading here is a link to a post from last Feb about a similar run-in.

Before I left for Chicago, I had a run-in with a Palmetto bug in my apartment.  I was horrified and terrified and had no idea what to do.  I was talking to myself (out loud, probably) and telling myself... "There is a thing that rational people do in this situation.  Regular people don't have a panic attack right now.  I am an adult.  I live on my own.  I have a great job.  I pay my bills and keep two cats alive.  There is something to do in this situation.  Now... what is it??"  I eventually got through it (with the aid of a couple friends on the phone and a Dyson vacuum cleaner), but it took like 2 hours of my life.  Ridiculous.

Today was almost worse.  There was an upside down palmetto bug on my kitchen floor that I believed to be dead.  I was sort of avoiding dealing with it so walked by it several times (in large arcs) thinking "later".  One trip past though caught my attention because I thought I saw it twitch.  Sure enough, I looked again and it was wriggling trying to turn itself back over.

*breathe*

I got my Raid in hand, shooed the cats away and sprayed with what might have been a little too much wild abandon.  Bug killed dead.  As advertised.  But now I have poison all over my floor and a dead, wet roach.  I lock myself and my cats in my bedroom and try not to think about it. 

This isn't an effective long term plan since i do eventually have to let my cats out and I have to clean up all the poison before I can do that.  Anyway to make a drawn out and stupid story less drawn out (but no less stupid), I come to realize that even though the bug is drenched in poison and I KNOW it is dead, I still can't get near it.

I ended up scooting a paper bag on the floor with a swiffer stick along until it half scooped it up, and got it out of the wet-with-Raid area, then put a bucket upside down on it.  Then I cleaned up the Raid and let my cats back out.  I'll deal with the bucket later.  Or I'll hire a maid.

Brilliant.

Anyway, here is my highly scientific list of what makes my run-ins with bugs worse.

1.  Contained spaces.  Being inside (even inside a large space) is always worse.  Being inside my *own* space (my home or to a lesser extent, my office) is on the more extreme panic attack version of the scale.

2.  Things that fly at me.  Or run toward me.  Especially in a spastic manner.  I have yet to be afraid of a roly poly.  I'm even not afraid of spiders.  They're smart, they keep to themselves or run away.  Thumbs up to snails and caterpillars.  Biiiig thumbs down to cicadas, palmetto bugs, flying crickets, grasshoppers, june bugs and bees.

I have learned that my current nemesis, the Palmetto bug (aka fucking huge flying roaches) flies at people because they believe people to be trees (and they live in trees when not scaring me to death in my home).  It is comforting to know they aren't trying to attack me, but I do doubt I will be able to remember that rational fact next time I am faced with the situation.

3.  I do not think that bugs are gross.  I do not wish for bugs to be dead.  I just want them to be alive, away from me.  Or I want to be alive, away from them.  If I am able to, I will catch them and release them outside.  If someone else is dealing with it for me, I strongly encourage them to do the same.  Still sometimes, it is inevitable and while it does actually, um, bug me to kill them, sometimes I just have to move on with my life.

4.  Body mass and exoskeletons.  If they have weight when they hit me or make a crunch that can be heard and really felt when crushed, I will have nightmares. 'Nuff said.

5.  Ears.  Please, bugs, stay away from my ears.  Even the smallest gnat can send me into a panic if I hear it buzz right next to my ear.

6.  Nighttime.  I can deal with everything better in the daylight.  Even if it's inside, I can still deal with it better if it is daytime.

I think my point is that I need to move somewhere that doesn't have tropical insects.

Every since I was a very small person, I have been truly terrified of most bugs.  Not in an "ew, gross!" way, but in a way that can only stem from an extremely overactive imagination in early childhood that must have imagined majorly terrifying things that they could do to me.  And other than to the idea of killing them, I don't actually have a "ew, gross!" reaction to bugs at all, really.  Just... blind panic.

A great story that my mom liked to tell went like this.  I was about 6, and had gone to the neighbor's house to borrow/return something from/to my friend.  My mom expect I would stay a bit, so didn't think it was odd that I didn't come home immediately.  I, however, tried to come home immediately.  It was dark, though, and so our front porch light was on.  And it was surrounded by bugs, so I wouldn't even get close.  I tried going back to my friend's house, but they'd turned on their light when I showed up the first time, so now their light also was surrounded by bugs.  I didn't know what to do, so I stood about 20 feet away from the front door, looking forlorn and crying my eyes out.  A woman driving by saw me and drove around the block a few times, trying to assess the situation.  She finally stops, and knocks on our front door.  "Ma'am, is that your little girl crying in the yard?"  My mom was embarrassed, to say the least.  But it was a story told often to illustrate my refusal to interact with bugs.  After that, we got a motion detector light, so the bugs wouldn't be hanging out waiting for me.

Logically, I know it doesn't make sense.  I know they are an extremely small fraction of my size and very few of them can do more to me than make a small itchy spot on me, if I even let them get that close.  It's a crazy irrational fear and I hate hate hate it.  I don't stand around crying about it anymore, but it does still bring up very unpleasant panicky feelings.

At various times I've tried to "train" myself out of it.  For example, this summer in Germany, the bees seemed to really like me.  I knew that if I just stayed still and left them alone, they'd leave me alone... but that hardly stopped me from panicking and flailing about like a moron.  I'm just glad Nathanael never got a photo of that happening.  At least if he did get a photo, he had the decency to not to show it to me.  Anyway, over the course of the summer, I was eventually able to make myself stay still, and not flail about, but my internal reaction never changed.  I was still having a near heart attack, I was just able to look calm while I did it.

It's worse with some bugs than others, but I've got lists of stories I could share about the subject.  Cicadas, grasshoppers and crickets rank pretty high up there on the list of things that will cause a full-on panic situation.  Junebugs were a constant source of trauma in my formative years.

Again, yes, I know it doesn't make sense.

The reason I'm writing about this now is because my bathroom is currently barricaded off.  Why?  Because there is a cockroach in it.  And not one of those little northern cockroaches, but one of those gigantic tropical ones.  I leave the balcony door open a lot, so I assume that's how it got in here.  Balcony door is closed now.  I put Spizzy in there for a while, because she's actually pretty good at catching bugs... but it just crawled up the wall, and then she got bored.

I feel remarkably silly letting a bug keep me out of part of my own apartment -- and an important part, at that!  But it's a quite large bug, and it makes me very unhappy.

I write this with no current resolution to the problem, other than that I can add this to my list of things I don't like about living alone (it's a short list, for the record, the only other thing on it so far is that if I can't open a jar, it just... doesn't get opened).