Bugs have terrible boundaries.

Posted on July 22, 2017 by luckyotter

ant

I’m hooked on a blog I found a couple of months ago called WaitbutWhy. It’s a blog for people who like science and geeky stuff and think about the same kinds of weird, random, shower-thought sort of things that I do. Some of the stuff its author, Tim Urban, writes about will absolutely blow your mind, such as this incredible article about how to fit all 7.3 billion people on the planet into a building that would fit in a space smaller than Manhattan’s Central Park. Yes, it can actually be done (but it would be terribly cruel!).

Some of his posts are hilarious because they’re so true and relatable. In my last post I mentioned that bugs (ants, to be specific) can be beneficial to the environment because they help break down dead material, but let’s be honest here — Do any of us really LIKE bugs?

They invite themselves where they are not wanted. They walk on our food and spit in it and lay their nasty eggs in it. They violate our bodies without our permission, sometimes painfully or causing unbearable fits of itching. They hide inside our bedcovers and crawl all over us when we’re trying to sleep. Some bugs have an unsettling way of flying in your face repeatedly. They won’t take no for an answer. They look like microscopic monsters or aliens from another planet. Their nasty dead carcasses can be found all over your windowsills, your floors, in your bed, inside your refrigerator. They are stupid (moths fly straight into electric lights — how have they not gone extinct yet?). Moths burrow inside your clothing and chew holes in them. Roaches and mosquitoes carry diseases. Termites can bring down your home (and during their horrifying spring swarms, they obnoxiously drop their wings after having sex — all over your hardwood floors. (I know, because this happened to me — I spent two hours vacuuming them all up while crying and whimpering in terror). I wrote about that awful experience in detail in this post about my weird phobia. Here is an excerpt.

The worst experience I ever had with my phobia was the time we had a termite infestation. I was home alone at the time, watching TV in the living room and something made me look across the room. Something weird was happening on the hardwood floor. It looked like it was sort of…undulating. I got up to investigate and saw what appeared to be THOUSANDS of ant-like insects walking, flying, and DROPPING THEIR WINGS ALL OVER THE FLOOR. I started shivering and crying as I frantically went to go find the vacuum cleaner. I couldn’t think straight. Whimpering in terror, I had trouble plugging the damn thing into the wall because my hands were shaking so badly. In a panic, I sucked up every last one I could see, but MORE KEPT COMING OUT OF THE WALL. I didn’t know they were termites–I didn’t know about the “swarmers” (the termites who mate in the spring and have temporary wings until they mate) until Terminex told me that’s what those were. THOSE UNHOLY FLYING FAKE ANTS WERE HAVING SEX ALL OVER MY LIVING ROOM FLOOR!

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Sorry.

Urban wrote a post about all these ways that bugs ruin everything, but what really stuck with me was his correct observation that —

Bugs have terrible boundaries.

They do, and maybe that’s why we hate them so much. More than anything, I despise bugs (okay, I know technically most of them are insects, not true bugs) because they have zero sense of where you end and they begin. Just like those predatory boundary-violating narcissists who make our lives a living hell and never seem to go away.

In a post I’ll write later tonight or tomorrow, I’m going to describe the wonderful day I had tubing on a local river yesterday. Everything was perfect — except for the hundreds of dragonflies swarming and hovering everywhere, persistently landing on our bare skin. Swarming all around us — and mating in the air while they did so! Do you have no sense of modesty, Mr. and Ms. Dragonfly? Having sex in public. In the air. No shame, those dragonflies. They all have abominable boundaries! So maybe I’m just jealous, because having sex while flying seems like it would be heavenly!

dragonfliesmating

I have nothing against dragonflies. As far as insects go, they are generally pretty inoffensive. Yes, they are big and kind of prehistoric looking (they scared the bejeebus out of me when I was younger). The sight of their large outstretched transparent wings is slightly unsettling to me (though I have no idea why). But I like them. They don’t bite. They eat mosquitoes and other annoying bugs that do bite. They are also very pretty. I have a love/hate relationship with dragonflies, and I guess the love wins out because I have a tattoo of one on my right shoulder.

I like dragonflies, but I like them from a distance and in limited numbers. I don’t like swarms of them flying all around me, landing on me, and making love right in front of my face.

Good thing that didn’t happen when I was young, because I would have died from panic. Over the years, I overcame my phobia to the point where my feelings about dragonflies are mainly positive, although I’ve retained a bit of my old fear that snuck up on me yesterday when they were all around me and I couldn’t get away. I dealt with it by pretending I was Spyro the Dragon with magical dragonflies protecting me.

The ultimate dissociative experience.

Posted on April 23, 2016 by luckyotter

Death isn’t something I like to think about, much less write about. In fact, it’s my biggest fear (outside of the death of one of my children). Oh, I know all the pat arguments and rationalizations that it’s not so bad–death is a part of life, death is nothing to be afraid of, if you’re a good Christian you will go to Heaven and there will be no fear, nothing at all will happen so there will be no fear, even the idea that death is beautiful.

I woke this morning, as I often do, thinking about how much I fear my own death. I think this is a little obsessive-compulsiveness on my part, and probably something I should talk about more in therapy. The mental health field has a name for the irrational or excessive fear of death: thanatophobia. So far I’ve only talked to God about my phobia but I feel like He isn’t listening. People in my age group (50’s) say they’re beginning to come to terms with the prospect of death, but so far, for me, that hasn’t happened. I get more scared every year.

Maybe death terrifies me because it entails complete ego loss–it’s the ultimate dissociative experience, and as someone who has had massive panic attacks usually instigated by dissociative experiences (feeling out my body, feeling like things are dreamlike or unreal, etc.) it would be natural for me to be afraid of what it might feel like. It’s like someone who had a bad drug trip and is mentally unstable to begin with being slipped some acid when they’re unaware of it–and never being able to return to reality.

I don’t like to write about death, because even thinking about it too long makes me extremely anxious. But I need to write about it, and need to talk about it with others, and maybe find comfort in the fact that others have the same sense of trepidation and worry. Maybe I’m not alone in my fear of death and dying. So I’m going to plow on. Writing about it surely can’t hurt.

I’ve been told by many Christians that, if I am strong in my faith, that there is nothing to fear, because I can be sure of my place in Heaven after I die. But this makes things even worse for me, because I do have doubts in my faith and I am not at certain I am going to Heaven, or even that there is a Heaven. No matter how much I pray for perfect faith, I can’t seem to make my mind rid itself of its many doubts. There are just some things about Christianity I can’t make myself believe or at least not question. Again, maybe it’s my obsessive-compulsiveness. As someone who is afraid to trust anyone and is hypervigilant, it’s even hard for me to completely trust God and not worry about what will happen to me after I die. I look at others–even narc abuse survivors who should be as hypervigilant as I am–who seem to have attained perfect faith and I marvel at this. How do they do it?

Although it’s hard for me to believe that if I question Christianity or what the Bible says, that God will send me to burn in Hell for eternity even if I’m otherwise a good person (that seems like a terribly cruel, narcissistic God to me), how do I know for sure God isn’t like that? Maybe God is really that cruel and narcissistic, but in that case, why would I want to even spend eternity in Heaven, trapped there with sanctimonious, self righteous, insufferable believers? (I’m not saying all believers are like that, but I’ve met more than a few who are). In that case, maybe Heaven would be more like Hell. But Hell…well, I definitely don’t want to go there.

But Christianity is only one way to look at the issue of death. Let’s face it. No matter how sure you are in your faith, whatever it is, none of us really knows what’s going to happen after we die. What if the New Agers are right and what happens is you look back and see yourself lying on the hospital bed, pavement, or whatever, see your own broken, bleeding, or used-up body there, and then watch as they pull the sheet over your head? What if you are swooshed at light-speed down a long tunnel toward “the light” and meet angels and see otherworldly landscapes and other inexplicable things? Or what if you float around the earth as a disembodied spirit, revisiting your friends and relatives you left behind? People who have reported NDE’s (near death experiences) have said that at some point they become aware they have died (that’s usually when they “come back”) and most say it’s very disorienting and even scary at first, because their bodies just aren’t there. All of these things, no matter how pleasant others have said they are, strike terror in me, because they sound like dissociative experiences that you can never escape from. I’ve struggled with episodes of dissociation my entire life, but no matter how terrifying they became, I always knew I’d “return” and the experience would probably only last a few minutes. Does something happen after you die where you’re no longer afraid of such things, or do you just learn to deal with it?

Maybe this is true, but I wish I could believe it.

What if the atheists and existentialists are right and nothing happens after you die? What if you simply cease to exist? While I find that prospect extremely depressing, it actually causes me the least anxiety. Eternal sleep and unconsciousness doesn’t seem so bad to me. If you’re aware of nothing, well, there’s nothing to be afraid of or get depressed about, is there? But I still don’t like the idea that this life is ultimately meaningless. What is all the struggle for then?

Reincarnation doesn’t seem so bad, and actually does make some logical sense to my scientifically-leaning brain, but it flies in the face of being a Christian. I don’t know of any Christians who acknowledge that reincarnation is a possibility after death. But why couldn’t it be? As a Catholic, we believe in the concept of purgatory, a place of purification (not punishment) after death. But no one can explain what purgatory might be like. Maybe living additional lives is what purgatory actually means? Again…we just don’t know.

‘It’s not that I’m afraid of dying, Doctor… It’s just that I don’t want to be there when it happens!’

Maybe we just go back to wherever we were before we were born, and have amnesia for this life. Or maybe it’s like eternal dreaming (that doesn’t sound too bad). Again, we don’t know.

Besides the inevitable experience of death, which seems bad enough, I’m terrified by the prospect of dying. I’m in my 50’s, and figure I might (realistically) have about another two or three decades of life left. To someone my age, that doesn’t seem so long. Twenty years ago was 1996; thirty years ago was 1986. That means that in that same amount of time, going forward, I will probably be leaving my body permanently, but before that, I may well suffer either unbelievable pain or a few moments of sheer terror. Few people just die peacefully in their sleep or just suddenly keel over while out on the golf course (that’s the way a 90 year old great uncle of mine died). Most suffer first, either for months (as in a long illness) or a few seconds (as in an accident). I’m terrified of both. I know there’s no way to get out of this life alive, so the inevitable is going to happen, and there’s not a whole lot of time left before it does. Even worse, each year time seems to hurtle forward twice as fast as the year before. What seemed like “a long time ago” to me twenty years ago now seems like the blink of an eye.

As someone who tends to overthink everything, I probably think about death and dying way too much. I know I should just stop and enjoy life while I still have it. But the more I try not to think about it, the more I seem to. It’s like that game where you try not to think about an elephant. I pray about this all the time but it hasn’t helped very much. I just keep feeling guilty because no matter how hard I try, I can’t embrace my Christianity with perfect faith. I have no guarantee I’m going to Heaven. I keep questioning everything and then I worry about going to hell. Or being eternally dissociated, which to me would be hell. Or just worrying about the intolerable suffering that will precede my exit from this planet. Maybe I need to talk to my therapist about this because it seems like it could be a form of undiagnosed OCD.

Further Reading:
My Fear of Death

My weird phobia.

Posted on May 13, 2015 by luckyotter

Terrified Woman Screaming --- Image by © Images.com/CORBIS

I remember watching an episode of one of those daytime talk shows (I forget which one) in which people with strange phobias were forced to confront the object of their terror. There was a man who lived in mortal fear of cotton balls and a woman afraid of balloons. I read later these fears aren’t as uncommon as you would think. Fear of Styrofoam is also pretty common. It apparently has something to do with the noise it makes. These phobias seem silly to me, but a lot of people have them. I have a silly phobia of my own, and I’ve never met anyone else who has it. It’s so uncommon it doesn’t even have a name. I’ve Googled it and no one in the world except me seems to have it.

I’m terrified of amputated insect wings. You know, like when you see an insect wing just sitting there not attached to the insect. I have no idea why that freaks me out so much, but whenever I see that, I feel like screaming and fainting at the same time and I feel like I’m going insane.

I had to put a drawing here, because if it was a photograph I wouldn’t be able to look at this post without freaking out.

The worst experience I ever had with my phobia was the time we had a termite infestation. I was home alone at the time, watching TV in the living room and something made me look across the room. Something weird was happening on the hardwood floor. It looked like it was sort of…undulating. I got up to investigate and saw what appeared to be THOUSANDS of ant-like insects walking, flying, and DROPPING THEIR WINGS ALL OVER THE FLOOR. I started shivering and crying as I frantically went to go find the vacuum cleaner. I couldn’t think straight. Whimpering in terror, I had trouble plugging the damn thing into the wall because my hands were shaking so badly. In a panic, I sucked up every last one I could see, but MORE KEPT COMING OUT OF THE WALL. I didn’t know they were termites–I didn’t know about the “swarmers” (the termites who mate in the spring and have temporary wings until they mate) until Terminex told me that’s what those were. THOSE UNHOLY FLYING FAKE ANTS WERE HAVING SEX ALL OVER MY LIVING ROOM FLOOR!

I also can’t stand large winged insects. Cicadas in particular really freak me out and it’s because of those damn wings they have. They’re so creepy looking the way those brown veins run through them and I hate the pattern they make. It looks evil to me. Put me in a room full of spiders first. Most people are terrified of spiders but I don’t really mind them as long as they’re not crawling on me or biting me. Oddly enough, I like dragonflies. I don’t want one landing on me or anything (I don’t want any large flying insects landing on me), but I think they’re pretty and I even have a tattoo of one.

I think amputated bug wings is my weirdest phobia. What’s yours?