Entomophobia and the terror of losing your connection with nature
You can harbor favorite fears too
Content Notice: This post contains graphic descriptions of body horror.
When I was seven years old, I watched The Mummy with my family. In the movie, the curse of the Pharaoh are scarab beetles that infiltrate your skin and then keep consuming all they find as they crawl up your arteries to your heart. With the VFX technology of 1999, this phenomenon was rendered as an inexorable blob that traveled up your skin until you died in excruciating pain. You couldn't squish it once it was inside you, because it traveled so fast once it was inside you. There was a whole swarm of them. At that time, I shared my room with my grandmother. She announced at breakfast the next morning that the family should stop watching such movies because I had spent the whole night imagining the printed patterns on my pillowcase as sub dermal invaders. That movie shifted my my general discomfort with insects into the region of phobia.
During the pandemic, the summers brought forth hordes of spotted lanternflies, which are an invasive species to the North/Northeast coastline. They jump. They're a grippy species, and you can't simply shake them off by swiping at them like you could with regular flies. They are also large (only one or two can fit in your palm). They make a buzzing sound as they slap against the glass, copulating in a frenzy that I could not avoid from my windows. Every summer I am home, I volunteer to help my father work in the gardens. That summer, I couldn't. The New York Times published a variety of articles on how and why to kill them (yes, each word links to a separate article).
I had nightmares that summer. Every painful lump on my face was a larval lanternfly and if I abused it, the creature would crawl out of my face, spattering my blood off its new wings and leaving volcanic scars in its wake.
Philadelphia has an alarming number of spotted lanternflies still. People standing on the street will try to stomp on them mid-conversation with strangers. There are at least a dozen or so spattered red and black spots on the pavement, which marks their corpses. They suddenly jump down on you from traffic lights. They haunt the auspices of CVS. I was being followed down the block by a homeless man catcalling me, and I screamed so loudly when a spotted lanternfly hopped on my grey backpack that he offered to squish the bug. When I walk around the city with other women, we ask each other to check for period stains, for our makeup splotches or for whether "anything is on me".
I don't want spotted lanternflies dead, not really. I’ve definitely had crying meltdowns after killing a bug because I don’t want to have to be the one ending the other’s life, and yet, my brain will catastrophically halt if the bug situation is not dealt with. My rational mind is capable of accepting the fact that life exists in multiple forms, even ones that aren't aesthetically tolerable to me. Perhaps the ultimate beauty of nature and of life that we're supposed to appreciate is that there is no "norm" to how life exists. All my reading in extinction studies proves that even the most reviled, disgusting and horrifying things are missed, even though their conservation does not generate as much attention as for species that are majestic and spectacular. Parasites have a reason to exist but I just want them to exist in a way that their life operations do not intersect with mine.
This is also why I hesitate to wander into the wilderness. I believe that nature is stunning, and I believe that pristine nature should be preserved (including all of its inhabitants). I'm sure there are ways for humans to navigate into the wild that provides them with a pleasant experience that still allows them to sample the beauty of the natural world. I believe it is important to look at the world before human existence and marvel at the splendors we hope will outlast us. But I do not feel like I belong in that nature. I don't have the resilience to assert my place in an ecosystem where I can be felled by something unexpected, lethal and small. It's strange that being in nature does not enable me to connect to it, but instead serves to remind me of how ill-equipped I am to be in it in the first place.
Great beauty brings great terrors. Perhaps we have invaded nature enough for our aesthetic gains and perhaps it is time we confront the death, decay, wildness of it rather than a sanitized version. This is not to say that I believe in entering nature only to "vanquish" it by some means. Ultimately, I might believe that we have surpassed many of nature's rules around longevity and survival, the things that want to kill us or feed on us also adapt accordingly, if not faster. Life does not happen if death does not accompany it also, a core spiritual belief shared across religions worldwide. The way I grapple with the existentialism is like this: we have to accept that things end. We know, based on previous things ending, that life will go on. Statistically and operationally, we experience multiple deaths in a lifetime and yet, here we (currently) are. Therefore, we have to accept that once we end, there must be some form of continuity that carries on without us knowing or predicting or trying to control for what it will be.
There are therapists who might teach me to condition my brain into accepting bugs better or inviting their presence with a curiosity than panic. I could try to solve for the phobia if I thought it would enable a less anxious connection with my living world. But the truth is that my entomophobia is a relic of an ancestral past. The fact that I still feel this knee-jerk upset when I encounter the creatures reminds me that there is some part of my brain capable of experiencing primal fear. Obviously, there are some cases in which solving for an instinctive brain-reaction is important to navigate a healthy life. Entomophobia doesn't feel like one of them. I don't want to create a framework of understanding insects because they still serve as an ancestral connector of how something natural, something as sacred as a form of life, can evoke something so visceral in me. Even while googling up articles for them, I tried to suppress images of the creature.
Fearing something as exotic as an insect feels charming in a reality where there are daily horrors. A missed assignment, a late deadline, a difficult boss or coworker, the contemplation of a future in dire circumstances are all elaborate complex horrors that I can spend hours reasoning around. But I don't have to do that with insects. I can just experience fear the way an animal does, and thus be reminded that perhaps I am an animal under all this.