opinions on spiders? any strong opinions on any other bugs?
Okay so. My relationship with spiders is a bit weird. Because I used to be huuuugely arachnophobic. TW because this is gonna get maybe a little gross for some people. I won’t get super graphic or anything but like, just to be safe.
When I was in 7th grade, I suddenly kept coming up with spider bites. Most of them were small and nbd, but I had two on the back of my leg at one point that were very big and very gross. Then, shortly after those were handled and healed up, I got one on my jawline. My dad picked at it, thinking it was a zit, and when I woke up the next morning I had a softball on my face. Dad wouldn’t take me to the doctor, because it was Sunday we had church and yardwork to deal with. So, my mom had to pull me out of school the next day and take me. At the doctor’s office, in an attempt to shame my mother for not being more responsible, as if it were her fault (my dad had neglected to inform her until that morning; he called her as he was driving us to school), the nurse said, very pointedly and loudly, with me, a small just-about-to-hit-puberty cares-about-her-looks-for-the-first-time-in-her-life preteen girl, right there in the room, “You’re lucky you brought her in when you did, her face was about to start rotting off.”
So, I was already kind of theoretically afraid of spiders at that point. Brown Recluses were The Hot New Trend in mass hysteria at the time and I was young and impressionable. I went from an outdoorsy kid who didn’t exactly like spiders but wasn’t overly bothered by them as long as they weren’t crawling on me, to the sort of exaggerated hysterical freakouts at the mere threat of a spider’s existence in my vicinity, basically overnight.
And it took me literal years to recover from that. I always knew spiders were important and all that, but I Did Not Care for a long time. If I saw it, it was dead. Someone was gonna kill it for me. Eventually I was brave enough to kill them myself.
The thing that finally got me over my fear was the fact that, at the time, I was best friends with an attention whore. This is relevant because my attention whore best friend eventually noticed how people coddled me if I had a spider-related panic attack, and decided she wanted in on that action, stat. So she went from someone who was maybe? scared of spiders? but never showed any signs of real arachnophobia that I’d seen, to being as dramatic as she could possibly manage at someone even saying the word spider. And it was fucking annoying. And I thought, wow, I don’t wanna be That Guy.
tl;dr I basically got over my arachnophobia to flex on my ex-best friend. Now I like spiders, just... from a distance. Like, if I see it in my house, I will try to catch it and take it outside. I will probably still freak out and kill it if it climbs on me, though. Aesthetically, I love them, and I admire what they do for our ecosystems. I just... don’t want them touching me, ever.
I also love bees. Bees are the fucking best. I will fucking fight someone over bees. Wasps and other bee-adjacent but scary bugs are the devil on the earthly plane but like, I’m more or less alright with the devil so I give them a pass as long as they stay the fuck away from me.
Other bugs I have strong opinions about are mostly “*insert type of bug* is fucking cool” because bugs are fucking cool.
Except cockroaches. Cockroaches are the fucking worst.
