Allow me to construct a narrative of my younger self:
She sat in the dirt with her small legs pulled across one another. Her little body was propped up against the side of the toolshed where her wild brown hair splayed out against the cedar wood and curled around her face. All of the intensity in her dark brown eyes was fastened on the project in front of her. Despite her mother’s greatest attempts, she was without a shirt and did not have a care in the world. Between her crossed legs she grasped an old teacup- with the handle in her right hand and the base of the cup in her left. Hunching over now, she used her teacup to dig down into the earth which continued to cover her faded yellow shorts in more brown and black than yellow. With each scoop, she pulled out a dark wet clump of soil, then spread it out on the ground to her right. Once spread, she sifted her fingers through the top of the soil looking for any living critters she could find. Spotting a large earthworm she exclaimed; “Yes!” and she wrangled it out of her growing dirt pile. On her left side, sat another small glass dish she had pioneered from the kitchen where she carefully laid her worm. With even more intensity, another scoop of soil was pulled from between her legs, and she continued the process until a sufficient amount of critters had been collected for show-and-tell the next day at kindergarten.
20 years later, and I will stay awake all night watching a bug on the opposite side of the room strategically making sure that there are at least 10 feet between me, and it. If you examine my history though, and look for a moment in time when the shift happened, you can’t find one. Instead, you find sneaky pieces of programming and learning that brought me to the humiliating state which I live in now. You can find moments here and there when my love for the little critters of the earth was chastised, or judged. There was the moment when a celebration in front of my mother was scolded, an instance when I thought I saw a bug in the classroom and all of my friends screamed, and another time when I was told “Only boys do stuff like that”. This all begs the question, was my fear learned? Is fear learned? Or, was I always afraid and just naive to the way that the world was supposed to work around me?
So I decided to test the facts however uncanny. If my fear of bugs was learned, then I could learn to be unafraid. Right? I proceeded to spend the next several hours learning about bugs. I read up on the great and powerful daddy long-leg, the infamous closet spider, and the ever crawling centipede that I am always battling with while I do my laundry in the basement. I now know that these bugs are not dangerous. I now know that the daddy long leg, though venomous in its own right, is unable to sink its teeth into my skin. I know that the closet-spider is more afraid of me than I am of it, and I know that one of my long legs can squash the centipedes hundreds right underneath me in an instance. Done. I have now unlearned my fear for bugs.
With my newfound confidence and cocky feelings about the small beings that would now fear me, I make a plan to face the enemy while putting in my next load of laundry. Making my way down the stairs to the 1920s unfinished basement, I can already feel my heart rate increasing. I imagine the photos from google, and I can see the scores of bugs that are preparing to team up against me during my feeble attempt to do the laundry. By now, my heart is pounding so hard that my ears have begun to wring just a bit, and my palms are beginning to sweat.
With a deep breath, I take the last step onto the basement floor, and pear out around the concrete of the damp and musty room – safe. I let a breath escape me, and muster up a bit more courage to begin the trek to the washing machine in the corner. When I glance down to take my first step, I spot him; A HUGE black, fuzzy, segmented crawler with pinchers. I let out a shriek as I stagger backwards tripping over the first step as my accuser begins to move towards me- its prey. I left the laundry on the bottom step, turned and ran up the stairs to spare my life, slammed the door to the basement, and called for my boyfriend to go kill the monster that nearly attacked me.
Slowly my heart rate begins to go to normal, and I wipe a tear that must have escaped during the debacle. Learned or not; this was a failed experiment, and I am freaking scared of bugs. As I walk back towards my bedroom, I glance over at my computer with a lingering feeling of shame and embarrassment at the events of the evening. Trying to focus myself on the facts, I push my self-talk a notch louder as a repeated reminder; I am an adult. I am an adult, I am an adult…
