creepycrawlaphobia

"It tastes just like popcorn."

"Really?" I asked, without much interest.

The fried caterpillar, with its shiny white body and pointy little legs, certainly didn't look like popcorn. But I had come this far. I had to try it.

I was on a self-imposed voyage of discovery. When my first husband left me after less than a year of marriage, I knew that I needed to do something adventurous for myself. We had been planning a trip around the world for that summer, and since I didn't have anything better to do, I decided to take the plunge and go by myself. So far, things were going well. I had navigated Japan for a week with about five words of Japanese, and in Australia I had conquered my crippling fear of flying by signing up for a skydiving trip. I had made it this far, but there was a reason I'd saved the bugs for last.

Maybe it was that millipede that fell into the claw-footed bathtub with my sister when I was about six years old. It must have dropped from the ceiling, but as far as I was concerned, it might as well have come from the fiery depths of hell. Before my mom could scoop it out with a kleenex, I watched in horror as its creepy body and disgusting legs writhed in the water. Bugs were everywhere, I realized, and they could strike at any moment.

I had a nature magazine with a caterpillar on the cover, and although I liked the magazine, I more or less refused to touch it after that. The cover image pretty much confirmed my suspicions -- in the close-up shot, the diabolical nature of the squirmy intruder was all too clear. Those garish extra "eyes" were supposed to ward off predators? Well, I certainly didn't want them within a mile of me.

I'm not generally a squeamish person. I'm always excited to see a snake up close or in the wild, and my first thought about house mice, bats and the like is generally that they look cute and cuddly. I'm usually even fine with ants and flies, bees and the occasional spider, and I tend to be surprised when people have a big problem with them. But I'm convinced that anything with more than eight legs has it in for me personally -- so much so that even today I have an almost uncontrollable impulse to scream and hurl things across the room if I suddenly encounter a particularly vivid picture.

Moreover, I had been a strict vegetarian for a number of years. If I couldn't even eat a delicious cheeseburger, why was I considering eating this thing? But I had to do it, I told myself, if I wanted to be free of my phobia. I took a deep breath.
It did taste like popcorn, kind of.

I lived.

But years later, when my baby son pointed and gurgled at a fuzzy caterpillar for the first time, I had to suppress a shudder and a creeping feeling of horror in the pit of my stomach.
The bugs are back, I'm afraid, with a vengeance.