Cockroaches: a fear, a paranoia
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been afraid of cockroaches. My earliest memories were in Houston in the morning, walking down stairs and cockroaches running across the floor in front of me. It frightened me. I was scared to kill them too. I had a nightmare where the oval kitchen table was one gigantic cockroach. It was a frightening dream then, and it would be now just as terrifying.
Houston is known for cockroaches, and my parents had the roof replaced twice to try to get rid of them. One day, when I was about four years old, my mom was getting ready in the kitchen bathroom. My brother and I saw a flying cockroach land in her hair. We told her, and she freaked out, but she didn’t find it. She then berated us for tricking her until of course the cockroach decided to fly out of her hair.
For many years, I lived in the north in the US, and I didn’t have to deal with cockroaches. Little did I know, I would come face to face with the little beasts when I moved to California. We didn’t have them in out first house, but they showed up in our second house to welcome us to the neighborhood.
One showed up in our bedroom, and I had a full on panic attack. This phobia came to the surface in an instant. I killed it when it went behind a box, and I hit it with the box. However, I refused to clean out the dead body, and we had ask a neighbor to help.
On a different day, another one came up through the drain. My wife saw it, and when I went to find it, heart racing of course, I saw its antennas in the overflow drain. So I put tap over it. I wasn’t sure how to kill it, so I figured I would pour boiling water in the sink would kill it and dispose of the body. The water went in, but the bugger didn’t go down, it just got steamed to death. Luckily, our neighbor came over to fish it out.
A few months later, I heard blood curdling screams while downstairs. I sprinted upstairs expecting blood, but a cockroach fell onto my wife’s hair after she took a shower. I captured one or two and took them outside to violently stomp on them. It didn’t take away the anxiety though.
A friend suggested a vacuum, so usually I vacuum them up, take them outside, and spray them in the face with RAID. It still frightened me because I fear they will crawl up me and into my mouth. Some times, when I’m alone at night, I fear there is a cockroach I don’t know about crawling around especially when the lights are off.
The biggest progress I’ve made in handling my fear is to change the name. The word cockroach causes something in my brain to go nuts. Now, I call them beetles. I have no issue with beetles. I get nervous still having to handle and kill them, but not as much with the name change.
Changing names or perspectives has always been the key for me to overcome fear and resentment especially for these little devils.
