Phobophilia

So here's how it is: people have a desire to be special. People also tend to look for sympathy. Put them together and you have a large subgroup of people who want to be special by having problems. This, I think, leads to a lot of people who exaggerate their problems even to themselves, leading them to think that they have some kind of mental or other disorder, when in actuality all they have is a few too many problems or perhaps a deep-seated boredom and a need for some attention. Understandable.

This less than groundbreaking discovery comes to you by way of an introspective discovery I made about myself tonight. Since forever, I have had an irrational disgust with clusters of small things -- insect/animal eggs on leaves, groups of white mushrooms, a lotus pod, magnified cellular structures -- which I just found out is called "trypophobia" and something that other people suffer from as well. This lead me to read an article about it, at which point I realized that I don't have trypophobia, but rather its watered-down cousin. I really do get grossed out by that sort of thing, but that's as far as it goes. I don't get itchy, I don't freak out and cry -- I just shiver a little bit, feel grossed out, and look away. A couple of minutes later, I realized further that I had been trying to make myself fit the symptoms, as if I wanted to have the phobia. Which I then realized (I was quite insightful tonight) that I did sort of want to have the phobia. It feels like the kind of thing that you can whip out as a party trick. When other people comment on disliking dogs or hating clowns, you can upstage them all by saying, "Yeah, well, I throw up every time I see groups of small holes," at which point everyone (presumably) feels sorry for you and you are the special snowflake of the night.

Of course, anyone thinking rationally would never wish to have a phobia. When you're scared of something -- really, truly, irrationally scared -- your life gets a lot harder. Imagine if I had a severe case of trypophbia: I'd start crying every time I saw a bowl of blueberries. I'd never be able to watch nature documentaries. It would suck. What people want, I think, is not the problem but the consequence: the sympathy, the recognition of a unique difficulty.

The closest thing I have to a phobia, really, is probably quite common, and is the physical aversion I have to insects larger than a gnat or very small fly, especially when indoors. Flying bugs, scuttling beetles, silverfish that inconveniently rest on the ceiling of small rooms -- I simply cannot force myself to get close to them, and when in close proximity to them (especially by myself), my heart starts racing and I get hot and sweaty (gross, I know). An aforementioned silverfish shows up fairly regularly my bathroom ceiling and inconveniences me for a good five minutes as I debate how to proceed. Sometimes I cover with a tissue the head of an old hobby horse and smush it from a reasonable distance, but even that takes effort as I force myself to stab at the bug. One time late at night, I saw a possibly dead silverfish on the side of the hallway connecting the bedrooms to the kitchen and I stood deliberating for a good ten minutes in four by eight foot space while trying to risk sprinting past it to get a cup from the kitchen under which I could then trap the silverfish. Still, I don't know if this counts as a phobia. It's inconvenient and persistent, true, but the independent idea of insects doesn't gross me out and I actually enjoy looking at magnified pictures of them. Now that I think about it, I think that my not-trypophobia and fear of insects are slight related. Disgustingly, when I'm trying to get rid of a bug, I can't help but imagine it flying into my ear and laying eggs or something nauseating like that.

Perhaps tellingly, my aversion to insects is a fear (if not quite a phobia) that I sincerely wish I could rid myself of. I know it's stupid, and it's certainly annoying to be petrified by a harmless organism a thousandth (or smaller) of my size, but the message doesn't quite translate to my limbs. This is probably far too narrow a statement, but I feel that the desire to rid oneself of a problem is often a defining line between the genuinely afflicted and those hungry for attention. I would guess that most people with real depression, a real broken leg, real phobias, and so forth desperately wish that they didn't have those, while the rest of us know we shouldn't want them, but sort of kind of sometimes do.