I Love Living Near Nature, But I'd Rather My Neighbours Not Have Six Legs
I love my home: it's the first house I've fully furnished with my wife (in the last one I was the one who moved in later), it's in a nice quiet area in town, a bit on the upper side, and there's a splendid view of the mountains in the distance. There are a lot of trees and greenery around, and birds chirp happily in front of my studio window. This season we got giant wasps too.
Yeah. Let's focus on that for a bit.
I'm deeply afraid of bugs, and have been ever since I remember. It's one of those fears I didn't exactly try to seriously overcome, unlike heights1, and you need to understand that where I come from bugs are much smaller than where I moved afterwards. All of a sudden I was living in Jumanji. I've never seen a stinkbug in my life before turning 19. What the fuck are these things.
Stinkbugs, probably the bug I despise the most2, are fortunately a lot less common here than where I lived before. What's a lot more common are wasps as big as my thumb, or are they hornets? I got no clue and no particular interest in discovering it, because if I look for images online I just get scared. From pictures. It's that bad.
On the bright side, I think I've become pretty good at escorting them out, especially since I live in a house with a lot of windows (another thing I love!) and they apparently really want to leave as well. Sometimes I can hear them going THUNK, THUNK against the glass from outside (STUFF OF NIGHTMARES), then they get in and suddenly realize they'd rather be out. How human.
When I try to show them the way out, talking to them (or to myself?) all the while, treating them like sentient beings instead of killer weapons employed to destroy me, they're a tiny bit less scary.
At some point in my childhood I suddenly became very afraid of heights, then with some light exposure therapy I managed to be relatively unfazed. I'm still pretty scared of turbulences while flying, though.↩
They stink when you crush them, but also at random because why not. They fly yet they suck at it. They're incredibly noisy and they're dumb. And there's a lot of them too. Please leave.↩