It's been incredibly rainy recently. Do you know what bugs really, really hate when it rains that much? Earwigs. So what do they do? They invade your house. Do you know that I recently found out that I have a full-blown phobia? Of what, you ask? Earwigs. I feel like I'm going ****ing insane.

There was one in the kitchen sink the other day and I didn't go near it for four days. There was one in the shower yesterday that I didn't notice until I was in the middle of showering, and I nearly slipped and cracked my head open when I jumped out of the shower. I had to check the entire shower before getting in it this morning and spent the whole time double-checking the curtain. There were TWO just munching away on the clementines I had on the table so I threw away nearly 3 lbs of good fruit. I had tea last night to try to calm me down, and when I woke up this morning there was one floating dead in my cup so now I'm only drinking bottled water.

I'm legitimately considering finding a new place to move just to get away from these things because I can't relax inside my own apartment. I'm shaking out my clothes everytime I redress. I can't even sleep restfully because I'm scared that they're in the bedroom.

To top it all off, I feel absolutely ridiculous. THEY'RE JUST BUGS! Harmless ones at that! They can bite, but they don't even have any venom... My therapist is out of the office until the 18th, so I can't even talk to her about it.

So, Subetans, talk to me. Make me feel better either with well-wishes or your own stories of phobias. (Please ping me)

I don't have an issue with earwigs (they don't have wings so it's all good for me) but you definitely have my sympathy. >: The tea-part of your story gave me goosebumps, that's just horrible. I, too would stick to bottled water or I'd check my cup/glass like crazy before drinking.

It was so disgusting! And the day before I had been so paranoid about it that the fact it happened the next morning had me nearly hysterical. I had to call my fiance to calm down and he ended up coming home early from work with a spray product that you use on baseboards and outside your home that kills and repels ants/fleas/crickets/spiders/earwigs/silverfish/centipedes. I felt bad about it, but I do feel a lot calmer now.

I hope the spray will help. crosses fingers Is it "just" earwigs, or do you have other insect/bug/whatever phobias as well? :o

Earwigs and ants. Maybe centipedes, but I haven't really encountered any. The ants make sense because I had a very, very bad experience with a colony of red ants when I was a child, but the earwigs don't make any sense to me at all other than the fact that they're disgusting.

I feel your pain so much! I pretty much hate any and all bugs. Freshman year of college my room had an ant problem, and I found dead ants in my cup at least twice that year. It definitely made me paranoid and I checked everything before using anything in my room. And the one shower on our floor constantly had spiders in it, so nobody used it unless they had to. And this past year at school, my roommate and I had to deal with a spider/ladybug/cockroach problem. Of course, my roommate is also terrified of bugs too, so there were times we were just paralyzed watching them, making sure they didn't get too close. It took us about a half hour one time to get enough courage to kill a cockroach once. Definitely terrible. The ladybugs were the worst though, we were dealing with about 30 a day at one point.

I'm the same way about cockroaches. Whenever I spot one I don't rest until I kill it, and even then I'm paranoid about there being more for the rest of the day/night. It's bad when I'm unable to sleep because of one single cockroach. I think it all stemmed from a time when I was a kid and were had roaches infesting out kitchen. We had to throw away all of our otherwise perfectly good food.

Yuck! The ants would have me disgusted and buying traps like crazy, I hate them so much >< Big or little, black or red, I don't care, if they're inside they need to die. While I'm not afraid of cockroaches I would be absolutely horrified to find them where I was living. Were you able to complain to the dorm about the problem? I imagine they're required to do something about it. I talked to my landlord about the problems today (we have mice too) because we want to move into the apartment he's renovating that's much better sealed than the one we're in. From what he was saying we might get to move into it by winter at the best.

Cockroaches are always nasty, I'm not sure I'd be able to sleep well either >< I've heard that roach bites are super painful, and they aren't afraid of sleeping bodies.

We did email the residence office when we started noticing the cockroaches. First time they asked for a picture before they would call for an exterminator, fair enough. So next time we took photos and emailed them,they said they would call the exterminator but nobody ever showed up. Eventually the cockroaches stopped appearing and that's when the ladybugs appeared, which is my roommate's phobia. So we emailed again and someone did eventually show up, a month later, at which point it was cold enough that they were no longer a problem. We also had a mouse running around our floor this past year too! I think someone just caught it in a box and released it into the wild though.

I actually haven't seen an earwig in years. I have all kinds of bugs in my apartment (old building, off of wooded area, basement unit), but earwigs hasn't been one. They were all over in my hometown in the 90's. Maybe they just don't like where I moved to?

ugh that's so gross! The spray should help though, my dad is always having to spray our house for cockroaches because they're everywhere in Georgia, especially since we live right by a woods. Cockroaches freak me out and I HATE killing them because I hate bugs that you can feel them squish - shivers They definitely make it hard to sleep at night if you've just found one. I've never heard of normal cockroaches bitting though. I'm pretty sure they're harmless, just gross. What's really terrifying is that they can live without their heads. Scientists say that if we ever have a nuclear disaster, cockroaches would survive. Why?? Why do they have to be such hardy little nasties??

Anyway, I hope you don't find any more bugs and that you feel better soon!

That seems to be how it always goes, by the time management actually does something the problem had taken care of itself. I have cats for the mice problem at least, and they are expert mouse catchers. However, most of the time they don't kill them and I end up releasing them outside where I hope they stay.

Earwigs are super new for us this year, at least inside the house, but my landlord says that it is a huge earwig year. He's been seeing them everywhere, and tons of them every time he moves things around in the yard. I never saw very many of them while I was growing up, either, which I'm guessing is why I went 25 years without realizing I was terrified of them ><

It's not a good idea to squish roaches anyway, it's possible to spread around roach eggs that way and then you just end up with more! (Ew) They can indeed bite, and their bites don't look much different from mosquito or spider bites. I never knew that they could live without their heads though! That's disgusting ><

what part of the country (assuming American, I apologise if not) are you in? I grew up in small town northern Illinois, live in eastern Iowa now, in a city. They were everywhere when I was a kid.

Michigan, which is why they're usually so rare. It gets so cold up here every winter that the majority of nasty bugs don't survive it. However, when I was a kid I lived in a much more open rural town, whereas now I have woods in my backyard and a lake to the front so my apartment struggles a lot more with unwanted insects and critters. It's also the (pardon my language) shittiest apartment ever when it comes to weather sealing, which means that there are ample cracks and holes for insects and critters to invade from ><

You're definitely right about that. I'm just glad the problems solved themselves. It was so bad that we were considering asking to be moved to another dorm. I'm hoping that whatever building we are in this coming year is better than last year. Of course, that's what we get for going to a school located in the middle of nowhere lol. I hope your bug problem gets settled soon!