I hate having to go outside because I'm afraid of being bitten by bugs. If I find a bug in my house, I cannot sleep or focus on anything else until I know it's dead. I have nightmares about bugs. One of the major reasons why I loved living up north years ago was because I would have three months of the year when all the bugs would die or hibernate. It was one of the few times I could go outside without having to worry about bugs.
It's gotten worse as I get older. I didn't care as much about it when I was younger. I even used to enjoy playing with the not-harmful ones back then, like lightning bugs and grasshoppers. I don't like them either anymore though. I can appreciate butterflies and lightning bugs and such from a distance, but I kind of freak out if they get within a few feet of me.
But it all started with mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are the bane of my existence. I'm allergic to mosquito bites, and when I was younger, any time I'd get bitten, I'd be left with a severely itchy lump about the size of a ping pong ball. I went to the hospital a couple times because some of the bites got so bad. They don't affect me nearly that bad nowadays, but you can imagine why I might feel the urge to avoid that kind of thing. And it doesn't help that mosquitoes love my blood. I seem to be the equivalent of a batch of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies to mosquitoes. No matter what precautions I take - wearing long-sleeved shirts, pants, and/or bug repellant - I always end up getting bitten more than anyone else with me at the time. The mosquitoes will find any square inch of skin I leave uncovered and attack it mercilessly. I get bitten on my hands, fingers, ankles, face, and neck. I've tried just about every method of preventing bug bites possible, and nothing works without fail. In the past two days, I've spent maybe a total of 15 minutes outside, if even that, in the daytime, and I have nine mosquito bites. More often than not, I almost always get at least one bite within 5 minutes of being outside.
So at first it was just that. I hate mosquitoes with a passion, and wanted to avoid them whenever possible. But then I got paranoid. I would feel a bug land on me and freak out, thinking it was a mosquito, only to find out it was a fly or gnat. Yet I'd still practically have a panic attack over that fly or gnat, even though I know it wasn't a mosquito. So then my fear of ANY bug landing on me set in and got worse over the years.
And then there are things like spiders or bees, that can bite or sting. My intense fear of being bitten by mosquitoes grew to include being bitten by anything else as well. Even if I know most bug bites won't kill me or do anything even close to that, I cannot stand the thought of allowing any bugs to bite me.
Not to mention moving from Ohio to Florida has not helped in the slightest. Everything here is a swampy breeding ground for mosquitoes. There is no winter time to kill off the bugs once a year. Not only do we have regular ants, but we have fire ants EVERYWHERE, which bite and itch like hell. And there are cockroaches everywhere, which are pretty much a living nightmare for me.
When I first moved to Florida, I lived in a temporary house. Kind of a long story, but more or less, it was an empty house that someone we knew let my mom and I borrow for a few weeks until we were able to move in to our permanent house. This temporary house was completely empty, and didn't even have carpet on its floors. Just concrete, and some tile in the kitchen. The kitchen also had cupboards and drawers, but that was the extent of any kind of furniture or whatever. My mom and I had a couple cots and air mattresses that we brought with us to sleep on while we were there.
But that house was full of cockroaches. Everywhere. In the drawers, in the walls, under everything. At night when my mom and I would go to sleep, we could hear the roaches flying around the room. At night I would go to sleep with my head buried into my sleeping bag, praying that nothing would land on me while I slept. The first thing my mom and I did after getting to the house was go out and buy about three cans of roach spray and put it all over the house along the floor. When we'd wake up, there would be dead roaches scattered around everywhere. It was disgusting.
I hate bugs. There isn't a word in the English language to describe how much I hate bugs. I hate them. I don't care if they can hurt me or not. I don't want them to exist.