i have a really bad insect phobia... i once got stung by some unidentified bug when i was 9 and my parents didn't take it seriously at all so i guess it traumatized me into being afraid of a lot of bugs. i don't hate bugs, though!! a lot of them are very cool and i like observing them :) learning more about bugs has made me a lot less afraid of them in general.

that being said, any bug that is really big or erratic, or a huge pile of bugs together? no that is terrifying. it's just the fact that i cannot predict what a bug will do since they don't behave in a human-like way. bees and wasps scare me immensely because they can hurt me. most people will just say they only do that when they're mad. but how am i supposed to know what makes a bee mad?? do they get mad if i wave them away or brush them off? i don't know!!

interestingly enough, i absolutely don't mind spiders. i mean, if they're extremely big and hairy, sure, but i've never seen any of those around here. spiders are extremely predictable to me. most of them will just sit in a corner because they don't want to be bothered. more often than not, if you enter a room with a spider in it, it'll just run away from you. though i've also previously found some jumping spiders and they really do seem to vary wildly in personality; some of them run away, some of them just get all excited and they crawl all over your hand!! they're TINY, there's literally nothing scary about them.

i'm not scared of normal mosquitos because they are small and easy to get rid of, but i am scared of those really big mosquitos even if they don't sting, because they're BIG and they fly all over the place and they could make contact with me. i'm squicked out by maggots because despite them being very easy to deal with, large clusters of them are definitely gross and horrible to look at. i'm scared of big hairy caterpillars but i think tiny ones are cute. i'm not scared of silverfish because 99% of the time they do nothing and they don't get in the way, but if they ARE in the way it does scare me because man do i NOT want one of them to get on my body. whenever there's a bug near me that i'm afraid of, i will either avoid it or if that's not a possibility i will straight up just get paralyzed out of fear and then i need someone else to deal with the situation for me. :/

also, i used to be very agoraphobic when i was younger. i got beaten up by a gang of teenagers once when i was very young and nobody came to help. this was in an incredibly small town of like 5,000 people or so; it was irrational to think that i'd ever see those people again, but that was always in the back of my mind. then a few years later, the MOMENT i walked out the door one day, the guy leading the gang was on the opposite side of the street, yelled "hey! you're the kid from the skatepark!" and he started chasing after me to the point where i went back inside our house and he started looking up and down the windows to see where i went. for years i was afraid of being in public places out of fear that i would get beaten up again. public transit was especially scary to me, as it would mean putting myself in a box that i couldn't get out of in case someone wanted to hurt me. i never got any help from my (new age) parents for this so i struggled with it for years until my dad decided to do exposure therapy with me. growing up also slowly helped me get over it, because at some point i was so visibly an adult that people just stopped picking on me (save for the occasional transphobic remark, but i can deal with that now)