The Cockroach That Changed My Life

Word of warning: this blog post has several jarring shifts in tone, as I’ve made almost no attempts at hiding my bipolarity this time. Enjoy the Bondok roller-coaster experience (which I go through dozens of times a day) 😊

This is a deeply personal blog post, which is why I did not share it on Facebook like I usually do. I only published it here for my own use.

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I’ve always wondered why we hate cockroaches… if, hypothetically, cockroaches were the size of cats, and they had the same playful attitude and level of intelligence as the average dog, would we have still been disgusted by them, or would they have been considered cute and some people would have kept them as pets? It has never quite made sense to me how a fully grown adult human, destroyer of worlds, conqueror of countless species and top of the food chain would be so thoroughly unnerved by a tiny creature that mostly keeps to itself, hides in the shadows and is virtually powerless to cause any harm to a towering giant, several hundred times its own size.

I’ve heard it said that human revulsion to cockroaches and insects in general is an evolutionary survival tactic, seeing as such insects are usually carriers of parasites and diseases; through millennia of human natural selection, the individuals who were most disgusted by these creatures -and therefore most likely to avoid them- were less likely to come into contact with the dangerous diseases they carried and hence more successful in reaching sexual maturity and passing on their hatred of creepy crawlies to their offspring.

That would make sense from a biological point of view… but what if the issue is more psychological? What if we hate them because we don’t understand them? Bear with me on this one; animals usually exhibit a certain degree of intelligence and our interactions with them are governed by a minimum level of mutual understanding; for example, we can usually tell when our cats or dogs are hungry or sick or sleepy or lazy or horny -first of all because we get the same impulses as they do; and second of all, because they are usually successful in conveying their needs to us. In other words, if we couldn’t relate to our pets or communicate with them in a meaningful way, they would be as foreign to us as the cockroach… an organism operating purely on instinct, incapable of intelligent thought, and therefore completely unpredictable to us.

Or maybe we just hate them because they're really ugly.

These thoughts raced through my mind one day while I was working out at my home gym. Don’t be alarmed; I’m not usually thinking about cockroaches by default, but on that particular day I was especially pleased with my pumped-up shoulder muscles… and it was while I was pridefully checking out my bulging deltoids in my full-size mirror in a gesture of vanity that would not be out of place on a 19 year-old, fist-bumping frat boy -but definitely was out of place on a 26 year-old adult- that I noticed an unusual chill in the room.

The lights flickered.

I shivered.

Something was very wrong.

And sure enough, I quickly noticed the reflection of a scurrying shadow at the bottom left corner of the mirror… and when I turned around, my suspicions were confirmed as I beheld what was undoubtedly the biggest cockroach I had ever seen in my life… in human terms, comparing its size to the size of a normal cockroach would be like comparing The Rock to Tom Cruise. It was large enough to have its own area code. It was the first double-decker cockroach I had ever seen; usually they’re quite flat, but this one was actually fat and tall. In a moment of hysteria, I briefly chuckled at the thought that that cockroach was probably the jock who had lots of sex at cockroach high school.

It was big, is what I’m trying to say.

What followed was that a startled, high-pitched scream escaped my lips as primal fear gripped me and I was temporarily frozen in place, my eyes darting to the only escape route out of the room. It took a few seconds of logical reasoning and mental pep talks to convince myself to calmly walk up the stairs to grab the bug spray from the utility closet and walk back to the room to spray the ever-loving shit out of the cockroach… which I did, but even watching it squirming on its back, flailing and clawing at the sky as it choked to death could not bring back my self-respect.

There I was, pumping iron several times a week in order to get stronger and more intimidating, and yet all it took was a cockroach -an admittedly massive cockroach, but still just a cockroach- to expose my hypocrisy and reveal my true mettle. The irony that the bearded, snarling, masculine, muscle-bound beast aggressively flexing his muscles a few minutes ago was reduced to a screaming little girl by a small insect was almost too much to bear… and it was during that moment of honest self-reflection that I realized I was overdue for a dose of humbling self-flagellation.

I am not a muscle-bound beast.

I am not a stoic hero.

I am not some ultra-masculine daredevil.

And it’s obviously not just about the cockroach.

  

I am also not a real writer.

I am not a real musician.

I am not an oscar wildian witty romantic.

I am not some mysterious, dark poet.

I am not a tortured lover.

I am not God's gift to women.

I am not a knight in shining armor.

I am not a genius.

I am not even nice.

 I am not what society, my parents or even I want to be.

What I am is thoroughly disappointing;

 I am a poser

I am selfish

I am proud

I am angry

I am anti-social

I am boring

I am a corporate slave with a job that doesn't even have the courtesy to be a 9 to 5.

I am very privileged and yet my inability to stop feeling sorry for myself is an insult to people with real problems.

I am not the victim, no matter how frequently I play the part or how good I've gotten at it.

 I am not some honorable noble soul... I am a self-centered narcissist with paradoxically no sense of self-worth, and no amount of manipulation will change that.

 I am a deeply flawed individual who fights his demons and loses most days.

I am… human. A human who grows more and more into a cynical loner as the days go by.

Let the records show that no matter how many people I've managed to mislead, the one person I ultimately couldn't trick was me.

A few months ago, I made a vow to learn to love myself, but I must admit defeat.

I am only human, after all. 

An ugly human I cannot for the life of me grow to accept, because he is not worthy of love or acceptance.

Come to think of it, perhaps what I hate most about cockroaches is none of the above… maybe I just see too much of my own ugliness reflected in them.