When I was little, I remember watching reruns of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. One episode called “The Caterpillar” sticks in my mind a lot. It wasn’t actually about caterpillars at all; it was about earwigs. One got inside a guy’s ear. He was in horrible agony for most of the story as it was eating the whole way through his brain, in one ear and out the other. They got it out eventually and he was relieved, only to find that it had been laying eggs the whole time.

This doesn’t really happen. I mean, bugs can get in your ears but it’s unlikely they’re going to eat your brain and fill it full of bug eggs. Still, it’s a pretty nasty thought and I was terrified of earwigs my entire childhood. People told me this was irrational; they can’t really hurt you. I just thought they looked gross. We had an above-ground pool out back at my parents’ house and I spent a lot of time in it to cool off in the summer. One thing I hated was that when my mom would hang clothes on the clothesline, sometimes bugs got in them. I’d always shake the towels out before using them, just in case.

Once I got my swimsuit off the line, took it upstairs to my room, and felt something crawling down my legs. It was an earwig. I screamed and stripped naked. I crouched on the steps, crying and shaking. There were 2 more earwigs in the crotch of the swimsuit, hidden in the little pouch created by the lining inside the suit’s crotch area. I didn’t go swimming again for a while.

Another time, I remember bringing my chemistry set over the neighbor’s house. We were sitting on the porch playing with sharp objects, knives and tweezers. She decided we should dissect something. All we could find was a dead beetle. It was really big. We each had tweezers and were trying to pull the head off for a long time.

Though it doesn’t technically involve insects, there was a story in one of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books that made an impression on me, as well. There was an illustration of a shocked-looking girl with spiders crawling out of her cheek. The story was about the girl getting a pimple that grew into a huge ugly boil. Then she took a bath and the boil broke, and she discovered a spider has laid eggs in her cheek.

In high school, I was still afraid of earwigs. I was also obsessed with HP Lovecraft. I remember writing a short story about earwigs which was extremely derivative of Lovecraft. So much so that I’m embarrassed to remember it. The story was kind of like a Lovecraft protagonist meets the situation in that Night Gallery episode; a man had an earwig crawl in his ear and it was eating the inside of his head. My protagonist didn’t have it leave through the other ear, though. It ate his optic nerves and he went blind, then went crazy, then presumably died.

One in a middle school science class, we were supposed to collect various bugs. This was extremely horrifying for me because I hated touching them, I’d jump and my skin would crawl for a while. I had a piece of foam meat tray and I was sticking needles through the bugs to display them on the meat tray. I was afraid of carrying the thing. I also had a hornet on a string that I carried around in high school for a while. I forget what I named it, but I used to bring it to class.

Years later, I was a member of various forums and livejournal communities about things like aliens and robots. Someone somewhere linked me to a gallery of artwork. It wasn’t on a furry site or anything, it was some artist’s personal website with a gallery of his drawings for sale. Some of it was kind of bondage-y, but I ignored that aspect because the rest of it was fucking cool. They were photorealistic graphite drawings of women turning into bugs, mostly. Ants and wasps, if I recall correctly. Some were more like women in costumes, but they got progressively more extreme and bizarre, and less human looking. I liked the contrast in it; human/insect, and the more chitinous exoskeletons aspects alongside softer humans parts, like lips and breasts. The waists were mostly wasplike. Some had human arms with latex gloves; others had bug limbs. I thought this was just about the coolest thing ever, though it seems to be offline now. There were bugs on places like VCL but not the same kind of thing. One reason I didn’t visit many furry art sites was because of the cartoonishness of many of the drawings, and because they seemed to be overrun with mammals. I think this was the first time I stopped viewing insects as terrifying.

More recently, I tried to find those drawings but could not. I’m not very good at anthros or with my tablet, but I tried to make a few drawings in the spirit of those. The only real similarity is that they’re insect women, I can’t even attempt to make anything that looked like the drawings I am talking about.

I’m sure I’ve read things about people sexualizing things they also found terrifying. The only furry art I’ve ever found interesting usually involves either really hideous, alien-looking stuff or extreme proportions (very large or small, or aspects of both like big tits and impossibly small waist).