Phobias 2.0

Years ago, I was watching some documentary in my high school biology class. The film focused on this mother Surinam toad that carries her eggs by embedding them into the skin on her back. There, her eggs stayed tucked away until her young are fully formed and "hatch" by breaking out through her skin. The image of those embedded eggs burned through my retinas and straight to my brain. It was the most eerie thing I had seen!

Years later, I'm watching Planet Earth with my husband. They're doing some episode on The Great Barrier Reef and talking about the regeneration of coral. They show the coral spawning, releasing round, ball-like eggs from each individual polyp. GA-ROSS!!!!

Every now and then, I'll see something on TV or even in my very own surroundings that unnerves me—ant hills, whale barnacles. EEEK!

Then today, as I'm surfing through my blog subscriptions, one blogger posts this:

It's a lotus seed pod, and it absolutely creeps me out. But, while this image makes the hair on the back of my neck stick up, I can't seem to take my eyes off of it. I so badly want to take a pair of tweezers to this pod and pull out every little seed. For some reason, I think if I got rid of all those seeds, I'd feel better. Just like I feel better after kicking over an ant hill or popping a huge blackhead.

The same goes for this picture of a shark's ampullae of Lorenzini.

Ugh! Those little jelly-filled sensory pore thingies make my flesh crawl!!! Yet, I can't help fantasizing about taking a bobby pin to this shark and scraping all of them off! Somehow, that would dissipate the queasiness I feel upon looking at this picture. Sick! My skin is now covered in goose bumps!!

In addition to posting these pictures, the blog also stated that the uneasy feeling I get from looking at the images is caused by a bout of trypophobia. It's the fear of clustered, asymmetrical holes and apparently, I'm not the only one out there who suffers from it. But where honey comb and porous pumice stones and even the innards of a crumpet set some people running for the hills, I'm not affected in the least. I only get anxiety from the more organic/biological/living things as shown above.

Honestly, I don't know why these things give me the heebie jeebies. I'm just glad to know that my fear is actually a real, legitimate phobia. Anyone else irked by these things???