Things I'm afraid of

Pondering entomophobia and shahedophobia

When a human body detects a threat, it instantly triggers an involuntary survival response. The cascade begins in the amygdala, a peanut-sized part of the brain responsible for regulating fear. The amygdala sends signals to other parts of the brain, kicking off the release of adrenaline and cortisol. Heart rate intensifies, blood pressure goes up, pupils dilate. The body then subconsciously decides on the best course of action — fight, flight, or freeze.

This happened to me twice yesterday. The two menaces that caused it weren’t in any way related, apart from the fact that both sent me running across my apartment. One caused a surge of entirely irrational terror, posing no real danger to me whatsoever. The other could, and was actively trying to, kill me.

The first was the cockroach. We met in a narrow archway, between the two bathrooms, as I was on my way to do nothing after putting my toddler to sleep. The black beast sat motionless on the baseboard—its antennas waving in my direction with harmless menace. Upon spotting it, I ran into the living room, far enough away so a terror less than a thousandth of my size and weight couldn’t hurt me—all the while still keeping it in my sight.

My amygdala got to work. The hormones were kicking in, the heart rate was jumping, the blood was flowing away from apparently non-essential parts of my body—like my stomach—to gear me up for survival. The body’s strategy was clear: a total and paralyzing freeze.

I pondered my options. The smartest thing to do was to use the vacuum cleaner, whose wand was conveniently long, to suck in the beast. I’ve seen my husband do that to a spider before. That’s not precisely correct: I didn’t actually see that because I was hiding in the other room while it happened—but I saw it in my mind’s eye, over and over and over again. And I haven’t seen that spider since, so the tactic clearly worked.

And yet, it baffles me to say that I, an adult who’s experienced the loss of a loved one, an ongoing war, and a traumatic childbirth, couldn’t bring myself to deal with a bug. I stood still, looking at the cockroach for at least ten minutes. “Babe, come back,” I pleaded with my poor husband, who was out with friends. “Can we move?” I asked. With a vacuum in my hand, I peeked at the bug from behind a door, unable to do a thing.

The situation rapidly deteriorated when the beast decided to run for its life — a nightmare scenario as far as was concerned. What if I lost it and it hid somewhere, only to reemerge later? For better and for worse, it ran into the bathroom and fell on its back. It was now immobile, which is the better part, desperately shaking its six legs, trying and failing to turn over. The worse part? It was still there. Still alive. And still out to get me.

I gathered whatever shreds of courage I had in me to throw a shoe at it. Then another. I missed both times. So I slammed the bathroom door, trapping the beast inside, and sprinted into the bedroom. “It can’t somehow crawl out, can it???” I texted my husband, who was now in pain from laughter. The fact that there is space under the bathroom door plenty big enough for a roach will haunt me for months.

I spent the next several hours lying beside my daughter, thinking about how I could ever leave the bed again knowing the danger that existed just outside of the bedroom. My husband came home. I heard the bathroom door open and the noise of the vacuum cleaner. We settled in for the night.

I didn’t yet know that menace number two was already on the horizon.

The air raid came at midnight.

Hundreds of Russian drones were buzzing through Ukrainian skies, most of them on their way to Kyiv, where I live. Having just spent the night in a shelter, I hoped to ignore the air raid for as long as I could. Russia attacked Ukraine with nearly 500 drones and missiles the previous day, and a part of me was sure they wouldn’t do it again, at least not right away. All I wanted was at least four hours of uninterrupted sleep in bed, although that is not something you ask for in Ukraine.

Machine gun fire rattled in the distance, but unlike the black beast, it didn’t scare me. I fixed up my pillow, checked the monitoring channels on Telegram, and determined that the few dozen drones that were in our vicinity were no big deal. My daughter was fast asleep, and I nearly dozed off with her when I heard the now-all-too-familiar buzzing.

The Iranian-designed Russian Shahed drone is both kind of like a cockroach and nothing like a cockroach. Kind of like in the sense that it’s a non-human thing that attacks my apartment and sparks terror in me and that I hate with every fibre of my being. Like the cockroach, it offers me nothing except the flight-or-fight response. And like the cockroach, it is semi-sentient and has autonomous motor skills.

It is nothing like the cockroach in the sense that it’s actually lethally dangerous. It’s here to kill me. And if I leave it alone, it will not leave me alone.

Hundreds of these killing machines with 200 pounds of explosives attack Ukraine every single night, destroying civilian infrastructure and killing people in their sleep—which, if I’m being fair to the cockroach, no bug is doing. Their engines make an annoying moped-like sound that is easy to ignore if it’s far away. (Did you know that the word Vespa, which is the name of the iconic Italian moped brand, means wasp in Italian—meaning that the Shahed drones even sound like bugs.)

The bug-sounding drone in question, however, was closing in on us, its buzzing growing louder with every passing moment. My husband and I froze for a few seconds before he told me, “Grab her and get out”—the “her” referring to the toddler.

My poor amygdala was at it again. I jumped out of bed, grabbed my daughter, and sprinted out of the apartment in the blink of an eye. There was no freezing, no thinking, no contemplating my options. No one could help me but myself. For a brief second, as I ran with my daughter's body pressed against mine, I was genuinely confident that we were escaping death.

Then boom — an explosion. The drone was shot down, probably less than a mile away. I collapsed against the wall, panting, my body shaking from terror. “This fucking day,” I said, turning to profanity for its scientifically-proven benefits of stress relief. “First the fucking bug, then the fucking Russians.”

The tragic irony of what happened that day couldn’t escape me. Having been exposed to thousands of Russian drones and missiles over the years, my body needed a perception of near-immediate death of my child to send me running. And if it wasn’t for my daughter, I probably would have slept through all the explosions. The worst thing that would happen is a bone-chilling dream about the bugs.

Which am I more afraid of: Shaheds or cockroaches? It’s a close call, honestly. Probably the bugs. People are not rational beings, after all. And besides, Kyiv has air defenses and bomb shelters. But the roaches are coming for us all, and there is nowhere to hide.