Making Friends with The Fear

what the hymenopterans are teaching me

I was a little bit stoned and very much naked, standing there on the bathroom tile as I waited for the shower to heat up. Mind wandering, I turned to inspect a freckle on my shoulder, and looked straight into the big black eyes of a wasp.

Alarmed by my screaming, she hopped off my shoulder and landed near the sink. My body had gone frozen. My first reaction to a stinging insect in the house is to whack it with a shoe, but I’d been spending a lot more time with wasps in the garden (and had no shoes within reach anyway), so I hesitated.

We stood there for a long time staring at each other — me completely exposed, catastrophizing about what a sting on the nipple might feel like, her completely at my mercy. While the shower’s static filled the air around us and I thought about what to do next, she flicked her wings and tried to shrink into the cabinet’s wood grain.

She was a long, thin, thread-waisted wasp, the solitary kind that doesn’t live in a hive. For most, “wasp” conjures images of yellowjackets and hornets, but the social, hive-making, sometimes aggressive wasps actually make up a very small percentage of the wasp family.¹ The vast majority of wasps dig holes in the ground and live alone. They’re not territorial, and they rarely sting humans.

Solitary wasps are often parasitic, meaning they lay their eggs in or around the bodies of other bugs to feed their young. Thread-waisted wasps prey on the larvae of moths that destroy vegetable crops, and can often be seen carrying entire caterpillars back to their holes. They’re like free pest control for gardeners, and I’d been trying to lure them to my yard with strategic flower plantings.

Of course, I could just use the quick hack of a pesticide in the garden, but these chemicals are indiscriminate. They wipe out predator populations, too, and because these bugs have longer breeding cycles, they’re slower to bounce back than quickly-multiplying pests. Often a quick pesticidal hack can create a worse pest problem over time, requiring more and more pesticides.²

I can’t help but think about my own quick chemical fixes. As a kid, I didn’t know the word anxiety, so in my journals I called it The Fear.³ I drank because The Fear visited me too much, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. Alcohol got rid of my anxiety in the short-term, but drinking everyday took more than just The Fear from me.

It turned me into someone else — what

Katherine May

has called a “noisy performance of humanity” that drowned out my own intuition. Sure, those chemicals helped me produce more, got me through school and work, but the Fear never went away. Over time, it grew worse, and morphed into The Sadness.

Sobering up, for me, has not really been about restriction. It’s been a practice in learning to hear myself again. Throwing a pesticide on the Fear meant that I also lost my connection to the protective force of presentiment. I couldn’t make decisions and I couldn’t say no, because I couldn’t trust my own feelings anymore. I was tossing in a sea of other people’s wants, fog too thick to see my own lighthouse.

In any sustainable garden, as in any sustainable life, quick hacks do not really solve problems. Re-building a strong, diverse ecosystem in the desert of a grass lawn is slow work; it takes time, and at first, some things will die.

What I’m growing is not perfect, and it’s by no means efficient or productive, at least in terms of human economics. Some plants still have holes where bugs have chewed on them and weird spots I can’t diagnose, but they’re leafing out and making flowers anyway, which is good enough for me. Growth is about much more than just output.

Smacking that wasp with a shoe was like reaching for a whiskey bottle in the face of the Fear, and it didn’t make sense considering all the work I’d put in to draw bugs like her to my garden. I had seduced this wasp with my sweet alyssum bouquets; how could I kill her now?

I threw on a towel and found a cup I could trap her in. On my way down the stairs I thought of a justification for Gray, who I was sure would be horrified at my Samaritan act. They looked up at me from the couch as I stood there, the little wasp bouncing around inside the cup in my hands.

“I found a wasp on my back, but she didn’t sting me, so I didn’t have the heart to kill her,” I explained in a hurry, fully expecting them to tell me it was time to stop planting wasp-bait everywhere and call an exterminator.

But to my surprise, they replied: “Maybe wasps are your friends now.”

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Related Reads From the Archives:

What Does My Anxiety Mean?

Needing Each Other is Human

Also, I’ve removed the paywall on two podcast episodes I made last year that critically explore the concept of timeblindness:

Is There Scientific Evidence for Timeblindness?

We're All In A Time Famine

You can listen to them on Spotify now, too! Stay tuned for more SlugPod coming soon.

1. Here’s a great interview on wasps with biologist Heather Holm on the podcast In Defense of Plants

2. See Dave Goulson’s excellent book on backyard bugs, The Garden Jungle: or Gardening To Save The Planet

3. When I discovered as an adult that Emily Dickinson used to do this kind of naming-by-capitalization too, I knew I had found a kindred literary spirit