When I was seven years old, I remember walking into Whole Foods with my mom just like I did every week. We would pick up all of our regular groceries such as rice, vegetables, milk etc. Only this particular day, my mom decided that she wanted to get some honey to put into her coffee rather than sugar, so I walked with her to the honey section of the store. I distinctly remember stopping to look at the bottles of honey on the shelves, and looking slightly to my right. My eyes landed on honeycombs that were packed into pretty little containers in order to make them look cute enough to sell. I myself did not find them cute, in fact, the

moment I saw the honeycombs I felt lightheaded, sweaty, and my stomach churned as if I was about to vomit all over the floor of Whole Foods. I ran to the bathroom, waited 20 minutes, and finally left the store with my mom without another glance at the stupid honeycombs that were sitting on the shelves.

Later that night, after I got home, I googled “why do I feel sick when I look at honeycombs”, and I finally had my answer. Trypophobia. 

Trypophobia [ trip-uh-foh-bee-uh ]

Noun

An abnormal feeling of discomfort or revulsion at the sight of clustered holes or bumps, as seen in sponges, honeycombs, certain seed pods, soap bubbles, and bubbles in batter: although not officially recognized as a phobia, trypophobia is a subject of ongoing psychiatric research.

Ever since the honeycomb incident, it feels like I see small clusters of holes everywhere I look, igniting my trypophobia. It happens every time I see papaya seeds, look through a microscope at skin cells, or even patterns containing irregularly shaped circles. Shortly after my trip to Whole Foods, I began experiencing nightmares. Yes nightmares. About holes. And I know you may find this silly, but I’m being dead serious. I would dream about trypophobic patterns and wake up drenched in sweat, and refuse to fall back asleep because I didn’t want to reconjure those images. 

After seeing things such as honeycombs that trigger my trypophobia, the symptoms can be really bad. When I was younger I used to feel like I had just run 5 miles; I was out of breath, panicked and extremely anxious and jumpy. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to “control” my trypophobia and my response to it so that it isn’t as bad. For example, looking at pictures of cells, especially under microscopes used to have me running in the other direction, however for classes such as Anatomy & Physiology, there is really no way around it. No one really thinks of Trypophobia as a serious enough condition, so I was, and still am, stuck having to look into a microscope at cells. Now it still makes me extremely uncomfortable, but I’ve trained myself to look for a short period of time, and my response has become more controlled. There are however, certain Trypophobic images that I will never be able to control my response to because they are so bad, honeycombs being one of them. *Shudder*

After accepting that Trypophobia was a real thing, even though others claimed it wasn’t, I began to wonder why I even had it in the first place. I had no idea what the root of the cause was, or why I developed this phobia to begin with. It turns out that scientists aren’t exactly sure what the root cause of the phobia is, however they do have some theories. 

One researcher suggests that, “trypophobic images mimic patterns on poisonous or dangerous animals: think leopard spots or the markings on the highly venomous blue-ringed octopus.” So, according to him, our brain involuntarily attributes honeycombed shaped patterns to danger which is why those who have Trypophobia tend to have the symptoms they do. Another researcher claims that Trypophobic responses are from a place of intense disgust rather than fear. Although fear and disgust are actually really similar, they trigger different parts of the brain (specifically the amygdala and anterior insula) in different ways. There are even more theories regarding the origin of Trypophobia and why certain people have it, but there is yet to be a solid, factual reasoning as of now.

With this blog post, I hope to shed some light not only onto Trypophobia, but other phobias that people may deem as irrational or silly. When I told my friends I had Trypophobia, a lot of them laughed in my face and said, “Wow, are you really scared of holes?” And although I know they are only saying this because they legitimately think it’s a joke, there are fears that people struggle with on a daily basis that are outside-the-box. And no, it’s not them being crazy, there are actual scientific reasons behind those “stupid” fears. 

Ok here comes the hard part – inserting pictures of Trypophobic images so that you can really see what I’m talking about. *Deep breath*. I probably won’t include too many and I probably won’t come back and read this blog post after I insert the images, but I hope you have a bit more sympathy and understanding for a so called “irrational” fear of mine, and I also hope that you have learned a little bit more about my life as a person with Trypophobia, and how I deal with it.