What is trypophobia?
That was a hot-button issue across the internet about three years ago. No one knew what it was, but, suddenly, everyone seemed to have it.
What?
Is?
Trypophobia?
Trypophobia is an aversion or repulsion to objects like honeycombs or sponges or certain flowers. But it’s not the objects. It’s the pattern. Repetitive and clustered. Tiny holes or an outcrop of blisters. It never was a thing for me, but the internet exploded sharing images of lotus seed pods and people going insane reacting to it.
Then we all forgot.
As if overnight, the social media zeitgeist shifted to another topic and the very idea of trypophobia went away. You can ask anyone on the street, and nine out of ten wouldn’t be able to tell you what it is.
The condition is due for a resurgence. So, I’m building a listicle of true trypophobia cases. The assignment has me on my way to the university library to find psychological journals. I did some preliminary internet searches and found doctors who specialize in these sorts of phobias. Most of the legit articles and studies were behind paywalls, but the actual journals would be on file at the library.
The university library is almost always nearly empty. With everything online, not many ventured out to peruse the three stories of analog content. My favorite spot is the back corner on the basement level. Something about the added silence of being below ground made for great reading ambiance. The catacomb-like rows of metal shelving filled with books lending to the fear of librarian ghosts around every corner enabled the silent solitude I so enjoy.
The downside of my favorite little reading nook is the complete lack of time here. I pour over journals and articles until I hear the loudspeaker in the library crackle to life.
“The time is one forty-five. The library will be closing in fifteen minutes.”
Almost two in the morning. It was early afternoon when I’d gotten here. Over the last eleven hours, I read clinical treatments for extreme anxiety triggered by these textures. I read case studies of severe agoraphobia where trypophobia crippled several patients suffering from dementia. Mostly, I read interviews with various psychiatrists describing exposure therapy and meditation gurus reviewing basic relaxation techniques as successful treatments for the generally mild condition.
One report, however, stood out from the rest. I found it early in my digging, but it read more like a treatment for The Exorcist than a psychiatric case report. The John Doe had been triggered by lily pods. They spiraled into a public psychotic break and were institutionalized. Ultimately, their psychosis resulted in self-mutilation and death.
This report would perfectly top my listicle of ten.
I tiptoed into the apartment and slipped into bed next to my sleeping wife and plugged my phone into the charger. I think she had gotten so used to me coming in late that I couldn’t wake her with less than an explosion. It wasn’t long before I fell asleep.
I woke with a snort and a sore throat that told me I had just snored myself awake. The sun was high and bright, and I was alone in bed. I dragged myself into the bathroom and ran myself through the shower. Once I was dressed, I brewed a cup of coffee and sat at my desk with my notes.
On top of the photocopies of the articles I read last night was a handwritten note.
I’ll see you for lunch. Hope you slept well.
XOXO
She came home most days for a sandwich since she started working in the office building down the block. It was a ritual I enjoyed except when I was on a deadline. Today was fine, though. I had the article written and posted for editorial with enough time to begin working on our lunch before she got home.
She greeted me with a kiss on the cheek and helped with final assembly before grabbing my hand.
“What’s this?”
She pulled back my sleeve to expose a small cluster of five… no six… blisters growing from a red rash on my wrist.
“I don’t know.”
“Looks like poison ivy or something. Have you been scratching it?” she asked.
“Poison ivy? I… I don’t think I’ve been scratching. The only place I went yesterday was to the library. I don’t think I would have gotten poison ivy there.”
She insisted I see a doctor. I promised I would, but I had no intention of going out of my way to make an appointment. I had some calamine in the medicine cabinet. That would be enough treatment for the rash.
She was back out the door within twenty-seven minutes on her way back to work. I checked my email and the article had been approved and posted. I began my social media routine. Sharing the article’s link on each of my social network feeds. I contacted my reels promotors who would release the usual TikTok and Facebook promotional video lists. Feigned excitement for one monthly fee. All to boost clicks on every publisher site running my story.
I scratched my wrist.
I hadn’t paid attention to the blight before lunch, but the itch slowly became more noticeable with every tap on the keyboard. I used a cotton ball to dab on more of the pink lotion. There were eight blisters, and the older ones were larger. Had I been spreading the ivy scratching it? I didn’t remember scratching it, but I was so busy I wasn’t quite sure.
My phone dinged.
I slid behind my computer to check the email that had just arrived. Dr. Maria Abrego responded to an email I sent her after linking her to the same private practice where John Doe had been treated. The psychiatrist who treated Doe passed not long after Doe was involuntarily admitted. Abrego relocated about five years ago to teach at the university about two hours from here, so it just made sense to reach out. I hoped she had access to the original case files. Something about my number one listing had me hooked.
Turns out she had direct knowledge of the John Doe case. The practice was small enough that she took over the last few months of Doe’s treatment and was the one who signed the admission order. She was willing to meet with me. She had an opening in her schedule that next morning and would sit with me, but she understood that I had already published the article. She wondered why the additional interest.
I wrote back confirming the article had gone live, but that I thought there was more to the story here. I thanked her for responding and practically begged for her to see me. She replied later that night, and the meeting was set.
I scratched my arm after knocking on her office door at ten thirty the next morning. This itch was non-stop and the rash had spread closer to my elbow. My wife damned me when she left for work because I hadn’t gone to the doctor. I promised I would call after the meeting with Abrego. The blister clusters were getting larger. More dense. My forearm was disgusting, and my scratching was making it worse.
Dr. Abrego opened the door. She would have needed four-inch heels to top five feet. Her gray hair was streaking with white, but her brown eyes were deep and youthful.
She invited me in, and we made small talk about the eventless drive and the pleasant spring morning. She joked that it didn’t seem so pleasant due to the dark circles under my eyes. My seasonal allergies began the day after winter and would continue deep into fall. There always seemed to be something in the air I was allergic to.
I remembered her insistence that her time was limited and realized that the chatter carried us halfway through the appointment.
“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “I really was hoping to know a little more about the trypophobia case.”
“You read the report, correct?” I assured her again that I had. “Well, then you should know it wasn’t a case of trypophobia. This patient was officially diagnosed with schizophrenia.”
I understood her conclusions from the final publication, but she contradicted the original doctor’s assessment. She believed that the extreme trypophobia was only a symptom of John’s emerging schizophrenia. The original doctor’s report detailed an increasingly exaggerated trypophobia that was slowly driving the patient into an anxiety spiral.
The patient was a health nut. They were part of a local hiking group that spent their weekends in regional national parks. They were hit with a panic attack that ended with a visit to the hospital. Under the care of the original psychiatrist, they recounted the entire hike. When they spoke of the lily pods they saw beside the path, they were struck with another panic attack.
The initial diagnosis was easily trypophobia. The doctor put them on an antidepressant and agreed to follow up in two weeks. The two-week follow-up turned into weekly appointments. Then twice a week. In under two months, John Doe was a daily office visit and regular evening calls.
Initially, John stumbled upon the pattern naturally. Sunflowers. Honeycombs on TV and in their cereal bowl. An episode of Animaniacs where the character Wacko removed his cap to show the eyes in the back of his head. There were a lot of eyes clustered in the black of the character’s fur. The antidepressants dulled the anxiety, and John assumed they were only noticing the triggers more often because of the first attack.
They then began hallucinating the texture where there was none. Doe would see words on a page cluster together. They saw the shadow of blisters on white walls and in the sky. They ran a stop light staring after thinking a wasp nest appeared in their car and caused an accident. Things moved in their food, and they stopped eating.
“That acceleration seems to match the original diagnosis, does it not?” I asked her.
“What is missing from those reports is the original doctor’s own mental health condition.” After I prodded, she continued, “He suffered from his own anxiety issues that were exacerbated by the John Doe patient. He fixated on John’s degrading health, heightening his own paranoia. In his unpublished notes, many of those evening calls were to John, not from him. He began ascribing almost supernatural causality to John’s schizophrenic break and failed to treat them properly.” She paused and watched me absorb this new information.
“Ultimately, his hidden struggles resulted in his suicide. I took over John’s treatment and quickly committed them into quality care, but I was too late.”
I scratched the back of my upper arm through my shirt sleeve.
“Are you okay?” Dr. Abrego asked. “You’ve been scratching that arm this entire time.”
I apologized. “It’s just a rash,” I insisted. “I’m getting it looked at later today.”
“Good.”
With that, she stood and heralded my exit from her office. Before I left, “Is there any way you could give me access to those later case notes before you took over?”
She smiled.
Sternly.
And closed the door in my face.
I sped most of the way back to town to make it in time to check in for my appointment. I couldn’t focus. I wanted to know more about what John Doe’s previous doctor thought of his hallucinations. What did Abrego mean by “supernatural causality?” I couldn’t fathom any doctor, no matter how depressed or anxious, defaulting to the god-of-the-gaps argument when it came to treating a patient. But Abrego had venomously spit the words when she recounted the previous diagnosis.
Through my peripheral vision, something ran along the highway beside my car. I thought about nights in the back seat when I was a child. I always thought I saw shadowy figures running between the trees as we sped along. I would focus out the window and would quickly identify the figure as tree shadows formed by the moving headlights. The perfect strobic image. But it never happened during the day. I turned to look at the motion outside only to see a rotoscope of buildings and cross traffic.
I couldn’t escape the unease as I sat in the doctor’s waiting room for another forty-five minutes before I was called back. My arm was hurting from the scratching. And my other arm was starting to itch.
I wondered why, if it was so contagious, my hands were not covered in the rash.
The doctor spent less than five minutes with me. He checked each arm and commented on how raw my scratching was making my skin. He mentioned calamine. When I swore I was applying it regularly, he wrote me a prescription for a cream and ordered me to stop scratching. He was gone before I could inquire about the blisters.
It didn’t occur to me to talk to him about the anxiety and lack of focus. The exhaustion.
I decided to call back for a follow-up appointment if I felt this way after sleeping, but no follow-up would be necessary.
I looked at my arm. The oldest blisters were forming blackheads. Were they zits? Had I so screwed my pores that acne was forming on top of the blisters? I pinched them to release the infection. The puss. But nothing came. Only pain.
The sky seemed to warble as I drove home. It almost seemed to have a net thrown over it. God was a fisherman and reality was drowning in his haul.
I thought about the last time I had eaten. I couldn’t remember having breakfast. Or dinner. Was it lunch yesterday? How many days had it been? My blood sugar had to be tanking.
I ran into the apartment and dug through the pantry until I found some Funyuns. I opened the bag and shoved one in my mouth.
The taste was off.
I mean, they tasted correct… maybe? But the texture was wrong. They felt like… like… I couldn’t wrap my mind around it really. I rolled the Funyun over my tongue. It felt like a honeycomb. Or a lily pod. Or the back of Wacko’s eyeballed head.
I spit it into the sink. Thousands of what looked like tiny insect eggs filled the mouthful.
I vomited. The only thing to come out was hot acid. An empty stomach gives up very little.
My head spun. I needed to eat, but the thought of putting anything in my mouth made me gag again. I grabbed the sink to keep from collapsing. The skin on my arms strained.
Once I righted myself, I pulled back my shirt sleeve revealing a field of blisters topped with blackheads covering both arms. Not exactly topped. The blackheads seeded every blister. They were buried inside somehow visible through the cloudy puss and transparent skin.
Movement.
The black spots buried deep in my arm squirmed. Something… a lot of somethings lived in me! Grotesquely using me to enter this world. A plaque waiting to be born.
I scratched them. Hard. My skin burned and bled staining my overgrown fingernails.
But not one blister burst. Not one monster was dug from my flesh.
I looked past the light blue curtains framing the window over the sink into the cloudless late afternoon sky. My wife would be home from work within the next half hour. She –
The sky wriggled. Millions of shapes appeared as overlapping eye squiggles behind the cloudless blue. The sun… I looked directly at the burning ball of light. The white-yellow formed into a giant, solar lily pod.
My skin crawled and ached. My stomach sank.
I looked at my arms. Despite the sun-burned texture dominating my vision, I saw the horrific life filling my flesh. They could not be allowed to survive. I thought of my wife and how this would surely infect her the second she got home.
I reached into the drawer to the right of the sink and pulled out a bread knife. I needed something sharp. My fingernails weren’t breaking the blisters.
I poked at one of the larger ones. Blood released in a trickle, but the blister remained.
I placed the blade flat against the inside of my elbow. I sawed at the skin covering the living blisters.
I dragged the knife down the length of my forearm. Each blister exploded releasing tiny, black leeches that died in the pool of blood that fell to the floor. Looking at my arm, I saw an endless cluster of bloody holes.
My knees weakened as I laid the blade against my other forearm.
The world darkened. It became fuzzy.
All that existed was that damned texture. It filled everything.
It pulsated around me.
It engulfed me.
Colors swirled behind my eyes and I could see gaping holes filling all things as I gasped for my final breath.
I…
THE END