Barnaby and A Cockroach
Go away, cockroach. Leave me alone.
Cockroaches are gross, disgusting, and scary.
The belief about cockroaches makes them feel gross. Maybe they are not different from me.
Cockroaches are unsettling. They activate something primitive in me that wants distance, control, extermination.
That reaction feels real — because it is. But what I started to notice was how quickly that reaction turned into a judgment. Gross became unworthy. Scary became intolerable. Existence became a verdict.
So many times in my life, I believed the belief that the cockroach was unwanted and gross — and I treated parts of myself the same way.
A cockroach that appears on the dining room table is Schizoaffective disorder.
It’s unsettling to live with.
It can be gross, marked by unpleasant and unwanted behaviors.
It’s stigmatized.
What made it unbearable wasn’t only its presence — it was what I believed its presence meant.
Another cockroach is explicit material.
It carries shame and produces guilt.
The more I see it, the more repulsed I become.
The more I try to fight it and get rid of it, the more it comes back.
This is what I call the infestation paradox:
the harder I try to eliminate the cockroaches,
the more space they occupy.
But if the cockroach wasn’t the problem — what if it was my belief about the cockroach?
After listening to How to Hold a Cockroach: A Book for Those Who Are Free and Don’t Know It, it made me wonder about the mechanism of belief itself.
When we are born, we inherit cognitive templates — shared assumptions about what reality is, what is acceptable, and what must be rejected.
It’s why people like me, with Schizoaffective disorder, share underlying symptoms — the system needs patterns in order to categorize.
But belief doesn’t just categorize experience.
It shapes how we suffer inside it.
At some point, I stopped asking how to get rid of the cockroach.
Not because I accepted it.
Not because I liked it.
But because the war was costing me more than the infestation ever did.
Extermination required constant vigilance.
Monitoring. Policing. Interpreting every thought, impulse, symptom, or desire as evidence.
The cockroach didn’t just live on the table — it lived in my attention.
Holding the cockroach didn’t mean indulging it or surrendering to it.
It didn’t mean approval.
It meant refusing to let its existence determine my worth.
Schizoaffective disorder didn’t disappear.
Desire didn’t disappear.
Shame didn’t disappear.
What loosened was the belief that these things had to be eliminated before my life could be livable.
I didn’t replace my beliefs with better ones.
I loosened them.
I stopped letting them speak in absolutes.
The cockroaches still appear.
But they no longer sit on the throne.
They no longer decide what my life means.
I don’t know if this is freedom.
I only know that my life became more livable when I stopped declaring war on myself.
Nothing about the cockroach changed — only the belief that its presence was a sentence instead of a fact.