I went to an event about moths
Yesterday I attended a night event at my local park about moths lead by a quirky old lady who wore a butterfly blouse and a butterfly necklace and a butterfly pair of earrings. I was the only one who really sent an e-mail beforehand to sign up for this event. Two of us really attended this thing thanks to outside communication, we both brought a notebook and a pen. There also were two couples, the two men are gardeners at the park looking for a night out as colleagues, they each brought their uninterested wives and each man had three kids they did not try to look after, leaving them to mom. There also were a couple kids who attended for a short period of time until they were bored enough and went back to their biking activity.
The old lady gave us a lecture about moths, their life cycle and their diversity, with an emphasis on how incredible they were. If I were younger, I would be in Guinea looking for the Painted lady, she said. I don't know all the species, I'd like to have a better book for identification, she said. I have friends who are really good at it, they are younger and they can use a binocular stereomicroscope but I don't do this, she said.
"This one is beautiful!", said one of the wives every time a multicolored moth appeared. Her husband said half-true facts about butterflies with great confidence, every now and then. The other person with a notebook took extensive notes and whispered many many brilliant reactions, "but I don't really know, I'm not an expert", she murmured.
When I was tired of people-watching, I crouched by the white sheet, got my camera out and watched the first insects appear. There were really great ichneumons, some ants, a lost soldier beetle and a really odd-looking fly I ended up catching for my collection. When the first macro moths appeared, the distinctive muffle of their wings made me think how I needed this sound. As I exhaled, I realized I was exhausted by all the talking and loud power moves embedded in this social gathering. I wish men just shut the fuck up for a moment. Everyone gathered around the sheet. The kids came back, excited about the gigantic sphinx moth climbing up their legs. A gardener let a moth sit on his hat for a little while. Finally, we were all on the same page, bounded by the grip of the tiniest sticky legs on our fingers. If a non-entomologist reader got this far on my post, I wish you hold an insect in your hand and be brave enough not to move. This takes courage as our mammalian instinct tells our body to flinch when something crawls on our arms. When you finally relax and let the critter climb your fingernails, you realize how fragile they are.
Fast forward, after an hour or two of moth-watching, my husband picked me up and we got home before midnight. He went back to bed but I couldn't relax. I practiced my emergency self-soothing activities, which are smoking a cigarette then sitting at my desk in the dark and plucking out my hair from the top of my head with tweezers for an hour or two. I reflected on the evening. Why was I so uncomfortable? I like it when entomology feels like a quiet night at the library. I don't like when people express how "beautiful" the insects are. They're not, they're beyond beauty. You can't talk about insects, you have to watch and listen and be quiet. Then I realized the most obvious thing I couldn't pick up during the event. Everyone was neurotypical. I felt lonely. I only felt surrounded by like-minded people when the insects arrived. Then I remembered a couple years ago, when I attended an internship at a place where all the volunteers where young neuroA and/or queer people. We had an inside rule where it was forbidden to talk when a non-human animal was present, to respect their wildness and lessen their stress. It felt like falling in platonic love. It felt like home.
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