I was less squeamish as a kid than I am as an adult. I think most people are kind of the same way. Or at least, I'm still equally squeamish about the same number of things but they're not the same ones that grossed me out as a child. Mold didn't used to repulse me but it does now; kissing used to make me go 'eew!' and hide my eyes, whereas it obviously doesn't anymore. (That would be weird if it did considering I have a boyfriend and am fucking him. I wonder how often that happens? People too squeamish to kiss other people but have no objections to the horizontal squelchy.) Even though I'm still not exceptionally repulsed by this particular gross-out, it still bothers me a lot more now than it used to.
Dissections.
Science class animal dissections are kind of mythic rites of passage to school kids. Everyone knows that it's going to be required of them at some point in their school career and successfully hurdling this particular curriculum requirement is the point at which you are a proper mature student. All my classmates had really mixed feelings about it. Some anticipated it, some dreaded it; personally, I didn't feel strongly one way or another but the thought of cutting things open didn't really bother me. It still doesn't really bother me much, except for the obvious lack of forethought that leads school board officials to conclude that it's totally not a bad idea to equip a bunch of twelve-year-old hormonal adolescents with scalpels. So it didn't cause me the kind of distress it caused some of my classmates; my best friend at the time, Hana, was on the other end of the spectrum. At that point she was a committed vegetarian and very into animals and also really, really not wanting to do the dissection. You could be excused if your parent wrote a note explaining why you (or they, or both) objected to the dissection. Hana's mom thought she was being dramatic and so no such excuse was made. Once Frog Dissection Day rolled around, she got one whiff of formaldehyde and promptly keeled over in a faint on the floor. In the end she got the school administration to excuse her. She also got a concussion and five stitches.
So I breezed through the dissections without a problem. We cut up all kinds of things and I never really had any bad experiences except that the chemicals smelled terrible and I have a sensitive sense of smell and an even more sensitive gag reflex. Smells that other people don't notice or are totally unfazed by will make me violently reverse my gastrointestinal tract. The smells of certain plants and flowers, cleaning products, chemicals, foods, and others almost without number can make me extremely sick for which I have never received an iota of sympathy. Even though I've had that extremely sensitive gag reflex my entire life--I couldn't undergo a throat swab without puking until I was in high school--my parents always just accused me of being a drama whore. Like I was throwing up on purpose for attention. Without considering the fact that, as far as attention-seeking devices go, there are a lot more easy to bear and way less messy methods than puking; or that I was always the most upset that these things made me so violently ill when no one else was ever bothered and was always embarrassed and upset by it.
Anyway.
It seems a bit weird to me that I wasn't more bothered by the fact that I was cutting up and removing body parts from a creature that was at one point alive and breathing and going about its daily business in happy ignorance of the fact that it would one day be pinned to a tray in a biology class. Part of it was, I think, that most of them didn't have faces. Or not a face that was immediately recognizable. Nothing I found especially cute or heartbreaking. And, most importantly, I think, none of them looked at me. Most of them didn't even have eyes--things like bugs and clams and little squids. Others, like frogs and mice, had eyes but were pinned on their backs so they weren't making any unnerving eye contact during the dissection. I list this possibility with a reasonable amount of confidence because of the one and only dissection that nearly made me vomit: a goat's eyeball.
It was in seventh or eighth grade. For the first time I was not only dissecting something that was looking at me, but it was nothing but eyeball. I can still see it in my head--horrible, tangerine-sized milky dead eye with all the optic nerves severed. When I cut into it, it leaked a pungent yellowish jelly-like substance that still haunts my dreams. It was over a dozen years ago and I'm still uncomfortable looking at lemon Jello because of the similarities.
This particular dissection was never finished. I got as far as picking the lens and the cornea out before I had to go puke. Rather fortunately, by then the science department had agreed that students throwing up and/or passing out would just be excused from the lesson. I wasn't sure I would be believed that I was actually bothered by this dissection when others hadn't done that before, because I was so used to being accused of faking and being dramatic whenever I got sick at home, but she didn't say anything and excused me without a word.
She probably understood.
After all, she had an entire jar of eyeballs on her desk so presumably she was aware it was weird to be stared at like that.
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