How a Disgusting Insect Taught Me About the Cage I Built Myself
I picked this book up on a Tuesday evening when I was feeling particularly stuck. Not the dramatic kind of stuck. The quiet kind where you know something is wrong but you can’t name it. I had just finished scrolling through my phone, feeling vaguely hollow, and there it was on my nightstand: a slim hardcover with a cockroach on the cover. Honestly, I almost laughed. But something made me open it.
The book is called How to Hold a Cockroach by Matthew Maxwell. It’s a short illustrated fable, barely an hour’s read. But it lit something within me I didn’t realize had gone dim. The central question it kept asking was simple and uncomfortable: what if the thing you’re running from isn’t the problem? What if the problem is the story you tell yourself about it?
The Boy Who Learned to Stop Fighting His Dinner Guest
The story follows a young boy who is eating dinner when a cockroach appears on his table. He is horrified. He tries to smash it, trap it, escape it. Nothing works. The cockroach keeps coming back, and his panic keeps growing.
This is where I recognized myself. Not with a literal cockroach, but with the small annoyances and fears I try to crush. A critical comment from a colleague. A memory of a failure. The vague sense that I’m not enough. I keep trying to eliminate these things, to smash them with logic or distract myself with busyness.
The boy meets a series of guides who help him see differently. They don’t tell him the cockroach isn’t disgusting. They don’t tell him to pretend it doesn’t exist. They show him something stranger: that his horror comes from a belief he accepted without questioning. The belief that this creature is dangerous and must be destroyed.
What struck me most was how gently the book makes this point. It doesn’t lecture. It just shows the boy’s journey from fighting to noticing. From reacting to choosing.
Why a Simple Fable Can Feel Like a Mirror
The core theme here is freedom through awareness. Not freedom from hard things. But freedom from the stories that make hard things unbearable. Maxwell uses the cockroach as a central image. It’s perfect because a cockroach is universally disliked, almost comically so. We all agree it’s gross. And yet the book asks: what if that agreement is the real cage?
There’s a moment where the boy is told to hold the cockroach. Not to kill it. Not to love it. Just to hold it. The illustration shows his trembling hand. I felt my own body tense reading it. That’s the power of the book’s craft. It makes you feel the resistance in your own body before it offers a way through.
The imagery is sparse but precise. A dinner table. A window. A wise old man. A forest path. The illustrations by Allie Daigle are warm and slightly messy, like watercolors that bleed at the edges. They match the book’s tone perfectly. Nothing is too clean or too neat. The truth is, I had to stop reading halfway through and just sit with it. I didn’t want to hold my own cockroaches.
What This Book Won’t Do for You, and What It Actually Does
Here is the honest truth. This book will not solve your problems. It will not give you ten steps to happiness. It will not make you suddenly love cockroaches or the hard things in your life.
What it will do is show you the shape of your own cage. And it will whisper, very quietly, that the door was never locked.
The book’s limitation is also its strength. It is simple. Almost too simple. Some readers might find it naive. It doesn’t engage with the real complexities of trauma or systemic injustice. If you’re looking for a deep psychological or political analysis, this is not that book. But if you’re someone who has been feeling stuck in a loop of self-criticism, or you’re facing a situation you can’t change and you’re exhausted from fighting it, this book might land like a hand on your shoulder.
I think it’s best read slowly. A few pages a day. Let each image sit with you. Let the questions settle.
After finishing it, I didn’t feel euphoric. I felt something quieter. A slight loosening in my chest. The next morning, when I found myself spiraling about a mistake I made at work, I paused. I imagined holding that mistake instead of smashing it. It didn’t feel good. But it felt possible.
This book won’t fix your life. But it will make you feel slightly less trapped in moments when you thought you had no choice.
