There's an Tiny Anxiety I Hope to Defeat. I'll Never Adore Them, but Is it Possible to at Least Be Calm About Spiders?
I am someone who believes that it is always possible to evolve. I think you absolutely are able to instruct a veteran learner, provided that the mature being is receptive and ready for growth. As long as the individual in question is ready to confess when it was wrong, and work to become a more enlightened self.
OK yes, I am that seasoned creature. And the trick I am attempting to master, although I am decrepit? It is an important one, an issue I have grappled with, repeatedly, for my entire life. My ongoing effort … to grow less fearful of huntsman spiders. My regrets to all the remaining arachnid species that exist; I have to be grounded about my possible growth as a human. It also has to be the huntsman because it is sizeable, dominant, and the one I run into regularly. Including on three separate occasions in the last week. Inside my home. I'm not visible to you, but a shudder runs through me with discomfort as I type.
I doubt I’ll ever reach “admirer” status, but I've dedicated effort to at least attaining Normal about them.
A deep-seated fear of spiders since I was a child (as opposed to other children who adore them). Growing up, I had a sufficient number of brothers around to guarantee I never had to engage with any myself, but I still panicked if one was visibly in the general area as me. One incident stands out of one morning when I was eight, my family slumbering on, and trying to deal with a spider that had made its way onto the lounge-room wall. I “handled” with it by positioning myself at a great distance, nearly crossing the threshold (in case it ran after me), and discharging half a bottle of bug repellent toward it. It didn’t reach the spider, but it managed to annoy and irritate everyone in my house.
As I got older, whoever I was dating or living with was, by default, the least afraid of spiders out of the two of us, and therefore tasked with handling the situation, while I produced low keening sounds and fled the scene. If I was on my own, my tactic was simply to vacate the area, plunge the room into darkness and try to forget about its presence before I had to re-enter.
Not long ago, I was a guest at a companion's home where there was a particularly sizable huntsman who resided within the sill, for the most part lingering. To be less fearful, I conceptualized the spider as a 'girlie', a girlie, part of the group, just relaxing in the sun and overhearing us gab. It sounds extremely dumb, but it had an impact (a little bit). Put another way, making a conscious choice to become less phobic did the trick.
Regardless, I've endeavored to maintain this practice. I contemplate all the logical reasons not to be scared. It is a fact that huntsman spiders pose no threat to me. I understand they prey upon things like flies and mosquitoes (my mortal enemies). It is well-established they are one of the planet's marvelous, benign creatures.
Yet, regrettably, they do continue to move like that. They travel in the utterly horrifying and almost unjust way imaginable. The sight of their multiple limbs propelling them at that terrible speed causes my caveman brain to kick into overdrive. They claim to only have eight legs, but I believe that increases exponentially when they are in motion.
Yet it is no fault of their own that they have scary legs, and they have just as much right to be where I am – possibly a greater claim. I have discovered that taking the steps of working to prevent immediately exit my own skin and run away when I see one, working to keep still and breathing, and deliberately thinking about their good points, has proven somewhat effective.
The mere fact that they are fuzzy entities that dart around at an alarming rate in a way that haunts my sleep, does not justify they deserve my hatred, or my shrieks of terror. It is possible to acknowledge when fear has clouded my judgment and driven by baseless terror. It is uncertain I’ll ever reach the “catching one in a Tupperware container and taking it outside” phase, but you never know. There’s a few years for this veteran of life yet.
