There's an Itsy-Bitsy Fear I Aim to Overcome. I'll Never Adore Them, but Can I at Least Be Calm Concerning Spiders?

I firmly hold the belief that it is forever an option to change. I think you can in fact train a seasoned creature, as long as the old dog is willing and willing to learn. As long as the individual in question is prepared to acknowledge when it was in error, and work to become a better dog.

Well, admittedly, I am that seasoned creature. And the lesson I am working to acquire, despite the fact that I am a creature of habit? It is an important one, a feat I have battled against, often, for my all my days. I have been trying … to develop a calmer response toward those large arachnids. Apologies to all the other spiders that exist; I have to be grounded about my capacity for development as a human. The target inevitably is the huntsman because it is sizeable, in charge, and the one I encounter most often. Encompassing three times in the previous seven days. Inside my home. I'm not visible to you, but a shudder runs through me and grimacing as I type.

I doubt I’ll ever reach “fan” status, but I’ve been working on at least attaining a standard level of composure about them.

I have been terrified of spiders from my earliest years (in contrast to other children who find them delightful). Growing up, I had plenty of male siblings around to guarantee I never had to confront any personally, but I still became hysterical if one was visibly in the same room as me. One incident stands out of one morning when I was eight, my family unconscious, and facing the ordeal of a spider that had crawled on to the lounge-room wall. I “managed” with it by standing incredibly far away, almost into the next room (in case it pursued me), and emptying a significant portion of bug repellent toward it. The spray failed to hit the spider, but it managed to annoy and irritate everyone in my house.

With the passage of time, my romantic partner at the time or living with was, as a matter of course, the least afraid of spiders between us, and therefore tasked with managing the intruder, while I produced frightened noises and beat a hasty retreat. If I was on my own, my tactic was simply to exit the space, douse the illumination and try to ignore its existence before I had to enter again.

Not long ago, I stayed at a companion's home where there was a very large huntsman who lived in the window frame, for the most part stationary. As a means to be less scared of it, I imagined the spider as a her, a gal, one of us, just relaxing in the sun and overhearing us chat. This may seem rather silly, but it worked (to some degree). Put another way, making a conscious choice to become less phobic did the trick.

Whatever the case, I've made an effort to continue. I contemplate all the logical reasons not to be scared. It is a fact that huntsman spiders pose no threat to me. I know they eat things like flies and mosquitoes (creatures I despise). It is well-established they are one of the planet's marvelous, non-threatening to people creatures.

Yet, regrettably, they do continue to scuttle like that. They move in the most terrifying and almost unjust way conceivable. The vision of their many legs propelling them at that frightening pace triggers my primordial instincts to go into high alert. They are said to only have a standard octet of limbs, but I believe that triples when they are in motion.

But it is no fault of their own that they have scary legs, and they have the same privilege to be where I am – if not more. My experience has shown that taking the steps of trying not to immediately exit my own skin and flee when I see one, trying to remain still and breathing, and consciously focusing about their good points, has begun to yield results.

Simply due to the reality that they are hairy creatures that scuttle about at an alarming rate in a way that invades my dreams, is no reason for they deserve my hatred, or my girly screams. I can admit when my reactions have been misguided and fueled by baseless terror. I doubt I’ll ever reach the “scooping one into plasticware and escorting it to the garden” phase, but you never know. A bit of time remains for this veteran of life yet.