🔗 Share this article

I maintain the conviction that it is always possible to change. I believe you truly can instruct a veteran learner, as long as the experienced individual is receptive and ready for growth. So long as the old dog is willing to admit when it was mistaken, and endeavor to transform into a more enlightened self.

Alright, I confess, I am the old dog. And the trick I am attempting to master, despite the fact that I am a creature of habit? It is an major undertaking, an issue I have grappled with, often, for my entire life. The quest I'm on … to develop a calmer response toward the common huntsman. My regrets to all the other spiders that exist; I have to be realistic about my capacity for development as a human. The focus must remain on the huntsman because it is imposing, in charge, and the one I encounter most often. Encompassing three times in the last week. Within my dwelling. You can’t see me, but a shudder runs through me with discomfort as I type.

It's unlikely I’ll ever reach “fan” status, but I’ve been working on at least attaining Normal about them.

A deep-seated fear of spiders from my earliest years (in contrast to other children who adore them). Growing up, I had ample brothers around to make sure I never had to handle any myself, but I still became hysterical if one was obviously in the immediate vicinity as me. Vividly, I recall of one morning when I was eight, my family still asleep, and trying to deal with a spider that had made its way onto the family room partition. I “dealt” with it by standing incredibly far away, almost into the next room (in case it ran after me), and discharging a generous amount of bug repellent toward it. The spray failed to hit the spider, but it did reach and disturb everyone in my house.

With the passage of time, my romantic partner at the time or living with was, automatically, the bravest of spiders out of the two of us, and therefore tasked with managing the intruder, while I produced low keening sounds and ran away. When finding myself alone, my tactic was simply to leave the room, douse the illumination and try to forget about its being before I had to re-enter.

Recently, I stayed at a pal's residence where there was a very large huntsman who lived in the window frame, for the most part stationary. As a means to be less fearful, I imagined the spider as a 'girlie', a one of the girls, part of the group, just relaxing in the sun and eavesdropping on us gab. This may seem rather silly, but it was effective (a little bit). Alternatively, the deliberate resolution to become less phobic worked.

Be that as it may, I've made an effort to continue. I contemplate all the sensible justifications not to be scared. I know huntsman spiders won’t harm me. I know they eat things like insect pests (the bane of my existence). It is well-established they are one of nature’s beautiful, non-threatening to people creatures.

Yet, regrettably, they do continue to move like that. They propel themselves in the utterly horrifying and somehow offensive way imaginable. The vision of their numerous appendages transporting them at that alarming velocity triggers my primordial instincts to kick into overdrive. They are said to only have eight legs, but I maintain that triples when they get going.

But it isn’t their fault that they have scary legs, and they have the same privilege to be where I am – perhaps even more so. I’ve found that implementing the strategy of working to prevent immediately exit my own skin and flee when I see one, trying to remain calm and collected, and deliberately thinking about their good points, has begun to yield results.

Simply due to the reality that they are fuzzy entities that scuttle about at an alarming rate in a way that haunts my sleep, doesn’t mean they merit my intense dislike, or my shrieks of terror. I can admit when I’ve been wrong and fueled by unfounded fear. I doubt I’ll ever reach the “scooping one into plasticware and taking it outside” phase, but one can't be sure. There’s a few years within this old dog yet.