🔗 Share this article

I am someone who believes that it is always possible to transform. I think you truly can instruct a veteran learner, as long as the old dog is open-minded and ready for growth. So long as the individual in question is ready to confess when it was mistaken, and work to become a improved version.

Well, admittedly, I am that seasoned creature. And the skill I am attempting to master, although I am decrepit? It is an important one, an issue I have grappled with, repeatedly, for my whole existence. The quest I'm on … to become less scared of the common huntsman. Pardon me, all the different eight-legged creatures that exist; I have to be realistic about my potential for change as a human. It also has to be the huntsman because it is imposing, in charge, and the one I encounter most often. This includes three times in the recent past. In my own living space. You can’t see me, but a shudder runs through me and grimacing as I type.

I'm skeptical I’ll ever reach “admirer” status, but I’ve been working on at least achieving a standard level of composure about them.

A deep-seated fear of spiders dating back to my youth (unlike other children who adore them). Growing up, I had a sufficient number of brothers around to ensure I never had to engage with any directly, but I still panicked if one was clearly in the immediate vicinity as me. Vividly, I recall of one morning when I was eight, my family unconscious, and attempting to manage a spider that had made its way onto the lounge-room wall. I “managed” with it by positioning myself at a great distance, practically in the adjoining space (for fear that it pursued me), and spraying a significant portion of insect spray toward it. It didn’t reach the spider, but it did reach and annoy everyone in my house.

As I got older, whomever I was in a relationship with or living with was, as a matter of course, the least afraid of spiders between us, and therefore in charge of dealing with it, while I emitted low keening sounds and fled the scene. If I was on my own, my tactic was simply to exit the space, plunge the room into darkness and try to ignore its existence before I had to return.

In a recent episode, I was a guest at a pal's residence where there was a very large huntsman who made its home in the window frame, for the most part stationary. As a means to be more comfortable with its presence, I conceptualized the spider as a female entity, a girlie, one of us, just chilling in the sun and listening to us gab. This may seem quite foolish, but it worked (a little bit). Alternatively, actively deciding to become less phobic did the trick.

Be that as it may, I’ve tried to keep it up. I think about all the sensible justifications not to be scared. I am aware huntsman spiders pose no threat to me. I know they consume things like insect pests (the bane of my existence). It is well-established they are one of the world's exquisite, non-threatening to people creatures.

Alas, they do continue to move like that. They move in the deeply alarming and somehow offensive way possible. The sight of their multiple limbs propelling them at that terrible speed causes my ancient psyche to kick into overdrive. They are said to only have the typical arachnid arrangement, but I maintain that multiplies when they are in motion.

But it isn’t their fault that they have frightening appendages, and they have an equal entitlement to be where I am – if not more. I have discovered that employing the techniques of making an effort to avoid instantly leap out of my body and retreat when I see one, working to keep calm and collected, and deliberately thinking about their beneficial attributes, has actually started to help.

Just because they are fuzzy entities that dart around at an alarming rate in a way that invades my dreams, is no reason for they warrant my loathing, or my girly screams. I can admit when fear has clouded my judgment and fueled by baseless terror. I doubt I’ll ever reach the “catching one in a Tupperware container and escorting it to the garden” level, but miracles happen. Some life is left left in this veteran of life yet.