TRIGGER WARNING!
This post will include pictures of spiders! Big ones! They’re terrifying! Don’t read ahead if you’re afraid of or sensitive about that stuff!
So, I’m afraid of spiders. And I decided to go to a convention about spiders as confronting my fears may help me in that regard. Or not. It may have gotten worse. I don’t know yet since I haven’t seen any spiders in my flat yet.
As a child, I used to not be afraid of insects and spiders and everything that’s crawling on the ground. I used to pluck legs off grasshoppers as a child, as my parents told me a while ago. I also used to have no problem with centipedes, worms and other insects. And then there was that one day where I was washing my hands at a well while on vacation and a huge spider crawled onto my hand. At the time I was rather short and the spider probably looked bigger back then on my tiny hands and… well,… ever since I’ve been scared of everything that’s crawling on the ground.
I guess that that was the trigger for it all. Nowadays I can’t catch spiders alive and put them on the balcony but I’ll have to use the vacuum or my house shoes to get rid of them and whenever I see them I not only let out a rather (not so) manly scream out but also get the shivers all over my body, so that sucks.
And then a while ago, my girlfriend pointed out that there’s a convention for tarantulas and other big spiders near the city I’m living in, so I decided to go there as it may help. My goal was to let those guys there put at least one tarantula on my hand and to take at least a dozen photographs of spiders to confront my fears and get rid of it. My girlfriend came with me as emotional support, although she, too, is afraid of spiders.
In the end, I made a list of parts of the world that I’m not going to visit:
- Australia
- South-Africa
- South-America
- India
- Mexico
There are spiders out there that get up to 28 cm big! Wtf?! And some of them even jump rather high and look terrifying with their huge hairy legs!
Well, I managed to take a picture with a spider on my hand and that one wasn’t that big. I noticed that my beard (which I very much like) shares a lot of resemblance with that tarantula on my hand back then. Both my beard and those spiders are soft, hairy and dark. That’s kind of terrifying.
Later I slept at my girlfriend’s place and ended up waking up a couple of times during the night due to nightmares. At one point, I woke up as my girlfriend was shivering because of some nightmare. I guess, that that confrontation didn’t help either of us. Even now, a month after going there, I’m waking up from nightmares in the middle of the night, although they’re not as frequent as they were… Also, while writing up this post, I’m getting shivers all over my body and I’ve got to check the ceiling and the walls every few minutes, just to be sure that I’m not getting surprised by one of those monsters.
So the lesson from this experience was that confrontation isn’t the best idea in some cases as they may worsen your fears.
This post, btw, isn’t edited, as I’ve made the mistake of putting those pictures in here already and as I don’t wanna look at them again.
Oh well. Cheers!
Indiecator 