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I maintain the conviction that it is always possible to transform. I believe you truly can instruct a veteran learner, as long as the mature being is open-minded and ready for growth. As long as the person is ready to confess when it was mistaken, and work to become a more enlightened self.

Alright, I confess, I am the old dog. And the trick I am working to acquire, although I am set in my ways? It is an major undertaking, a feat I have grappled with, repeatedly, for my whole existence. I have been trying … to grow less fearful of huntsman spiders. Pardon me, all the different eight-legged creatures that exist; I have to be realistic about my capacity for development as a human. It also has to be the huntsman because it is large, in charge, and the one I see with the greatest frequency. Encompassing a trio of instances in the previous seven days. Within my dwelling. I'm not visible to you, but I’m shaking my head at the very thought as I type.

I doubt I’ll ever reach “enthusiast” status, but I've dedicated effort to at least becoming a baseline of normalcy about them.

A deep-seated fear of spiders dating back to my youth (unlike other children who are fascinated by them). In my formative years, I had plenty of male siblings around to guarantee I never had to handle any personally, but I still became hysterical if one was obviously in the immediate vicinity as me. One incident stands out of one morning when I was eight, my family still asleep, and trying to deal with a spider that had crawled on to the living room surface. I “handled” with it by standing incredibly far away, almost into the next room (in case it chased me), and discharging a generous amount of pesticide toward it. The chemical cloud missed the spider, but it did reach and disturb everyone in my house.

As I got older, whomever I was in a relationship with or cohabiting with was, as a matter of course, the least afraid of spiders in our pairing, and therefore in charge of managing the intruder, while I made frightened noises and fled the scene. In moments of solitude, my strategy was simply to leave the room, plunge the room into darkness and try to erase the memory of its presence before I had to return.

Not long ago, I stayed at a pal's residence where there was a particularly sizable huntsman who made its home in the window frame, primarily lingering. In order to be less fearful, I conceptualized the spider as a female entity, a one of the girls, in our circle, just chilling in the sun and overhearing us chat. This may seem rather silly, but it had an impact (to some degree). Put another way, making a conscious choice to become more fearless worked.

Whatever the case, I've endeavored to maintain this practice. I think about all the rational arguments not to be scared. I know huntsman spiders won’t harm me. I understand they prey upon things like flies and mosquitoes (my mortal enemies). I know they are one of nature’s beautiful, harmless-to-humans creatures.

Alas, they do continue to scuttle like that. They propel themselves in the utterly horrifying and somehow offensive way possible. The sight of their many legs propelling them at that frightening pace induces my caveman brain to kick into overdrive. They ostensibly only have eight legs, but I believe that triples when they are in motion.

But it cannot be blamed on them that they have unnerving limbs, and they have the same privilege to be where I am – if not more. I’ve found that implementing the strategy of trying not to have a visceral panic reaction and retreat when I see one, trying to remain calm and collected, and deliberately thinking about their beneficial attributes, has begun to yield results.

Simply due to the reality that they are fuzzy entities that scuttle about extremely quickly in a way that causes me nocturnal distress, is no reason for they merit my intense dislike, or my high-pitched vocalizations. I can admit when my reactions have been misguided and driven by baseless terror. I’m not sure I’ll ever attain the “scooping one into plasticware and escorting it to the garden” stage, but miracles happen. There’s a few years for this seasoned learner yet.