Hunstmenphobia

Dearest e-Diary,

I've just murdered a huntsman and now I hate myself. I just wanted to take the poor little fella outside, but I just can't bring myself to do it. Stupid arachnophobia (huntsmen specific) is a psychological brick wall. My sister advised me to get phobia counselling for the sake of all my future eight-legged victims. That may convince me to go.  Nothing else will.  The problem is that systemic desnsitisation involves touching a spider.

And to think I could become a psychologist after a few more years training. Who wouldn't want me as their counsellor?

Never smile at a ladybug

Sometimes I want to write, but nothing of interest feeds through my little pea brain, so I'm left bereft with little more than useless, time-wasting, blog-cluttering sentences (which turn into paragraphs), a little like the one you're currently being subjected to.  And sometimes a tiny, inconsequential ladybug can trigger an avalanche of amazing, mind-blowing, mind-boggling blog content.  Alas, I'm afraid that's not going to happen today.

It turns out that I did actually see an itty bitty ladybug today, as opposed to those mammoth ones you see stomping loudly and violently through Amazonian rainforests via David Attenborough.  If you haven't seen them then you really need to sign up for the National Geographic channel and enlighten yourself to the world of these scary, polka-dotted savages.

Whilst viewing said ladybug today, I wondered to myself - as one naturally does - if the ladybug is non-threatening to me because it is polka-dotted, thus fairly comical, or if it's scarylessness has evolved from the fact that we call it a LADYBUG.  And then it occurred to me (very slow traffic lights) that maybe this is the root of the huntsman's unpopularity; the darn things have a PR crisis. 

So I was thinking that if perhaps we renamed the huntsman 'Mr Scarylegs', they wouldn't be so terrifying to me.  Hmm, or perhap that wouldn't help much at all.  I still remember thousands of years ago, when the little arachnids used to terrify me as I drove out of my cave's garage for a hard day of hunting and gathering at Costco, so it's pretty hard-wired in there.

I have had arachnophobia - huntsman specific - for a fairly long time.  I am fucking petrified of them.  Yes, I know I can fix it by systemic desensitisation, and yes I know that my fear is irrational, and yes I know that it is absolutely not rational to keep tongs by your mailbox to fetch the post, and yes I know that it's a little weird, if not completely screwed up, to not allow furniture to touch your walls.  It seems the one thing I do having going for me in phobialand is self-awareness.  

I know what you're thinking, that a huntsman wouldn't hurt a fly, but we both know that's not strictly true, don't we?  They friggin' devour flies.  And, yes, I know they keep away other wall-dwelling bugs, burglars and probably extraterrestrial life from mars, but I have a phobia, fool, so shush.

Why Bed Bath N' Table love Halloween, but I don't

Today I innocently wandered into a retail death trap set by stealth-like shop assistants, who were intent on seeing me suffer a socially awkward anxiety attack in front of their cash register.  The buggers have have put out their Halloween merchandise and tacky decorations (see: fake spiders) ALREADY. 

I thought I had a few weeks to prep for the trauma that is involved, but they took me by surprise this year.  For the love of god, why do they need to put plastic spiders on the cash register??!   Perhaps I'll take in a big can of Mortein and jam it up their EFTPOS machine.

I used to love Halloween. When I was eight.  Living in New Delhi, India, and attending an American school, my sister and I got right into the spirit of things with our friends, spurred on by the American obsession with celebrating the holiday through jack-o'-lantern carvings, dressing up as ghosts trapped in purgatory, and trick or treating our way through the diplomats in the U.S. Embassy who were stupid enough to open their doors to us.  We had so much fun; it's a shame that Australia doesn't celebrate the holiday with quite the same enthusiasm as Americans.

I took all the trimmings of Halloween in my stride back in the day.  All the symbolism of skeletons, witches and ghosts in low thread count white sheets, and the associated spiders and other creepy crawlies didn't bother me at all.  But that all changed the day a non-itsy bitsy super-spider fell onto the white doona of my bed during a holiday in Northern India.  It was the beginning of my arachnophobia. 

Many moons, and countless stereotypical close encounters with eight-legged monsters later, I can safely say that I got it bad.  People tell me to just go get it fixed, like it was an oil leak in my car.  But it's not a friggin' oil leak, people, I have a friggin' psychological disorder.  And research shows that "hardly any" people seek treatment for their phobia.

Which makes sense, given that sufferers are terrified of the object of their phobia.  You couldn't pay me to voluntarily get treatment, because I know that the process of systemic desensitisation involves, at some point, handling a spider.  

I studied this treatment at uni in psych, and I know that I should be slightly less mortified by the time I handle the spider, but I still can't do it.  No way. 

Plus, I've seen this show from the U.S. where this shrink's idea of therapy is to force their client to spend a night (with the shrink) in a spider-infested house, and they don't know where the spiders are hiding, and then they get all surprised when they find them in the morning and then, presumably, they are cured.  I am still completely traumatised by this documentary. 

But, I can't kill spiders because it's against my rules, so on the occasions that it comes down to me and the spider, it's all about who blinks first, and then the other runs away and we just pretend that it didn't happen.  And then I rope some poor sucker into taking it outside, under strict instructions to not kill the prisoner.  Poor little things.