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I maintain the conviction that it is forever an option to transform. I think you can in fact teach an old dog new tricks, on the condition that the experienced individual is receptive and willing to learn. Provided that the individual in question is willing to admit when it was wrong, and work to become a better dog.

OK yes, the metaphor applies to me. And the skill I am working to acquire, although I am decrepit? It is an significant challenge, an issue I have grappled with, often, for my entire life. The quest I'm on … to develop a calmer response toward those large arachnids. Pardon me, all the remaining arachnid species that exist; I have to be realistic about my possible growth as a human. It also has to be the huntsman because it is sizeable, in charge, and the one I see with the greatest frequency. Encompassing a trio of instances in the recent past. Within my dwelling. I'm not visible to you, but I'm grimacing with discomfort as I type.

It's unlikely I’ll ever reach “enthusiast” status, but my project has been at least becoming a baseline of normalcy about them.

I have been terrified of spiders dating back to my youth (as opposed to other children who find them delightful). Growing up, I had ample brothers around to make sure I never had to handle any directly, but I still freaked out if one was clearly in the same room as me. I have a strong memory of one morning when I was eight, my family unconscious, and trying to deal with a spider that had made its way onto the family room partition. I “managed” with it by positioning myself at a great distance, almost into the next room (lest it ran after me), and spraying half a bottle of bug repellent toward it. It didn’t reach the spider, but it did reach and irritate everyone in my house.

With the passage of time, whomever I was in a relationship with or living with was, by default, the least afraid of spiders between us, and therefore tasked with dealing with it, while I produced whimpers of distress and fled the scene. In moments of solitude, my method was simply to leave the room, douse the illumination and try to forget about its being before I had to return.

Recently, I visited a companion's home where there was a very large huntsman who lived in the sill, mostly just hanging out. To be less scared of it, I conceptualized the spider as a 'girlie', a one of the girls, in our circle, just chilling in the sun and listening to us yap. It sounds quite foolish, but it worked (to some degree). Put another way, actively deciding to become less scared proved successful.

Be that as it may, I’ve tried to keep it up. I contemplate all the sensible justifications not to be scared. It is a fact that huntsman spiders are not dangerous to humans. I recognize they prey upon things like flies and mosquitoes (creatures I despise). I am cognizant they are one of nature’s beautiful, harmless-to-humans creatures.

Yet, regrettably, they do continue to move like that. They travel in the utterly horrifying and almost unjust way imaginable. The sight of their numerous appendages transporting them at that terrible speed triggers my caveman brain to go into high alert. They are said to only have a standard octet of limbs, but I maintain that multiplies when they move.

However it is no fault of their own that they have scary legs, and they have the same privilege to be where I am – perhaps even more so. My experience has shown that implementing the strategy of working to prevent instantly leap out of my body and flee when I see one, trying to remain calm and collected, and deliberately thinking about their positive qualities, has actually started to help.

Simply due to the reality that they are hairy creatures that move hastily extremely quickly in a way that haunts my sleep, does not justify they deserve my hatred, or my high-pitched vocalizations. It is possible to acknowledge when I’ve been wrong and driven by irrational anxiety. I’m not sure I’ll ever make it to the “scooping one into plasticware and relocating it outdoors” phase, but one can't be sure. A bit of time remains left in this old dog yet.