Melting Snow

Wildcard Thursday: Overcoming Arachnophobia

Thursday, March 16, 2017

“Fear echoes your self-defined limitations, not your actual ones. To change your self-image, you must face what scares you.”
Vironika Tugaleva

The Wildcard Round prompt for "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS" 
Tell us about a time you had to overcome a big or small fear in order to get what you wanted/be successful/maintain something.

I have suffered from arachnophobia most of my life. It was so bad that I couldn't even remove a spider's web from a corner of the ceiling in any room of the house or remove a black widow's egg sack from the garage. The Widow was hanging onto the egg sack. I had to get one of my brothers to kill the spider to prevent her from dropping onto a person's head. I finally over come this fear by killing a black widow spider, but not because I wanted to. I didn't want to get near her.

Mom and I were living in the house on Bracken Avenue. We had several indoor cats at the time. The cats would chase anything they saw moving across the floor. I happened to be in the foyer when a black widow crawled into the house. I think she was between the screen and the door when I opened the door. Anyway I just happened to look down and see her. I sure it was God's will that I noticed her crawl into the house.

I couldn't let her stay in the house or deposit an egg case anywhere inside. I had no choice except to kill the spider. I hit her with something, I think my shoe or some other object. I don't know whether I killed her, but I definitely knocked her out. I swept the body into the dustpan, dumped the dustpan into a plastic trash grocery bag which I tied tightly and then placed that in another plastic grocery bag. I wasn't taking any chances of her crawling out and coming after me in revenge. I put the plastic bags containing the spider into the kitchen trash bag, tied that and carried it to the rolling plastic dumpster in the garage. I then rolled the dumpster to the curb because the garbage trucks were coming the next morning. Normally I would have waited until early on on trash day to roll the dumpster to the curb, but I wasn't taking any chances that the spider would crawl out of the plastic bags and come after me.

As a results of that experience I'm no longer so terrified of spiders that I can't kill them if they are in home or close to my door. I can also remove spider webs from the corner of rooms, all though I have encountered those inside my house in years.