I’m not normally afraid of spiders…
However…
Coming back from Ottawa yesterday, I stopped for gas and felt a small sting on my ankle. Looking down, I spotted a small brown spider crawling up my leg. I brushed it off my leg and continued refuelling thinking nothing of it.
I mentioned it to my wife, a health care worker, and she took it upon herself to check on me every half-hour. Making sure I wouldn’t soon forget the incident. Thankfully, there were no ill effects.
I was back on the highway, daydreaming of new powers, minding my own business, when out of nowhere, another spider appeared and started crawling across the inside of my windshield. I struggled to find something to squash it while travelling at high speed.
Just when I found a tissue, it disappeared into the headliner. For the next three hundred kilometres I kept an eye on it’s point of entry… never actually seeing it again.
From Wikipedia (modified slightly to remove a bunch of fill):
Arachnophobia (from the Greek:, aráchnē, “spider” and phóbos, “fear”) is a specific phobia, the fear of spiders and other arachnids such as scorpions.
People with arachnophobia tend to feel uneasy in any area they believe could harbor spiders or that has visible signs of their presence, such as webs. If arachnophobics see a spider, they may not enter the general vicinity until they have overcome the panic attack that is often associated with their phobia.
So I’m over it for now and I’ll probably forget about the spider lurking in my headliner but it will very likely come back to haunt me at the most inopportune time and bring back my temporary fear of spiders.
the dan blog 