Arachnophobia and the Quest for Freedom

So, firstly a little bit of back story.

My name is Ally, though many people call me Tig. I am a 40 year old animal science laboratory technician at an agricultural university. I graduated with a first class degree in Zoology with aquatic biology.
In my time as an undergrad I undertook grassland sampling, invertebrate sampling, kick sampling, and I spent several weeks doing biodiversity work of all kinds in the Borneo rainforest. I have had plenty of exposure to invertebrates, and I have enjoyed it. In my personal life, I have kept giant African land snails, Indian stick insects, and giant millipedes. I love all animals and have no fear of insects - I love to handle them, the bigger the better.

......except for spiders.

Spiders, spooders, nopes. More recently I have come to call them Ticklers of Terror.

My fear of spiders is such that during my first year of uni I resisted all efforts to have me visit the endangered cave spiders at a site of scientific interest. During my second year at university, I deliberately avoided all arachnid based lectures. I couldn't face even learning about them. My lecturer got his revenge by setting 33% of the exam questions on arachnids at the end of the year... I couldn't answer any of them. Fortunately I still managed to pass the course, getting a respectable B grade in that unit. But honestly? I could have done without the spiders. And finally, during my final year, I dug my heels in and refused to go on a night time rainforest walk to highlight all of the giant spiders with a UV torch. I managed to get through the entire degree without experiencing so much as a single spider-related educational experience.

I wasn't always scared of spiders. I can't say that I ever really liked them as a preteen, though as a small child I would play with them in much the same way that my daughter plays with ladybirds.
One day when I was 11, there was a giant house spider (Eratigena atrica) running loose in the living room. It made me jump and so I shouted out. I wasn't really scared as such, but it was quite large and I obviously didn't want it to run at me. The adult in the room at that time decided that he was going to catch the spider, and I thought he was going to put it out in the garden. Instead, he chased me with it, pinned me to the floor with my arms by my sides, and let this rather large spider crawl over my face.

And that was it. One traumatic event is still affecting me 30 years later. I've had nightmares, night terrors, hallucinations. If someone sent me a picture or a video that contained an unexpected spider, my phone would be literally thrown across the room. It's a knee jerk reaction that I have no control over, and it's rather embarassing. My teenage son has posted photos of me hiding from spiders under my duvet, and my young daughter likes to tell me there's a spider on my back just to see me react. I don't like it, but for the most part, I've not been able to control my responses. Whether it is a real spider in the house, an animated spider in World of Warcraft, or a CGI one in a movie, I simply can't handle them.

Currently, I collect samples for the Rothamsted Insect survey. My university is home to both an aphid suction trap and a moth light trap. These traps are not set to deliberately catch spiders, as their names might suggest, but spiders do inevitably end up in the sample pots. There's nothing worse for me than removing the sample pot from the suction trap and having a very annoyed spider suddenly dart out of the pot onto my hand. And once, a whole swarm of mini spiders started crawling out of a pot I was collecting. I dropped it in the sink and had to have a colleague finish the sampling for me. Additionally, spiders like to make their webs on the moth trap, or hibernate in latches and doors when the weather turns colder.
Another part of my job involves the maintanance of our collection of specimens. I have been fortunate enough to not have to work with the live spiders in the small animal centre, but we do have a collection of perserved invertebrates, including tarantulas and tarantula moults. These have posed problems in the past as I've been unable to go near the shelf that they're kept on.

All of this adds up to my arachnophobia being quite debilitating now. It's affecting both my home and work lives, as well as my social life. Going to the cinema to watch The Lord of the Rings was a no, for example.

Recently there has been a surge in the number of people keeping and vlogging about jumping spiders, Phidippus regius. At first I made a deliberate effort to hide every spider related post that was popping up in my social media feed. Every unexpected spider would give me a start, and risked my phone taking a flying dive. But....eventually I became accustomed to seeing them. I didn't need to hide the posts any more, I was able to simply scroll past instead. But, eventually I was able to look at the photos and to watch the videos. It was just a baby step, but I found myself starting to think that maybe these spiders weren't scary, but cute. And, with great respect and many thanks to content creators such as Mini Robot Muppets, and Tiana the Bug Lady, I finally feel ready to take the next step in combatting my arachnophobia - Spider ownership.

I am nervous, I am anxious, I am excited. I don't know whether I am actually as brave as I think I am, I don't know that if I order a spider, I'm not immediately going to throw the poor mite across the room at the first unboxing. I don't know the first thing about keeping spiders. This is going to be an adventure, and it might end in disaster. It might even leave me more phobic than I was to begin with. But I have to try. And I hope that you will join me for the ride.