Just thought I’d share my personal spider experience.
When I was a kid I had no fear of spiders what-so-ever. Nor was there any reason to be afraid since I live in scandinavia where there aren’t any spiders that can hurt you anymore than a mosquito bite. I used to catch and/or kill them with my bare hands whenever my sister let out a window-shattering scream from the next room.
That was then.
When I was about 13 I had two freak-me-out incidents with spiders within a one month period.
The first one happened at a classmate’s birthday party. He got one of those palm-sized brown tarantula-esque spiders as a present and everyone was daring each other to hold it. Beeing a weak-minded teenager put under even the tiniest hint of peer pressure I agreed, picked it up and placed it on my palm.
It bit me.
It wasn’t really poisonous and my “wound” was no worse than a bee sting, but I don’t care who you are, when a godzilla sized spider bites you - you freak out. I must have flung that spider 15 feet across the room right into a wall.
If you ever feel the need to fling a spider into a wall, you should know that they don’t bounce… not even a little. When it hit the wall it dropped straight down behind a bookcase of some kind and it took about 15 minutes before we had it back safe in it’s terrarium.
I got the last laugh though. The spider died a few days later… and I didn’t. I did get two giant spider toothmarks in my hand though… and that’s pretty darn cool when you’re 13.
A few weeks later what I assume is a completely unrelated spider freaked me out again.
I was home alone that morning and had just taken a shower so I got my newly washed bathrobe that was hung out to dry in the garden and put it on. You know how you sometimes get the feeling like something is creeping around on your skin? Well, I now know that spiders feel exactly like that. At first you think it’s “just that feeling” but when you see a big black spider crawl out of your robe over your chest you never quite think of it as “just that feeling” ever again.
This particular spider had a body about half an inch long, and was about 2 inches including the legs. By swedish standards that’s a pretty f-ing big spider.
Anyway, I ripped that robe off as fast as I could, threw it on the floor and ran naked to the other side of the house, limbs flailing about frantically. I stood there for a while trying to calm down when I suddenly got “that feeling” again, something was creeping up my arm. I looked but there was nothing there. Then I feel something on my leg. Again nothing. Then I got the feeling on my back, in my hair… and at this point I started to calm down, “It’s just my imagination”. So I calmly (well…) went over to a mirror to make a thorough examination and as I stand there, the spider comes creeping up from my back over my shoulder and onto my neck.
Its evil master plan was ofcourse to enter my mouth and lay a thousand eggs in my stomach so that it’s young could devour me from the inside, and when they were grown I would explode in a myriad of spiders.
Fortunately, I killed it before that.
I killed it good.
To this day I have never seen anything that small spread over such a large area.
Nowadays spiders kind of creep me out, not in a “Eeek, a spider!” way , but more like “Kill, Kill, KILL!”. I don’t touch them with my bare hands anymore though, I wimp out and get some toilet paper. Or preferably a nice heavy college textbook, that way I can take out my aggressions on two things at once.
I’m not really that upset about this. I actually find it kind of comforting because this is the only aspect of my personality I can actually attribute to a specific childhood emotional trauma.
Besides it’s one of the few decent real life stories I have.