1
Before Adrian and I left for our two-week trip to the Galapagos Islands, my friends had a going-away party for me. I was a PhD student at the time at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.
Knowing my fear of insects, especially spiders, my friends gave me joke gifts: one was a size 46 bra with plastic spiders, cockroaches and flies sewn into the cups. It was disgustingly vulgar.
Another gift was a live cockroach, still moving, in a see-through plastic pouch. A string had been stapled to it so it could be hung around my neck.
Another gift was the synthetic stuff sold around Halloween to make your own fake spider webs. It came with a plastic spider.
Finally, there were pages of text about spiders in the Galapagos Islands.
Actually, spiders turned out to be the least of my worries on the Galapagos trip. I remember only one, and it was not large. Biologist Bruce held it in his open palm as he stopped to give us a little lecture about it.
2
I am not afraid of snakes and mice—things that some people are afraid of. The point is, a phobia doesn’t have a point. You are afraid of what you are afraid of. It’s not rational.
I remember one summer being able to hold a large preying mantis in my hand. I had tricked my mind into thinking of it as an animal, not an insect.
3
One cure for phobias is to immerse yourself in the thing you are afraid of. Watching the movie Arachnophobia was as far as I got on that one.
4
Maybe one sign that my first marriage was not going to last was the fact that my husband kept a black widow spider as a pet.
5
When my daughter was around ten, I often encountered spiders in the little house in Lake Hiawatha, New Jersey, that the two of us lived in together. I can remember one time being trapped in the bathroom because a spider was between me and the exit.
“Blixy,” I called, “come and help me kill a spider.”
When she came upstairs to the bathroom and saw the small size of the spider, she said, “Can’t you just step over it?”
“No, I can’t.”
She sighed and killed it for me.
6
Last night Blixy reminded me of another spider encounter that was more harrowing for her than for me: We were in the car together on the far lane of a highway in New Jersey. She was around 11 or 12 at the time.
As I focused on the road, Blixy noticed a spider on the steering wheel and thought, “Omigod, if Mom sees that, we’re dead!”
In a calm voice, she said to me, “Mom, would you pull off the road when you can?”
I must have thought she was feeling sick or something, and did as she said. As soon as I stopped the car, she killed the spider and we continued on our way.
7
A therapist once asked me what spiders represent to me. “They are unpredictable,” I said. “You don’t know what they are going to do next.”
Just like me.
After working with the therapist on my phobia, I can now deal with very small spiders. I can’t live with them, but I don’t panic at the sight of them any more.
8
After a lifetime of frightening encounters with spiders, one of my sisters suggested a few years ago that I get an exterminator service for the house.
Wow, why didn’t I think of that? Makes much more sense than carrying a can of bug spray wherever you go.
Since then, a service comes four times a year to do my whole house, and if I find any bugs in between those times, they will come and take care of it, free of charge.
Last year a new guy came to do the extermination. As we discussed the plan for his attack, I said, “I have a spider phobia, so I need you to do a thorough job.”
“Don’t worry,” he said enthusiastically. “I have a spider phobia too!”
Then he told me his story: when he was a little boy, the family went every summer to stay in their cabin in the woods in Pennsylvania. One summer when he was five, he ran inside the cabin the instant his parents unlocked the door, and on one window he saw a giant spider on the glass. It was so large he was sure it was a toy spider, and he ran up to grab it.
The spider latched itself onto his face. He ran screaming, traumatized forever, as his father tore the thing off him.
I was glad I didn’t have a story like that to tell, and I’ve felt secure ever since that this man will make sure I don’t find any live spiders in my house.
9
For most of my life, I not only panicked when I saw a real spider, but hallucinated them as well.
I’d be sound asleep at night and then bolt up, suddenly awake, seeing a spider dangling in front of me. I’d leap out of bed, careful not to invade its space, and turn on the lights. Then I’d look through all the bedcovers to reassure myself that what I had seen was not real.
Sometimes I’d do this several times in one night. It was exhausting.
When I was a kid, I’d wake up my mother and she would come in and check all the bedcovers to reassure me that it was OK to go back to sleep.
These were not dreams, but real hallucinations. A partner who was still awake when this happened to me reported that I focused on a spot in front of my face when I bolted up at those times.
I learned eventually that these hallucinations were a sign of anxiety. The more anxious I was, the more hallucinations I had. But over the years I got so used to them that I didn’t have to jump out of bed any more. “Hallucination,” I’d remind myself, and go back to sleep.
Once when there was an actual spider in my bed, I sleepily crushed it, brushed it off the bed, and went back to my dream.
10
In the middle of a deep depression in my late forties, a psychiatrist diagnosed me as bipolar and prescribed lithium.
End of hallucinations.
Even after I stopped taking lithium, the hallucinations never reappeared.
I kind of miss them.