Hello this is where I am going to talk about my irrational(ish) fear of spiders because I would like somewhere to document the extent of my fear and also how it started.

I can recall memories of when I was 4 years old. Me and my family spent a lot of time at our beach house. I shared a room with one of my sisters (my youngest sister to be specific, who is still 3 years older than me). She slept in the small single bed and I slept in a cot. I think 4 years old is probably a bit too old to be sleeping in a cot? Im not really sure if thats normal or not but I do remember I really liked the cot and I have always been averse to change so I would just sleep in there instead of an actual bed. It’s kinda weird to recall being small enough to fit in a cot let alone comfortably sleep in it. Anyways at our beach house in the living room we had a small indoor tent that was filled with ball pit balls and I loved playing in it. We also had these lego-like bricks that you could stack together but it wasn’t as custom as lego is but being 4 years old thats not really important. Anyways that parts not really relevant I just wanted to write down all that I can recall. At my beach house I used to have nightmares about the tent, I would be sitting inside the tent and there would be a swarm of ladybugs jumping up and down towards me. I told my sisters about it and they would make fun of me for being scared of ladybugs. Which to be fair, they had a point. Ladybugs are pretty awesome, although I haven’t seen one in a really long time. In addition to them making fun of me they would also put me in the tent and talk about ladybugs and torment and scare me. It was pretty messed up but in their defense they were all <10 years old. I think thats where my fear of bugs in general first manifested.

Some point after this incident, back at my normal house. My parents were at work and it was me and my sisters and my neighbour who would come over often to hang out. I was in the living room playing video games next to one of my sisters (I can’t remember what game but it was probably jak n daxter for the ps2) as I was playing, my 2 other sisters came in. One of them screamed “[deadname] THERES A SPIDER !!!” And I turned around and behind me I saw a giant spider and started screaming and ran away. All of my sisters were laughing and one of them was holding a nokia phone. They had bought a rubber spider from the 2 dollar store and snuck up and placed it behind me without me noticing. Then filmed my reaction as they yelled out to me. My sisters and my neighbour were watching the video on my phone over and over again and laughing at it. I was still so terrified I had hopped up onto the kitchen counter and curled up because I was terrified of the floor, I couldn’t process that the spider was fake and was still freaking out.

Like I said my sisters were all very young and even my neighbour was only slightly older than my oldest sister. So I don’t really blame them, to them it was just a funny prank on their baby brother. It really sucks that it’s still stuck with me my entire life but what can ya do.

I’ve never actually met anyone more or even equally as afraid of spiders as myself. This part of the page will be dedicated to the extent of my fear now that we’ve talked about the root of it.

I cannot bare to so much as look at a picture of a spider, even a lot of cartoonish depictions are too much for me, some are okay. An example that comes to mind are the spiders depicted in adventure time season 4 episode 3 titled “web weirdos” I’m not really sure what makes these ones okay ? Probably because I love adventure time so much. It also helps I first watched the episode when I was still pretty young and the fear hadn’t manifested itself as strongly as it is today. Although there is a moment towards the end of the episode that makes me viscerally uncomfortable, I tend to look away during that part. Pretty much all realistic depictions of spiders are a no go for me, sometimes if its a video game or something I can tolerate it, some days I can even handle looking at an actual spider (although extremely rare and there is always a strong degree of discomfort regardless) but yeah its pretty all encompassing. I wanted to write about it because a lot of people don’t truly understand the full extent of my fear let alone how it started (it’s not a story I like telling). I was inspired to write because I got jumpscared opening a text channel in the australian smash discord where someone had posted a picture of a spider. I think a lot of people are afraid of spiders but I haven’t met anyone that cannot even handle looking at pictures of them. It can get pretty frustrating since no one is ever thinking to censor pictures of them. My friends in school used to troll me by sending me gifs of spiders and stuff like that. They weren’t very good friends a lot of the time.

I’ve gotten pretty good at sensing when youtube videos im watching might end up bringing up spiders or showing one on screen among a list of bugs and whatnot. Its kinda an awesome feeling to realise in advance and block my gaze before they even start talking about spiders, just because they said something that was only loosely related to spiders. I kinda hope ai can get good enough to develop a permanent “aracnaphobia mode” chrome extension or something. Apparently one used to exist but it doesn’t anymore, it probably didn’t work very well anyway. Sometimes ill get jumpscared by spiders on my twitter timeline which is always very upsetting, no matter how many times i hit “i do not like this tweet”.

Thank you for reading if you read all of this. All of this was to say: I really really hate australian summers.