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I firmly hold the belief that it is forever an option to transform. I think you truly can teach an old dog new tricks, as long as the old dog is willing and ready for growth. So long as the old dog is ready to confess when it was in error, and strive to be a improved version.

Well, admittedly, I am the old dog. And the lesson I am trying to learn, even though I am set in my ways? It is an important one, a feat I have struggled with, repeatedly, for my all my days. My ongoing effort … to develop a calmer response toward the common huntsman. Pardon me, all the different eight-legged creatures that exist; I have to be realistic about my potential for change as a human. The target inevitably is the huntsman because it is imposing, in charge, and the one I see with the greatest frequency. Including on three separate occasions in the last week. Inside my home. I'm not visible to you, but a shudder runs through me and grimacing as I type.

I'm skeptical I’ll ever reach “enthusiast” status, but I've dedicated effort to at least becoming a baseline of normalcy about them.

A deep-seated fear of spiders dating back to my youth (in contrast to other children who adore them). During my childhood, I had a sufficient number of brothers around to ensure I never had to handle any directly, but I still freaked out if one was obviously in the general area as me. I have a strong memory of one morning when I was eight, my family still asleep, and trying to deal with a spider that had made its way onto the lounge-room wall. I “dealt” with it by positioning myself at a great distance, practically in the adjoining space (in case it ran after me), and spraying a generous amount of insect spray toward it. The spray failed to hit the spider, but it succeeded in affecting and annoy everyone in my house.

With the passage of time, whomever I was in a relationship with or sharing a home with was, by default, the least afraid of spiders in our pairing, and therefore in charge of managing the intruder, while I made whimpers of distress and fled the scene. In moments of solitude, my strategy was simply to leave the room, turn off the light and try to erase the memory of its presence before I had to enter again.

In a recent episode, I was a guest at a friend’s house where there was a particularly sizable huntsman who made its home in the sill, primarily hanging out. In order to be less scared of it, I envisioned the spider as a 'girlie', a one of the girls, one of us, just chilling in the sun and eavesdropping on us gab. Admittedly, it appears rather silly, but it worked (to some degree). Put another way, actively deciding to become less phobic did the trick.

Regardless, I’ve tried to keep it up. I reflect upon all the logical reasons not to be scared. It is a fact that huntsman spiders won’t harm me. I understand they prey upon things like insect pests (my mortal enemies). It is well-established they are one of the planet's marvelous, harmless-to-humans creatures.

Unfortunately, however, they do continue to scuttle like that. They move in the most terrifying and almost unjust way imaginable. The appearance of their many legs propelling them at that alarming velocity causes my primordial instincts to go into high alert. They are said to only have a standard octet of limbs, but I am convinced that multiplies when they are in motion.

Yet it isn’t their fault that they have unnerving limbs, and they have just as much right to be where I am – perhaps even more so. My experience has shown that taking the steps of trying not to have a visceral panic reaction and run away when I see one, trying to remain still and breathing, and deliberately thinking about their good points, has proven somewhat effective.

Simply due to the reality that they are hairy creatures that move hastily extremely quickly in a way that haunts my sleep, does not justify they deserve my hatred, or my shrieks of terror. It is possible to acknowledge when I’ve been wrong and motivated by baseless terror. I’m not sure I’ll ever attain the “trapping one under a cup and escorting it to the garden” level, but miracles happen. Some life is left within this veteran of life yet.