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I firmly hold the belief that it is never too late to transform. My view is you can in fact instruct a veteran learner, on the condition that the mature being is willing and eager for knowledge. As long as the old dog is willing to admit when it was mistaken, and work to become a better dog.

OK yes, the metaphor applies to me. And the trick I am working to acquire, although I am set in my ways? It is an major undertaking, a feat I have struggled with, frequently, for my entire life. The quest I'm on … to become less scared of huntsman spiders. Pardon me, all the different eight-legged creatures that exist; I have to be grounded about my capacity for development as a human. The target inevitably is the huntsman because it is imposing, dominant, and the one I see with the greatest frequency. Including a trio of instances in the previous seven days. Within my dwelling. I'm not visible to you, but a shudder runs through me and grimacing as I type.

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

An intense phobia regarding spiders since I was a child (unlike other children who adore them). Growing up, I had a sufficient number of brothers around to guarantee I never had to engage with any personally, but I still panicked if one was obviously in the same room as me. Vividly, I recall of one morning when I was eight, my family slumbering on, and trying to deal with a spider that had ascended the lounge-room wall. I “dealt” with it by standing incredibly far away, practically in the adjoining space (for fear that it chased me), and spraying a generous amount of insect spray toward it. The spray failed to hit the spider, but it managed to annoy and disturb everyone in my house.

As I got older, whomever I was in a relationship with or sharing a home with was, by default, the most courageous of spiders in our pairing, and therefore tasked with dealing with it, while I produced whimpers of distress and ran away. When finding myself alone, my method was simply to exit the space, turn off the light and try to forget about its existence before I had to enter again.

In a recent episode, I was a guest at a companion's home where there was a particularly sizable huntsman who lived in the casement, for the most part hanging out. As a means to be less scared of it, I envisioned the spider as a female entity, a one of the girls, one of us, just relaxing in the sun and overhearing us chat. This may seem extremely dumb, but it had an impact (to some degree). Or, actively deciding to become less scared proved successful.

Be that as it may, I've endeavored to maintain this practice. I contemplate all the logical reasons not to be scared. I know huntsman spiders pose no threat to me. I understand they consume things like flies and mosquitoes (the bane of my existence). I know they are one of the planet's marvelous, non-threatening to people creatures.

Alas, they do continue to scuttle like that. They move in the deeply alarming and almost unjust way possible. The appearance of their multiple limbs transporting them at that frightening pace induces my primordial instincts to kick into overdrive. They claim to only have eight legs, but I believe that multiplies when they move.

But 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. I’ve found that taking the steps of trying not to immediately exit my own skin and retreat when I see one, trying to remain calm and collected, and intentionally reflecting about their good points, has actually started to help.

The mere fact that they are fuzzy entities that scuttle about with startling speed in a way that causes me nocturnal distress, doesn’t mean they merit my intense dislike, or my high-pitched vocalizations. It is possible to acknowledge when I’ve been wrong and driven by irrational anxiety. I doubt I’ll ever attain the “trapping one under a cup and escorting it to the garden” stage, but one can't be sure. A bit of time remains for this veteran of life yet.