When I was younger, I didn't have any phobias that i was aware of and boy was that a lot of fun. For instance, when I was at school, my best friend Paul had a phobia of insects.....especially spiders. According to him, his fear of spiders stemmed from an incident when he was younger where his dad had squashed a massive spider on the end of a broom, then tried to make him touch it. He didn't want to, but in the end he grabbed it because he didn't want his dad to think he was a scaredy cat. Well, as it turns out, the spider wasn't actually dead and it suddenly clamped itself around the end of his fingers. You can imagine what happened. First he screamed, then he smashed his hand on the floor and everything else in an attempt to get the thing away from him. I couldn't help but laugh when he told me that story and given the way he told it, i'm pretty sure he didn't mind. To be honest, part of me doubted his commitment to his phobia so I decided to test it out.
Naturally, my lack of fear for spiders came in very handy. A couple of days after he told me the story, I went around the school and collected all the spiders I could find, maybe 30, then released them into his bedroom. Disappointingly, nothing explosive happened and I figured his phobia wasn't as bad as he'd made out.
It was two weeks later, when I saw a full cleaning crew at work in his room, that I realiszed something unusual was taking place....but I was yet to make the connection to my spiders. I grabbed hold of him and asked what the cleaners were doing in his room. He explained that he was fairly sure there was a spider nest in his room and that they had set up in there because they could smell his fear. I said that was madness. Spiders don't have noses. He said he'd noticed them appearing more and more. They were trying to surround him, then take him out. They were in his cupboard , his speaker, his pillow, on the walls.... It had gotten so bad that he'd started having nightmares about spiders with red eyes wrapping him up in silk so he couldn't move. Then climbing slowly up his body, fangs agape and dripping with venom, to his face. He always woke up at that point.
I felt bad. He wasn't kidding. He really did have arachnophobia. Anyway, I told him that I thought they were after me too because I'd found a bunch in my room.
"Really?! They're everywhere!" He said with a shudder.
So I didn't tell him it was me right then. But I did tell him years later and got a well deserved dead arm for my trouble.
I haven't seen Paul for a long time. Not because of that. We were the best of friends at school. Inseparable. Life just did it's thing and moved us off in different directions. I think he would be happy to learn that in the years since losing touch, I discovered quite a bit more respect for people's fears.
After university, I spent some time living in Perth, Western Australia......where I developed, you guessed it, a persistent and irrational fear of spiders. That would be because I had several unpleasant encounters with the fabulous varieties they have down there. The huntsman that launched itself at my face from inside a cupboard, the rot-the-skin-off-your-bones whitetails that persistently found their way into my bedroom and the BBQ-ruining Redback's in the garden. My fear manifested itself in a general anxiety and a tendency to jump and scream at every minute sensation on my legs, arms or back of the head. It was very annoying for everyone around me because, generally speaking, there was never anything there.
I'm sure Paul would be even more satisfied to learn that in addition to my irrational super-respect for our eight-legged friends, I'm becoming increasingly fearful of heights, air travel, dust, gluten, enclosed spaces, mosquitoes, deep water and the rest.
All joking aside. Phobias can severely restrict a person's life and they can be a devil to overcome. As I've gotten older, I've realized that true courage and bravery is best exemplified by those who are operating from a position of weakness or vulnerability. When someone challenges a fear, even if they fail, it fills me with admiration and inspires me in turn.