Face to face with your Phobia

Have you ever been face-to-face with your phobia?  I have fears of things but nothing quite like my phobia of spiders.  It’s paralyzing for me.   If I can touch one with a ten foot pole then it’s too close.  If I am home alone I will watch the spider until my husband gets home to take care of it.  He has received hysterical phone calls that he needs to get home because there’s a spider in the house.  He’ll tell me things like use a shoe, put a cup over it, spray some bug spray on it.  I just can’t bring myself to get that close.

My mom needed some old pictures that were stored in our crawl space.  I got curious and started to look through some just when I felt a little tickle over my left shoulder and jumped a little. I swiped with my hand but felt nothing.  My husband saw me jump and asked what happened.  I told him I got a… and all I saw were his bulging eyes leaping from the couch and his hand was flying at me.  I KNEW.  I KNEW something was there.  He swiped once and I knew I wasn’t in the clear yet.  I thought I was going to have a panic attack.  I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t move.  My body was paralyzed.  I could only scream.  Horrible, horrible words that I won’t even type with asterisks because they were so bad I don’t want them to be on the record.  Bam! He swats again and yells, “Get me a paper towel!”  I couldn’t.  I really could not move. He came running back downstairs and wrapped up whatever it was in a blanket of paper towels and took care of it.

When my heart began to finally beat at a normal pace I quietly asked, “What was it?”  He just looked at me with questioning eyes that were asking are you sure you want to know? ” What.  Was it?” I repeated.   Why did I need to know?  Wouldn’t it just torture me more?  I just had to know though so he finally told me.  A centipede!!!!!!!!!! Again.  Even with carefully placed asterisks I won’t say what my response was.

Needless to say, I’ve been twitching for two days now.  A gust of wind, a breeze from a fan, a swipe of my hair.  It all makes me jump.  I’m constantly looking over my shoulders.