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I am someone who believes that it is forever an option to change. My view is you absolutely are able to train a seasoned creature, provided that the mature being is receptive and willing to learn. So long as the individual in question is prepared to acknowledge when it was wrong, and work to become a better dog.

OK yes, I am that seasoned creature. And the trick I am trying to learn, despite the fact that I am decrepit? It is an significant challenge, an issue I have struggled with, repeatedly, for my all my days. My ongoing effort … to develop a calmer response toward the common huntsman. My regrets to all the other spiders that exist; I have to be realistic about my potential for change as a human. It also has to be the huntsman because it is imposing, commanding, and the one I encounter most often. This includes three times in the recent past. Inside my home. You can’t see me, but I'm grimacing at the very thought as I type.

I'm skeptical I’ll ever reach “fan” status, but my project has been at least becoming a standard level of composure about them.

An intense phobia regarding spiders from my earliest years (as opposed to other children who find them delightful). In my formative years, I had plenty of male siblings around to guarantee I never had to confront any directly, but I still panicked if one was visibly in the general area 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 crawled on to the lounge-room wall. I “handled” with it by standing incredibly far away, nearly crossing the threshold (in case it ran after me), and emptying half a bottle of pesticide toward it. The spray failed to hit the spider, but it managed to annoy and disturb everyone in my house.

In my adult life, whoever I was dating or sharing a home with was, automatically, the most courageous of spiders out of the two of us, and therefore responsible for managing the intruder, while I produced whimpers of distress and fled the scene. When finding myself alone, my strategy was simply to exit the space, plunge the room into darkness and try to erase the memory of its being before I had to return.

Not long ago, I was a guest at a companion's home where there was a notably big huntsman who made its home in the casement, mostly just lingering. In order to be less scared of it, I envisioned the spider as a her, a girlie, one of us, just chilling in the sun and listening to us yap. It sounds rather silly, but it was effective (somewhat). Put another way, actively deciding to become more fearless worked.

Regardless, I've endeavored to maintain this practice. I contemplate all the rational arguments not to be scared. I know huntsman spiders are not dangerous to humans. I know they consume things like flies and mosquitoes (creatures I despise). I am cognizant they are one of nature’s beautiful, benign creatures.

Alas, they do continue to scuttle like that. They travel in the utterly horrifying and almost unjust way possible. The vision of their many legs transporting them at that frightening pace causes my primordial instincts to go into high alert. They claim to only have the typical arachnid arrangement, but I believe that triples when they get going.

However it isn’t their fault that they have scary legs, and they have an equal entitlement to be where I am – if not more. My experience has shown that employing the techniques of working to prevent have a visceral panic reaction and run away when I see one, working to keep calm and collected, and consciously focusing about their good points, has proven somewhat effective.

Simply due to the reality that they are fuzzy entities that scuttle about with startling speed in a way that causes me nocturnal distress, is no reason for they merit my intense dislike, or my shrieks of terror. I am willing to confess when my reactions have been misguided and fueled by irrational anxiety. It is uncertain I’ll ever make it to the “scooping one into plasticware and escorting it to the garden” level, but you never know. There’s a few years left in this seasoned learner yet.