Fear Is Control in a Safety Vest

On spiders, worst-case scenarios, and making meaning.

To know me is to know my long-standing fear of spiders.

As the direct descendant of spider-fearing people, I come by it honestly. My mom, my mom’s mom, her mom, and presumably, the Neanderthal before: all spi-fraid.

Where’s the arachnophobia lineage upsell on Ancestry.com?

One of my Grandma’s greatest post-mortem hits is that she once saw a very average spider in her bathroom, then peed in a stockpot for two days.

Another time, while she was staying with us, there was a tornado warning. Instead of joining us in the spidery basement, she announced that she’d “rather die at the kitchen table.”

She did not die that day at our table. She died a few years later from six decades of smoking.

One could draw a straight line between my grandmother’s fear of spiders, my mother’s, and mine. We closely watch the women who raise us, and their overreactions become ours.

But I also think that irrational fears transcend time, space, and kinship.

I believe that during creation, we’re all sprinkled with a mittful of shit to overcome.

My sprinkles included thin hair, a general lack of coordination, and of course, spiders.

Growing up in an old stone farmhouse, we had our share of mice, centipedes, and earwigs. I didn’t like them, but I wasn’t afraid-afraid.

However, a spider sighting was always a 9-11 emergency—and honey, I will need to see a timestamped carcass as proof I can move on with my day.

As a kid, if there was a spider that got away in my bedroom—MY BEDROOM!?—you'd best believe I spent all my allowance and social prowess bribing my sister to look after my dossier. For the next week, she’d be in charge of fetching my clothing, toys, and other must-haves.

As an adult, at the sight of a spider, I’ve jumped out of rolling vehicles, off docks and into lakes, and from lakes into boats. I’ve refused countless real estate opportunities because a house has “felt spidery.” I don’t walk under cedar boughs, relax on wooden patio furniture, and have never, ever fucked with Australia.

When I go camping, I check every tent seam.

Before bed, I do a sensory scan.

In the fruit aisle, I approach bananas with caution.

For three consecutive summers, I had to get two-drink drunk to fall asleep on our houseboat. Really, I was in my 20s, so this wasn’t much of a chore.

But it was there, on our waterlogged, spider-magnet, that my exposure therapy began. Nary was there a day without an eight-legged encounter that would make child me, or my stubborn French Canadian grandmother, high-tail it to a Motel 6 in search of verminless luxury.

In poor taste, I’ve joked that I’d rather be in a room with a serial killer than a spider. I feel like I could incapacitate a killer with a few show tunes. And if that failed, perhaps the length of my leg hair, or just my regular personality, would do it.

But a spider is totally unpredictable. You never know when one might appear, which way it’ll go, or whom it’ll select to victimize.

Since those infestation-level summers aboard Luv Tub, my fear of spiders has noticeably improved. While I’m nowhere close to being cured, I can slip into closed-toed shoes without much thought.

Mostly, I am able to forget that satan’s arachno travels without an ankle monitor.

But recently, something unspeakable happened. Something that would’ve hospitalized an earlier iteration of me. Something so specific, cruel, and perfectly designed for personal upset.

On a regular night, after putting on fresh sheets, I crawled into bed. A few hours into my slumber, I awoke. Without a thought, I stuck my finger inside my ear and felt something.

Before bed, we’d gone on a walk in the fields. I assumed that “the something” in my ear was a disease-ridden tick and I’d be joining the likes of Avril Lavigne and the Hadids in a Lyme-y haze.

I flicked whatever it was out of my ear. Then, for dramatic effect, I flicked my ear a half dozen more times, then swatted and swiped at my mattress.

Naturally, I grabbed my phone and powered on the flashlight. Targeting the floor below, I looked for the tick.

At this point, my husband awoke.

In an attempt to stay calm and return to my favourite pastime (sleeping), I let out a fretful, “There was something in my ear, and I can’t find it!”

With that, I continued to scan the ground with my meagre iPhone 11 (Gen Z’s antique lantern), before going to the bathroom.

With both of us up, Kevin flicked on the overhead lights and began to rip apart the bed.

Then, from the bathroom, I saw it.

Under my pillow was a large, not average, black spider.

While I lay in bed searching the perimeter, that motherfucker jumped out of MY EAR and hid under MY PILLOW!

Stunned by the assault, I sat on the toilet seat and barked out my standard checklist:

“Get it!”

“Don’t let it get away!”

“Hurry!”

“Did you get it?”

“Ahhhhhhhhhh!”

“Let me see the body! Wait, I can’t know!”

From my porcelain commander’s seat, I quickly determined that in this unprecedented scenario, a close-up of the body would actually make things worse.

When I checked the clock, it was 5 AM. As neither a menopausal woman nor a strength trainer, it was too early to be awake.

I left the bedroom, possibly forever, and sat upright on our too-stiff, too-vintage sofa. Staring blankly ahead, I allowed myself the caricatured indulgence of bulging eyes and delirious hair.

“I can’t believe that happened!” I thought. “Why me!?”

From the living room, I yelled out my next round of questioning:

“Was it black? It was black wasn’t it!? Fuck!”

“How big was it? Actually, don’t tell me!”

“It was big though, right? WAY bigger than average!”

For the next week, I slept in the furthest bedroom from the incident. Every night, I checked my ear dozens of times. I even jolted awake from dreams of a spider on my face.

I meditated on it, googled “meaning of spider,” and stopped just shy of watching medical bug-in-ear retrievals.

I told my therapist about the encounter and how I was trying to make sense of it.

What could a spider in the ear mean?

Then she asked a question in the way that only therapists do: “Do you always try to attach meaning?”

In other words, did I treat something impactful as happenstance, or did I need to attach a lesson, silver lining, or some greater significance?

And my answer was, “Well yeah, doesn’t everyone?”

She said no. No, they do not.

Apparently, some people just experience a lifelong fear in their actual ear, caulk the baseboards, and look no deeper.

I can’t recall a time when something unfortunate happened, and I haven’t tried to create meaning.

A hurricane destroying the house isn’t just “bad luck”; it’s a chance to rebuild.

Not getting the job isn’t just a “no”; it’s a redirection.

Getting rained out isn’t just discomfort; it’s a memory.

I do this with the good stuff too.

A chance encounter is serendipity.

A perfectly timed song is the universe winking.

A person entering my life is “meant to happen.”

I’m not religious. I don’t have a psychic on retainer. But I have been quietly operating under the assumption that the thing is never just the thing.

These moments happen to foreshadow, teach, reward, punish, and eventually reveal themselves as part of a larger plot.

And this isn’t some toxic positivity bullshit where I don’t believe in cancer or unjustifiable things happening to good people. I don’t think everything happens for a reason. I think I’m just compelled to find one afterward.

Which, when put that way, is a lot of pressure to put on a spider.

When I think about the incident now, the whole thing feels embarrassingly literal. I came face-to-face with one of my greatest fears.

And then, a few weeks later, something even greater.

My too-young, too-centre-of-everything dog died. If someone had asked earlier this year what my greatest fears were, I would’ve said, “Dewey dying,” and tacked on a deflective spider quip.

Then they both happened, and I’m still searching for the meaning.

In the throes of Dewey’s death, I caught myself saying one thing out loud: “Now I have nothing left to be afraid of.”

This isn’t actually true. I have plenty to be afraid of, and many more worst-case scenarios I’ve never allowed myself to say out loud.

We spend so much of our lives treating fear like preparation, as though worrying can keep bad things from happening. Of course, we take precautions. We look out for the cracks and don’t feed our dogs chocolate-coated chicken bones.

But fear is not advance notice.

The spider can still find our ear on clean bedsheets, and something we love more than anything can still die on a good day.

I think that’s what I meant when I said I had nothing left to be afraid of. It’s not that nothing scares me anymore—it’s that I’m starting to understand that being afraid doesn’t make me safer.

Making meaning can’t protect me from what happens next. But maybe it can help me figure out what to do with what already happened.

Fear is little more than control dressed in a safety vest.

I think I’ll stay at the kitchen table.