I can tell that something needs to get written when I catch myself repeating the tale to friends, foes, and the innocent checkout girl.
A spider crawling into my ear was one of those stories.
I started to lay down the tracks of the essay, but then my dog died.
Suddenly, the spider story felt petty and naive. Revisiting the Google Doc took on a strange voyeurism, like I was peeking into the diary of someone who was about to take a major blow and didn’t know to duck.
Then, after briefly adopting a bereavement niche on Substack and crafting several notes and two full essays about my grief, I found my way back to the spider-in-ear story.
The real work with this essay was weaving together who I was at the time of the first draft with the larger events that came down the pipe and altered the meaning of the story.
As I wrote Fear Is Control in a Safety Vest, the link between the spider and Dewey began to unfold. What was a simple story about a lifelong irrational fear became one about what happens when the things you’re afraid of happen, and how little all that worrying does to prepare you.
It also felt good to be funny again after all that death-talk (yarp!).
Here’s how the essay changed along the way.
