ESSAY: Making friends with monsters

Making friends with monsters

Ghouls, goblins, witches, and zombies—the stuff of my childhood Halloween fantasies. I wasn’t scared of Halloween or the many gruesome sorts I encountered during this season. To me, they were all part of the fun—a day my family would celebrate long before it became this commercial enterprise of wholesome superheroes and cartoon characters. We were in it with old-school gusto, replete with evil pumpkins, rusty cauldrons, and sticky cobwebs.  

There was one tiny problem, though. 

I was terrified of spiders. I still am. And where there are cobwebs, well, there are spiders.
I know that most Halloween spiders are only made of rubber or plastic, and some are even made to appear cute. However, they look just as frightening to me as the real critters. 

So there. I love Halloween, but hate spiders. Which is pretty much like saying I love Christmas, but hate Santa Claus. 

I don’t exactly remember when this aversion to spiders started, but I do remember this one time when I was rummaging through a wicker basket in our kitchen and found a large dead spider at the bottom. It was one of those hideous brown house spiders with long legs (my least favorite kind). It was on its back with its numerous appendages splayed in full horror. Surprisingly, fear wasn’t the first thing I felt, but a weird compulsion to count its legs. I counted 16. 

This bothered me so much that I hurled the basket as far as I could and bolted out of the kitchen. 
I later realized, though, that I may have miscounted (I was bad at math), or it could’ve been two dead spiders stuck together, hence, twice the number of legs. Eeew.

Nevertheless, that incident left an imprint on me that I still can’t seem to shake off to this day. For years, I would imagine 16-legged spiders hiding at the bottom of every wicker basket. This probably also explains my irrational dislike for wicker baskets. 

Interestingly, one of my favorite nursery rhymes as a child was Little Miss Muffet—a story about a little girl who was minding her own business when a spider suddenly sat beside her and frightened her away. Poor Little Miss Muffet, just quietly eating her breakfast (a healthy low-fat, high-fiber one at that), only to be rudely interrupted by a multiple-legged visitor.


It was practically what happened to me in the kitchen—although if we’re being honest, I could’ve been the intruder in this situation. In fact, I may have inadvertently committed a double murder, killing those spiders in the wicker basket from all the rummaging I did. And for all we know, the little spider in that nursery rhyme may have been the real victim after all, having been discriminated for its mere appearance. Imagine being blamed for ruining someone’s day for simply sitting beside that person. If it could, it probably would’ve said, “I was also just minding my own business, you bitch!” as Little Miss Karen—er, Muffet—was running away. 


Whatever her reasons for freaking out, that story informed my young impressionable brain that spiders were bad and to be avoided at all costs, even in the middle of a nice meal. I sometimes wonder how that story might have played out if that little girl looked past her big prejudices. I also wonder how much more I would love Halloween if I did the same. 


It’s surprising to know how most of our fears are just products of social conditioning. And it’s all ridiculous, really, because I’m quite sure spiders are more terrified of me than I am of them. How easy it is to fear or dislike anything that we don’t understand, whatever is vastly different from us. It becomes even more ridiculous when we realize that we’re all actually more similar than we think. 


This could apply to almost anything we’re scared of, really. For me, it’s spiders. For others, it could be something else, even outside the horrors of Halloween. Pick your own monster. We all have one. 

Perhaps in the middle of all the self-induced anxiety around us, we could use our own fears and prejudices as opportunities to shed light on those dark parts inside us, to come face to face with our monsters lurking in the shadows, and find a way to co-exist. 


Just the other day, I saw a spider crawling on my bathroom wall. It was one of those small jumping kinds (unlike the big ones I saw in the wicker basket), so this time, it didn’t involve a Little Miss Muffet moment. It could’ve only been my imagination, but I noticed that the spider suddenly broke its stride, briefly stopped in front of me as though to tip its hat in greeting, then nonchalantly crawled away. We were just two different creatures sharing the same space.


I don’t know if I can honestly say that I’ll one day be comfortable with spiders—perhaps I will, perhaps I won’t—but I do know that at the end of it all, we’re all just trying to mind our own business. And that’s a good place start. 

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