adventures in empathy

[kaberett]

content notes: arachnophobia, crabs, shrimp.

In the context of having the pom-pom crab gif shared with me encouragingly earlier in the week (I have just! sent off! chapter 4 edits! to my supervisors! yes it is ten to midnight but if I crack on with the draft of my synthesis between now and the end of Wednesday I will have all the words, approximately, give or take final edits and also typesetting and maybe processing some more data for bonus points) there was a brief "wait, is it a crab or is it... a shrimp?" discussion, leading to The Discovery Of The Relevant Wikipedia Page and Learnings About Sea-Anemone Pom-Poms, and also me declaring that it didn't spark visceral horror in me so it clearly wasn't a shrimp.

And! In the process of doing my ha-ha-only-serious Shrimp Are Proof Of Malicious Design and also The Fundamental Failures Of The Theory Of Evolution comedy routine I suddenly realised--

-- that the way I feel about shrimp, which are An Abomination that Should Not Exist, and are Bad Bad Bad, for no particularly clear reason, is... presumably... how arachnophobes... feel... about spiders...?

Which I had not quite previously managed to actually, yes, empathise with. Like, yes, obviously, I was going to warn for pictures of them and discussion of them, and obviously I was not going to go HA! SPIDERS! at people, but -- I think between having not conceptualised myself as having a phobia, and my personal quiet affection for the Smol Spider Friends, I Didn't Get It. And now I... plausibly still don't get it, but also I think that now I know where I'm looking I can at least see it from here.

Comments

[archangelbeth]

*giggle*

Yes. Spiders are just wrong and bad and some of them hide the wrongbad enough that I can look at pictures of them without sort of cringing, but they are just WRONG AND BAD!

Which I carefully remove, if no one else is around to do so, with a cup and cardboard, because it's not their fault they're abominations, and also smushed abomination is ultra-gross.

(Yay on sending off drafts!)

[silveradept]

Huzzah for more words being sent off.

The Visible Spiders rule helps to make sure that nobody has to deal with more crawlies than they want to. But yes, it's nice when the last link forges and understanding drops into place.

[vass]

That sounds like a useful realisation to have. (I didn't know shrimp were a problem for you. I'll try to warn for pictures if it comes up.)

My feeling about spiders isn't They Should Not Exist, but rather They Are A Threat. I'm fine with them existing, I'm fine with pictures or even video if it's not unexpected, I just get increasingly Less Fine the greater the proximity I'm in to an actual spider (even a dead one; even -- to some extent -- their web.) My limbic system thinks if there's a spider near me then it's (for no particularly clear reason) endangering my life, even if I know what species it is and that it definitely has no means of hurting me. (Although knowing that does lower the fear level, even if it doesn't eliminate it.)

But, like, spiders harmlessly living their lives somewhere else where I am not is fine, and I've managed to desensitise myself to pictures by starting with the cute jumping spider photos and then researching pet tarantulas to find out what they're actually like and what their keepers like about them. There are some incredibly pretty ones, and understanding a bit more about their behaviour did help lower my fear level (e.g. that most of them really seem to only care about their environment re whether it's something to mate with, something to eat, somewhere to live, or something that's trying to hurt it. They're not trying to conduct market research or give you pamphlets about their religious denomination! So if you can leave them alone, you won't fall into any of those categories. Which of course is harder to do if one of them decides your (meaning my) car is somewhere to live.)

It's a GET IT AWAY FROM ME fear, not a KILL IT WITH FIRE fear.

[ewt]

Also, I really don't *want* to be scared of spiders. In ecological terms I consider them broadly allies, they eat all kinds of things I don't want on my crops.

But they MOVE WRONG and they have TOO MANY LEGS,both of which I can almost sortof deal with, except when they MIGHT CRAWL ON ME. So I deal better with the really tiny ones (that still move wrong but I can't tell), and the ones that mostly stay in their webs (much less likely to crawl on me). I don't dwell on pictures, but don't have too much trouble with them as they are not moving and not going to crawl on me. I may well need to temporarily abandon a room that has a spider roaming in it, if I can't safely remove the spider (getting them under a cup is hard if they move fast and I am shaking and in principle I don't want to harm them), until my hindbrain forgets there is a spider there, by which time it has usually retreated to somewhere that I can't see it.

I can't really cope with mice or rats either. Snakes are basically fine though.

Brains are weird.

[davidgillon]

Yay chapter!