An Act of Courage

I am proud of myself for a small thing today. Well, not for me. For me, this is pretty big.

After my run this morning, still listening to my the audiobook of Shrill by Lindy West, I peeled my sweat-drenched clothes, got the shower running, and stepped blissfully, nakedly inside. You know, like how normal people get into showers.

Then I looked up and there, on the stark white ceiling just above the showerhead, was a daddy long legs.

As you can imagine, I quickly backtracked out of that shower and stood there half sweaty, half wet, all naked and cursed out loud.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but if I ever meet a boggart in this magical life it would turn into a fucking daddy long legs to terrorize me. I am distinctly unchill. And to twist the knife, some of my worst encounters with these spiders (okay, I know they’re not technically spiders but give it a rest) have been in, you guessed it, the goddamn shower.

Lately, as I contemplate my eventual move back to Wisconsin, I’ve been trying to figure out this problem. Sure Texas may have more scorpions, but I used to run into daddy long legs on a daily basis growing up. As I live alone, I don’t have a protector to quietly handle my fear for me. I don’t hate them, I don’t want them dead, and like hell would I ever get close enough to kill one anyway . . . though I admit (because I’ve lived alone for some time now) I have gotten the hand vacuum out, screaming all the while.

But on the whole, I’ve been, well, chiller. I don’t cry about it anyway. I feel mindful about their existence, still habitually scanning every corner when I walk into a room but, like, in a totally zen way.

Back to the scene: I’m standing naked outside my shower, it’s still running, Lindy West is speaking out of my phone speakers. I turn her voice off so I can think.

I have a few decisions to make. The first one is easy, I can’t leave this spider in my shower. If I didn’t need to shower I might have . . . as my mom says, sometimes they just kind of go away. But I just ran four miles in a Texas summer and need to go to work. And showering with this spider in there would be retraumatizing myself in my safe space, so not going to happen.

With that decision out of the way, I now need to decide how this spider is going to leave my shower.

I should say at this point, thank the lord, that this daddy long legs is about a 4.7 on the 10 point scale of scariest motherfucking representations of its breed I’ve seen in my life. I’m not in an impossible situation. It’s not small exactly but it’s not a figure of my nightmares, so combined with my totally new zen outlook, I felt confident that I could handle this situation.

In the past, as I mentioned, I used my little hand vacuum. But maybe I was just riding out my inner Gryffindor because I saw another way . . . a way I had never dared try with a spider before . . .

I walked to my kitchen, naked (how many times do you think I can throw into this story that I was naked?), sweaty, and grabbed a Green Bay Packer’s plastic cup from the cupboard and a birthday card. I opened my balcony door in preparation.

I returned to my bathroom, finally turned the water off, took a few deep breaths, told myself it had to be done, and slowly covered the intruder with the cup and slid the card along the ceiling, keeping my grip tight and determined.

I stepped down from the tub’s edge and shuffled back to my living room, out onto the balcony (again, freaking naked) and shook that Packer’s cup out over the wild below with my eyes firmly closed. Then I dropped the cup and card onto the balcony floor for good measure so I could check it was gone from a distance. It was.

(You may be thinking ‘really, you’ve never gotten paper and a cup and put a spider outside?’ To which I would say ‘No, definitely not. Why the hell would I be that close to a spider?’)

What bravery. What courage. I saved the spider instead of senselessly vacuuming or moving out of my apartment entirely . . . never mind it must’ve died when I sent it on a three-story drop . . .

With Love,
Natalie