I am terrified of spiders.
And I don’t mean:
“Ew. Spider.”
I mean my heart races.
My palms sweat.
My breathing changes.
My entire body goes into panic mode before the logical part of my brain has even had time to remind me that I am significantly larger than the thing currently ruining my day.
So naturally—
I took her picture.
😂
And somehow, out of all the pictures I could have taken of a spider I desperately wanted nowhere near me…
she decided to pose.
One leg stretched upward.
The others perfectly angled.
Body turned just enough to show off every stripe, every little patch of color, every horrifying hair on those ridiculously long legs.
She looks like she knew exactly where the camera was.
Which feels unnecessarily confident for something that almost made me leave my own backyard.
But then I looked at the photo.
Actually looked.
And—
damn it.
She’s beautiful.
I hate that.
😂
Her legs aren’t just black.
They’re banded with orange and yellow.
Her abdomen has this complicated pattern running across it that I never would have noticed if I hadn’t gotten close enough to take the picture.
Even the little hairs on her legs—the part I find particularly offensive—catch the light.
There is so much detail packed into something my brain normally reduces to one word:
SPIDER.
Danger.
Nope.
Get it away from me.
And I think that’s the interesting part.
Looking closer didn’t make me less afraid of her.
I didn’t take the picture and suddenly become a spider person.
Absolutely not.
I still wanted distance.
A lot of it.
Preferably several zip codes.
But for a minute, fear stopped being the only thing I could see.
There was fear.
And there was color.
Pattern.
Texture.
Structure.
Beauty.
All occupying the exact same frame.
I think sometimes we assume appreciating something means we have to stop being afraid of it.
Maybe we don’t.
Maybe two things can be true at once.
She scared the absolute shit out of me.
And—
she is gorgeous.
I can admit that.
From over here.
Very, very far away.
😂🖤
Maybe looking closer isn’t always about discovering that something wasn’t scary after all.
Sometimes it’s just about noticing that fear wasn’t the whole story.
Until next time,
-Destiny
P.S. Have you ever found something beautiful even though it scared you?
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