Crawling (My Worst Fear) | A Mixed Media Art Project

Arachnophobia. The word sounds as ominous its feels. To be frightened of something or someone is a totally different feeling than to experience a morbid, intense, and sometimes paralyzing fear. The anxiety may or may not be irrational. Each person reacts differently. However, a phobia is an overwhelming and uncontrollable or irrational emotion or belief that is perceived to be a severe threat. It can be a fear of a certain object, situation, or activity. The threat may be real or imagined.

In my case, the threat was real.

It all about the age of seven, my family traveled home to the country. When I say "country", it was definitely not the city. Woods for your backyard. Outdoor toilet facility.

Clothing garments hung on a clothes lines stretched from one tree to the other, the wind gently drying them with that fresh outdoor pure breeze leaving your garments with a scent like no other that we will never experience again in our lifetime.

Upon arrival, us children were informed that we would be sleeping on a mattress pallet on the wooden floor. Of course, the floor's board were not compact close together. Cracks between the board allowed me to look down upon the ground underneath. I thought nothing of it.

That is, until I readied myself for bed and fell asleep. That's when the spider crawled up onto my face. Feeling funny, I woke to a thing with legs ten feet long and a massive body with eyes looking me in squarely in the face.

Or so it seems. Everything looms large when you are only seven years old. Needless to say, I let out a bloodcurdling scream that piled upon each other as the night wore on.

I woke everyone in the house.

"Oh, girl. It's nothing but a little spider. Go back to sleep." My mother was embarrassed as though she expected better of me. I got that look from my country cousins. That "who and where does she thinks she is" look.

I didn't care. There was no sleeping for me that night and many nights after that. I could still see the spider on my face looking at me. Crawling toward my eyes was the worse. I wouldn't stop rubbing, scratching, and covering my face and arms.

My parents finally took me to the doctor. Diagnosis: Arachnophobia. It remains to me this day. As an adult, my fear of spiders prevents me from gardening.

On several occasions, I woke to a spider on my bedroom ceiling. I froze, crying, thinking that it was waiting to fall upon me.

But dreaming of spiders became my nightmares. Humongous beings larger than an entire city with their rear body almost touching the clouds. A life of their own chasing me. Their webs weren't ordinary silken threads. Traps I couldn't escape from.

I'd wake in a sweat, panicking. It would take me seeks to shake the feeling. Then a different scenario next time. Ridiculous, others would tell me.

In my dreams, once bitten, the venom either would transform me two ways.

The first. I would turn into a female spider man, beautiful but deadly. In this version of myself, I would be all powerful. I feel it was a way to counteract my fear. In these dreams, I would be surrounded by spiders. No longer afraid after the initial bite, I controlled all arachnids. The moment they see me or my vibes sent out in all directions like a net catching and watching them do my biding by attacking others that either ridiculed me or someone I wanted vengeance upon. Satisfying to say the least.

Imagining this outcome was much easier in my dreams than the alternative.

The second. I would turn into a hideous monster, twisted and vengeful for having been bitten. Now my life would be taken away. No one would want to look upon my face. I wouldn't be able to work in a career. I would go underground in a cave to dwell.

Either way, I was doomed. But I had to overcome this fear that was eating me core, making me a difficult and gloomy person to live with.

I had to discover a way to distance myself from even the images of spiders. So my therapy was to use them in writing and art in any form. Control how they looked, the colors, and the tentacles, eyes. Reduce them to abstract and non-threatening beings in my life.

I have been able to manage my fear in the abstract to a certain extent.

But the fear is still underneath, smoldering, on the verge of tears, weaving its thin veil, waiting for me to turn and run headlong into its snare.

To create my "Worse Fear" theme, I wanted to portray the two versions of my phobia. In my dreams, I'm either bitten and proceed to threaten others.

For the different version of my reaction to being bitten, I was able to locate images that portrayed each. I also included pure fractals created by me in Apophysis 7X, an advanced fractal rendering program.

Below is my processes:

To blend all images into the two scenes, I uploaded them into Canva. Numerous background removals and filters assisted in colorizing the images.

Below is my process:

Below are my two completed versions of the effects of my phobia:

AND,

Thanks for taking the time to view my post. I hope you like my mixed media art project.