By Anonymous, United Kingdom

There was a young girl who caught sight of a spider
It wiggled and wriggled and jiggled beside her
She hadn’t seen one before
Not that she could recall
With such a monstrous shadow
And legs so tall

So she pondered uncertain of how scared she should be
Thought, if she covered her eyes it might leave quietly
But it scurried and it flurried
It rattled her bones
As she tried not to think, it began to edge close

Was it harmful or kind? There was no way to know
She thought it safer to hide, leave that creature alone
So she curled herself up and she writhed in the corner
As she imagined it squished, it headed straight for her

There was a young girl who remembered that spider
It wiggled and wriggled and niggled inside her
It would sprawl out its legs and tread spikes in her tummy
It would stiffen her jaw and make her feel funny

Filled her dreams of the scene she was stuck in a web
It would bite at her legs as she desperately bled
Thoughts went horribly dark
Hung there trembling and beaten
She lost all her pluck and felt doomed to be eaten

But then that young girl, one day she got bigger
The sight of a spider, beside her, would trigger
Not the thought of an end there suspended from ceilings
Nor the judder of bones
or those torturous feelings

She reached out to that spider that stirred her so much
She thought nothing to lose if she just picked it up
Though its shadow was huge
It was tiny quite simply

Felt it light in her hands as it bimbled there limply
Much smaller than her
Just one tenth of the size
Of that same creepy crawly her mind multiplied

There was a young girl who made friends with that spider
The spikes they began to subside deep inside her
As it danced in her hands and she kept herself cool
She found herself ask if it existed at all

About the poem

This poem came from a dream I had. I’m not scared of spiders per se, but there was a deep struggle I was becoming aware of in my own mind at the time.

In therapy my purely obsessional tendencies initially got worse. As my awareness grew of the thoughts I was repeatedly having, it was like someone racked the volume up on it. I was often overwhelmed with nowhere to go. One particular time at work, a voice was triggered in my head that played over and over in response to a colleague’s haircut. It was getting louder and louder until I shot up, heading for the door to escape. I learnt to do it all so discretely, as no one had a clue and I’d sit in the toilets crying my eyes out, feeling alone and confused. It felt like a constant and endless battle I would never win. After all, I just wanted to sit attentively in my Management position in the meeting.

The lines of the poem came easily, and soon became an antidote, to overcome the times I found myself in the loos again or in other situations I wished I could turn off my thinking. I am so thankful that therapy has hugely improved things. There are tendencies there, but now I understand them and I am better placed to spot and neutralise my fear based reactions to things.

I believe that we are all capable of finding our inner strength and there is a way out of the maze of the mind, if you do the long hard graft and put the work in.