What's fear got to do with it?

As I sit typing this blog, here in my student bedroom, I can see a Daddy long legs above me.
It is in the corner directly above me and I could swear it has moved closer to me, its prey, in the last ten seconds.

As you may tell, I hate Daddy long legs. I have a fear of them, Daddy long legs and birds. I think it's safe to say though that my fear of birds is worse.

I've come to realise that these fears originate from my childhood. The Daddy long legs phobia deriving from visits to my grandparents' house, where these creatures would haunt me from corners of the room. Their long, skeletal legs slowly prowling across the ceiling, I felt as though they were taunting me, they knew I was afraid, and they enjoyed it. Of course, no Daddy long legs has ever specifically harmed me, I've never been put into danger because of one, but if I were asked to hold one, I think I'd run a mile.

My repugnant feeling towards birds I believe has some more serious ground to stand upon. If my memory serves me right, the fear comes from a trip to Newcastle when a goose, or some other hideously feathered creature, bit me. I was very young and found it very scary. This, alongside the fact that my school was infested with screeching seagulls, although my school was located nowhere near a sea, but who needs the sea these days? All it takes in London is some litter and you've got yourself a flock of rats with wings. So, I spent 5 wonderful years running from the science block to the maths block in fear of getting stained. This, I promise you, does not add up to a love of birds.

To be honest, I know that they are irrational fears, but what fear isn't? I know people that are scared of things that I would consider to be features of day-to-day life: from cats to planes, to glitter, to sand. While I wouldn't think twice about any of these, for some, they represent their greatest phobias.

So, what is it that makes us believe these things are such fearful elements of life? When you truly think about it, our irrational fears don't pose such horrific threats as we may think. Perhaps it's due to the films and television programmes we watch - I can tell you I'll never be watching Hitchcock's The Birds. If we weren't incessantly told that spiders are scary, through such films as Eight Legged Freaks, perhaps the fear of insects wouldn't be so common.

It is also interesting to look at phobias from the point of view of control. Whether it is who we associate ourselves with, where we live, or work, people feel the need for a sense of control. Therefore when a seemingly uncontrollable threat is posed, we lose our composure.

Is it that we are all purely too obsessed with the need for control over our lives? Or has the media gained such power that its influence extends to what we fear? Either way, these irrational fears we live with are hard to shake. They say to get over a fear, you must face it, but in all honesty, I think I'll stick to asking my neighbours to remove this insect intruder.