ladybusiness | (Reply)

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I recently watched a talk by Chris Hadfield about going blind in space, where he uses a fear of spiders to show how you conquer that fear. He argues that if you keep walking into spider webs, eventually you'll lose the jerky fear response and be able to calmly deal with the situation. Now, I'm not sure I buy this as an example, because fear of spiders and phobia of spiders are radically different. Anyway, so his response to going blind in space wasn't panic, because NASA creates situations in training and makes astronauts go through them multiple times. When something inevitably goes wrong, they don't have a a jerky fear response.

So, since short fiction isn't spiders, this was actual a useful reframing for me, although I revisited this anthology way before the Hadfield video existed. Instead of walking into spiderwebs, I have to walk into situations where people tell me I'm wrong so I can read their assessment and then disagree with them. ;)