When the sun has slipped beneath the skyline – circumscribed in a rectangular panel beside my peripheral vision – I am beside my desk, index finger tendon taut with tension as I tap against a mouse pad. The time is 9:19, or 21:21, displayed on my blinking digital clock that’s two minutes ahead. Its glare spreads from the glassy confines of the LED display.
This isn’t a particularly interesting scene – most things are fixed in place, as if captured by a single, static shot, except for the small movement that accompanies an insistent clicking.
As I block an orderly new wave of tasks into my calendar, I prepare my arsenal of equipment against the steady force of deadlines and assessments. Sometimes I am victorious, and other times I sit alongside a familiar sense of paralysis. The feeling huddles in the subtle corner where drywall meets bed frame, and sifts through my laundry, gathered loosely in small piles of afterthought.
Some hours present themselves more formidably than others to this quiet giant, I think.
Here, the fear of an imminent penalty defeats my resolution to finish my assigned labor, where I am often left questioning my position in space and time, fiddling with a computer that has begun to bear teeth.
In these instances, I am reminded of my first swimming lessons taken at seven years old, where I had once viewed water as a hostile element. Put plainly, I was scared of being subject to an environment where I couldn’t breathe freely. Of course, this instinct must have been wired into my brain from some primordial origin, in attempts to protect me from venturing into dangerous currents and mysteriously deep puddles alike.
A rapid surge of adrenaline is released from the adrenal gland when animals of prey sense nearby danger–their pupils dilating to catch any telling slivers of threat – but also during the minutes prior to flipping over the pale cover sheet of my exam. A cascade of unfurling booklets rustles in concert with the warm surge of blood pumping through veins.
Somehow, my body has difficulty distinguishing between what is and isn’t dangerous to me.
I recall standing outside a faded brick building with a flickering blue “KIDS FIRST” neon sign, my rubbery pink goggles and swim towel dangling from my fist. During these summers, the distinct humidity brought on by storm clouds clung to my cotton tank, piling a little near the seams, and muffled the thrum of my heartbeat. As I returned weekly to learn correct form and basic strokes, the feeling of danger subsided. I readjusted the way I understood water, and it became an interesting state of matter, capable of flux that transported orange bobbing ducks across the deep end to my swim instructor.
Although adrenaline and cortisol are useful chemicals, I concede it wasn’t fear that allowed me to swim. Instead, it was the simple joy I found in understanding the buoyancy found naturally in the human body’s design, in how quick baby kicks broke the surface of water into sinusoidal waves, in the cold rush of gasping for air when oxygen had depleted from my lungs.
It was the act of childish wrestling, where my attempts at making stabs into the rippling unknown were prompted primarily by curiosity rather than potential danger.
And while “childish” is charged with characteristics like naivety and gullibility, it is an adjective that points towards how my spirit was often left dangling outside of my chest like a ripened cherry when I was younger. It was subject to grit stuck in the foam underbellies of shoe soles, beads of sweat clinging to my forehead like mustard seeds, or a kind of cheek flush that resembled a rash. All in good trying.
So now, when I feel the shell of my exterior hardening or amplified fear over something insignificant, I try, instead, to draw up the legacy of childish wonder, letting it poke through as I continue to peer at wildflowers with pearly eyes and probe fortunes from fine lines marking jagged rivers across my palm. Rather than chastising fear when it wells up inside, I try following it to its hiding place. Because most of the time, fear comes from a place where we feel smallest, where we have shrunken up the memory of bright ducks and glowing cheeks. And, it is incredibly important to nurture that smallness until it grows up, puts on a pair of shoes, and walks away. To see if it skips a little as it leaves its home.
Crystal Wang is a sophomore from Baltimore, Md., studying Molecular and Cellular Biology.
