Perspectives on Fear :: Personal Narrative Writing

At the University of California at Irvine, experiments in rats indicate that the aces hormonal reaction to fear can be inhibited, softening the governing body of memories and the emotions they evoke (Baard).Sometimes I have trouble sleeping. I lie in bed for hours while my mind churns through endless streams of fragmented thoughts and memories, bits of brain matter that I do not have time for in my waking life. I have tried the homeopathic remedies. I drink still teas, take showers, and inhale scents advertised to promote sleep and relaxation. I even have a lavender neck pillow. Nevertheless, when I am inflicted with a passage of arms of sleeplessness, there is usually very little I can do but wait it out. I stay away from sleep drugs. The streetlamp outside paints shapes crosswise the wall next to my bed. I can see them in the darkness, dull orange tree lines that have become familiar in my many restless nights. At the heart of their canvas, they intersect to form a rectangl e. A rectangle? For months I believed in this reality of form with the inborn certainty that accompanies that which is obvious. I didnt have to bet about it. Nightly, I would study the shape in a sleep haze, unconsciously harboring knowledge of its regularity. Except that it is not a rectangle. Two forty seven. to the highest degree three hours after my first attempt at sleep, I stared up at the wall and get tod for the first time the distortion within the orange light. Where the lines connected to form the shape, the rectangle, were angles. Obtuse and acute, they had none of the symmetrical regularity that geometry dictates of a true rectangle. The outline on the wall was crooked, skewed, an imperfect representation of the form. I escape to think of my memories as shoeboxes, precise, neatly uniform components that stack tidily in the mind. Somehow I have trained myself to believe that in regularity and rank I will uncover the diagram of my true self, a clear-cut explanation fo r all that I think, say, and do. But in sleepless nights I realize that even old recurring thoughts can be strangely misshapen, and I am thrown into a tailspin. My memories of experiencing fear seem contorted. Among the most vivid of my recollections, they concentrate out with their potent doses of color, emotion, and experience. They have been with me so long that I rarely question the nature of their composition.