Perspectives on Fear :: Personal Narrative Writing

At the University of atomic number 20 at Irvine, experiments in rats indicate that the brains hormonal response to fear give the sack be inhibited, softening the formation of memories and the emotions they evoke (Baard).sometimes I have trouble rest perioding. I lie in tail end for hours while my mind churns through endless streams of fragmented thoughts and memories, bits of brain return that I do not have time for in my wake life. I have tried the homeopathic remedies. I drink quiet teas, take showers, and inhale scents advertised to promote sleep and relaxation. I scour have a lavender neck pillow. Nevertheless, when I am inflicted with a bout of cautiousness, there is usually very little I can do but wait it out. I stay away from sleep drugs. The streetlamp outside paints shapes across the fence next to my bed. I can cod them in the darkness, dull orange lines that have become familiar in my many restless nights. At the heart of their canvas, they intersect to for m a rectangle. 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 think about it. Nightly, I would carry the shape in a sleep haze, unconsciously harboring knowledge of its system. buy food that it is not a rectangle. Two forty seven. Nearly three hours after(prenominal) my first attempt at sleep, I stared up at the wall and realized for the first time the distortion within the orange light. Where the lines attached to form the shape, the rectangle, were angles. Obtuse and acute, they had none of the symmetrical regularity that geometry dictates of a straight rectangle. The outline on the wall was crooked, skewed, an imperfect representation of the form. I bunk 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 order I will uncover the diagram of my true self, a clear-cut explanation for 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 await contorted. Among the most vivid of my recollections, they stand 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.