Perspectives on Fear :: Personal Narrative Writing

At the University of California at Irvine, experiments in rats indicate that the geniuss hormonal reaction to fear can be inhibited, change intensity the formation of memories and the emotions they evoke (Baard).Sometimes I wealthy person trouble cat sleeping. I lie in bed for hours while my mind churns through fadeless streams of fragmented thoughts and memories, bits of brain matter that I do not break time for in my waking life. I have tried the homeopathic remedies. I drink calming teas, take showers, and inhale scents advertised to produce sleep and relaxation. I even have a lavender discern pillow. Nevertheless, when I am inflicted with a b divulge of sleeplessness, there is usually precise little I can do but wait it out. I stay away from sleep drugs. The streetlamp outside paints shapes across the wall succeeding(prenominal) to my bed. I can see them in the darkness, dull orange lines that have become familiar in my many restless nights. At the total of their c anvas, they intersect to form a rectangle. A rectangle? For months I believed in this verity of form with the inborn certainty that accompanies that which is obvious. I didnt have to phone 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. Nearly three hours after 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 connected to form the shape, the rectangle, were angles. Obtuse and acute, they had none of the radiate regularity that geometry dictates of a true rectangle. The outline on the wall was crooked, skewed, an weak representation of the form. I tend to think of my memories as shoeboxes, precise, neatly changeless components that stack tidily in the mind. Somehow I have instruct myself to believe that in regularity and order I will publish 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 superannuated recurring thoughts can be strangely misshapen, and I am propel into a tailspin. My memories of experiencing fear seem 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 irresolution the nature of their composition.