As we barrel through October and find ourselves deep into the spooky season, I’ve been
thinking a lot about fear. Not cliche, Halloween-type fears – things like skeletons, ghosts, demons, and the likes – but my own, personal fears. I’m a naturally anxious person, so there's rarely a moment in which I'm not feeling afraid, and all of this fear has been limiting the kinds of experiences I open myself up to for as long as I can remember.
It’s okay to be scared, says one of the countless self help articles I’ve found online during an anxious meltdown the night before a presentation. You just have to do it anyway. The only way to grow is to do the things that scare you, no matter how terrifying it feels.
Advice like that is hard to hear when your anxiety has been making you feel nauseous for hours, but the worst part is that they’re right. Out of the long list of things that I have learned during my time at this program, this idea, that in order to grow you need to be scared and do the scary thing anyway, has stuck with me the most. Primarily because I’ve been doing it over and over again, particularly with bugs.
During our second field trip, I caught a tiny butterfly (an Eastern tailed-blue) in a net despite being horribly and embarrassingly terrified of all bugs and insects. Not only this, but I held an even bigger butterfly between my pointer and middle finger and let it sit on my hand for half a second, feeling its legs crawl up my knuckles. It was a fleeting, weird sensation that I can still recall a month later. I held a toad, too (which isn't a bug but still got my heart pounding just the same), and a moth! I attempted to pick up a salamander, I put on chest waders after four cave crickets hopped out of them, and I rinsed caddisflies with DI water, even when it wriggled around in between my tweezers. Above all, maybe, a caterpillar crawled on my back without my knowing and I only freaked out a little bit while I waited for someone to take it off of me.
Fear has been battled outside of the insect realm, too. I peered over the edge of a huge hole in the ground, watching leaves fall down the deepest mine shaft I’ve ever seen; one of the many sublime sights I’ve seen during my time as a part of the bats and mines research project. I walked down steep, steep hills and then crawled back up them, terrified of falling and being okay when I fell anyway, not hurting myself nearly as bad as I had anticipated. I walked barefoot in rivers, feeling the mud and the rocks and the sticks on the bottom of my feet, trying not to think about creatures I might be stepping on. I shared emotionally vulnerable reflections to a group of fourteen friends and I filtered microplastics despite being afraid of somehow messing up everything and ruining our research project.
Even just making that first five hour drive to the Highlands Biological Station was scary for me. I was taking my mom’s car (which only added to my anxiety, because the last thing I needed to do was crash a car that wasn’t mine) and I was coming from the Raleigh suburbs. I’ve always loved the mountains, despite never having lived there, but I was afraid of being completely out of my element. And even though I was (and still sort of am), I think one of the reasons I've been able to face so many fears is because of where I am. Constantly surrounded by beautiful natural landscapes, where bugs are friends and risks are taken every day, I'm in a place that pushes me to grow. It's hard to be afraid once you get used to these sorts of conditions!
We still have a couple months left of the program, and I’m excited to continue growing. I don’t think I’ll ever not be afraid (especially of bugs), and it’s never really a good feeling, but it does feel nice to know that I can deal with it. I can do things even when I’m scared of doing things.
- Sydney Sibillia