Squirrels

I’m not what you would call an animal person. Cats and dogs kinda freak me out, and Petsmart sounds more like a haunted house then a place where I want to spend any time. But my mild dislike. Of most animals pales in comparison to the two I am most afraid of: birds and squirrels.

I know this sounds slightly insane, but most fears aren’t entirely rational.

Squirrels are really the thing that freak me out like no other. My friend Alys likes to tell the story of the time she watched me stand paralyzed in the middle of the road, as a car honked at me and I refused to move. My reason for refusal was simple: there was a squirrel standing on the path on the opposite side, and I couldn’t go near it because squirrels are evil. So I stood. Stuck in the middle of the street, till the car honking at me got loud enough that the squirrel ran away.

My freshman year of college I took a class called Misfits, Freaks and Derelicts. The class was filled with the kind of strange and wonderful people you would expect to take a class with a title like that. I loved it. But the story about how that class made my Hiram experience what it was is a story for another day.

One day, about a week after school had started, I was sitting in Misfits waiting for class to start. Our TA came in and explained that she would be leading class that day, and doing some fun exercises to help us get more comfortable at being at school and with being around each other.

I appreciated this idea. I knew no one, and had come to a school 8 hours away from home in a state where everyone seemed to get very angry if I dared to say the word ‘soda’. I felt a little in over my head.  

The idea of the first activity is that we were going to do a fishbowl type thing. For those that didn’t grow up at summer camp, a fishbowl is when everyone gets the opportunity to write down a question anonymously. All those scraps of paper are thrown together in a bowl, and the person who is leading the exercise pulls them out and gets a chance to answer the questions. This gives people a chance to ask the questions they want to ask without having to ask them face to face. It’s low pressure, and allows people to get answers to the questions that are really on their minds.

So the first thing our TA asked us to do is take one of our pieces of paper and write down something we were really nervous for at college. I, in all earnestness, wrote down that I was nervous about the amount of squirrels on campus.

Here is the thing about the squirrels on Hiram’s campus: they are a) mean and b) unafraid of people. Either of those things alone would be bad enough, but the combination had me trembling every time I left my dorm room.

So I wrote down that my fear was too many squirrels.

Our TA collected all the slips and started reading them off. She gave some good advice about a couple of topics: early morning classes, parties, being intimidated by teachers and bad dining hall food. Then she pulled another slip out of the bowl.

“Guys. If you aren’t going to take this seriously, we don’t have to do it. I just wanted to do something fun and helpful. If you don’t want to, then we don’t have to.” She said.

The class was confused. “What did it say?” someone asked from the back of the room.

“It was about squirrels. If you aren’t going to take this seriously guys, I’m not going to do it.”

I started sinking in to my seat. I couldn’t say anything at this point, right? I was done. It was over, I was officially too embarrassed, and to top it all off I could feel myself starting to blush.

The girl sitting next to me, who I had spoken a grand total of 10 words to so far, saw the embarrassment flashing over my face. “Uh, I think that one is legit” she said.

Our TA’s face changed instantly. She felt horrible, and honestly, I did too. I was embarrassed, she was embarrassed. No one in the class knew what to say.

“So I guess, uh… my advice, um… would be that the squirrels are more afraid of you then you are of them!” the TA said.

I appreciated the attempt. I appreciated her (and the class in general) being supportive, even when my fear was weird, and even when they didn’t understand it.

I’m still not a fan of squirrels. I think they’re evil and mean, and probably the spawn of hell, but that doesn’t change the fact that I have to interact with them.  

But now, every time I see a squirrel, I think of that day in class. The day I learned that fears, even if they are silly, are much better faced when your friends believe in you.