Deep Water

            Picture yourself drowning, trying to breathe, but only getting water. How it seeps into your lungs as your body goes limb. Fright of dying pops images of family and good friends, then black nothingness. This is how it begins; drowning: no one has found a way to prevent it, only to have lifeguards watching the water, but sometimes that does not even help. “Deep Water” by William O. Douglas, teaches you that fear can take over no matter what situation you are in.

            When you are little, there is almost nothing you can control, not even a cute little puppy. Everyone thinks that your own dog could never hurt you, but when you yank on an ear, panic races through their minds and they snap back, protecting themselves. Just as the boy in “Deep Water”, standing in the ocean when a large wave knocks him down, panic takes over and this time he can do nothing but struggle to keep himself alive. Although when I was a little girl, I had gotten knocked over by a large ocean wave in California, I did not nearly drown like the boy in the short story. I remember what it felt like to swallow the horrible salt water as it went prickling through your nose. It happens all the time, people drowning because of the panic that takes over your mind and body, and that’s when you develop a phobia of that particular thing. For the boy in the story, the phobia he had was hydrophobia, one of the top phobias around the world.

Even though phobias create panic and how that can take over your life, dying from panic is a whole different thing. Almost 1.2 million people around the world die every year from drowning, that’s about 2 people per minute according to International Life Saving Federation. Imagine what it would be like for the families of these people; what they had to go through, not even to see the person they loved one more time. At least the boy in “Deep Water” survived to see the rest of his life and to conquer his worst fear.         

While 1.2 million people die every year due to drowning and rise above their fears, what happens when you don’t rise above and eliminate the fear? “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury shows that you can be friends with a bully when you fear them, but never leave a best friend behind. Both stories relate to each other in that both main character/s develop a phobia. Social phobias occur mostly around people as for bullies that are mean and disrespectful of other people; that anger is from their life at home. Both phobias that have big effect on the people that have them and many of the people they are around.

Situations can cause fear at times and not at other times, it just depends on situation, but there is always a way to control it. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt stated “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.”