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| In 1995, I was on vacation with my mother at Australia's most famous ocean resort - Gold Coast. We went to the beach. The sun was shining almost unbearably and without compassion for our bodies. Not thinking twice, my mom ran to the water and plunged under its waves. I felt a sense of fear, not fear of the unknown, but rather of something else, something tangible - a shark. I asked a lady standing nearby if there are nets around the beach, protecting it from sharks. She told me not to worry (in the usual Australian way "No worries, mate!") explaining that there existed nets for sharks three meters and longer. I went into the water, partly because I was afraid for my mom, partly because I felt angry for being such a coward. As the huge waves covered my head, even though I had only dared enter up to my knees, I couldn't escape imagining the jaws of a shark into my flesh… then screams, blood, nothingness… I soon found myself out of the water and onto the safety of the squeaky, burning sand. Having been a synchronized swimmer for over ten years, a national champion of both my country and Australia, and a participant on a world level, I have spent a large part of my life in water. Yet I not only fear swimming in the ocean, I fear swimming in any natural body of water, be it the sea, a river, lake, or even a stream. My fear of sharks, with its unknown origin, and stories I have heard, have led me to believe that sharks can thrive wherever there exists water. In August, this year, after a summer full of news about shark attacks, Times Magazine published a special feature on sharks called "Summer of the Shark. Why Can't We Be Friends?" For the first time in my life I was reading about sharks. It had never occurred to me that by gaining information about sharks, I could actually conquer my "sharkophobia." So began my research about sharks. Click on the links above to learn more about sharks, and maybe you will start respecting these animals, just like I did after finding out about them. |