The Good Old Dolphin Days
Tags: Perseverance, Grief, Curiosity, Adversity, Grief And Loss

How curiosity fuels perseverance in times of adversity

As a child, I was quite obsessed with dolphins. I thought it was quite special that they had lungs and could live in the sea at the same time. I would go to the library and take out any book available on dolphins and I’d use my pocket money to make photo copies of the images found in those books. I didn’t take my curiosity for these species lightly, obviously. I can’t quite recall why I was so fascinated by dolphins, and why I wasn’t fascinated in the same way by killer whales, frogs or crocodiles for that matter. My best bet is that my interest derived from excitement and where it might’ve possibly been fuelled by the promise of a new friendship because that girl at my table at school liked dolphins too, or because I’d been mesmerised by the dolphins I’d seen at the zoo, I never stopped to think why I was so keen to know all there was to know about those elegant mammals of the sea.

Two years ago, I applied for a part-time master’s degree in translation studies,

thinking I knew exactly why I was making that decision. As picking up

adult-education might suggest, it wasn’t because I was in a dire need for a career switch, I had a perfectly dreamy job in travel that I loved. My mum had passed away relatively suddenly the year before, after I’d just moved to London. On a solo walking trip in Spain the epiphany had come to me that the issue with my grief was that I didn’t dare to plan anything for myself anymore because of the order of events related to the loss of my mum. As a bilingual I had always been interested in language and translation, a subject I had considered getting my bachelor’s in and a far-flung curiosity I could now force upon myself to explore further, to counter the effects of my grief, and so I did.

When I applied, I didn’t quite apply to do the doing of a master’s degree next to a full-time job. I hardly felt any excitement once I actually started the study, mostly because it asked of me time I didn’t have to give. If I showed my face in the library it was to run to a shelf to pick up reading materials, only to run out as quickly as possible to make it back to work in time. No time for photo copies this time around. I had not signed up for this vague interest to become a commitment like it did. Though, the thing was, I had signed up for it. It didn’t pique me in any way, more so, it made me wonder why I had ever thought it had been a good idea. A question that oh so fiercely decided not to leave my mind just three days before three essays were due at the end of the second term. Unlike in my dolphin loving days I was hyperventilating and experiencing heaps of stress and anxiety that nearly led me to quit the master’s altogether in that moment. I almost did because I felt that anything giving me stress and anxiety was not something I needed in my life, it definitely was not something that served me. It took me months to realise that the opposite was true and see that the why of my decision to go and study was not something I could predefine like I had done. Why is a word used to question things, and it was only through the hyperventilating 6am

mornings where I scrambled for two thousand words about translation

philosophies that the why was starting to tickle something in my brain.

I am currently about a week away from hearing whether I passed my dissertation for my master’s degree. A degree I will have finished, if I do, in a year that holds a pandemic, months of lockdown, job insecurity and heartbreak to top it off. I hope I have passed, and not because that long lost interest has now become a strong interest or because I want to travel the world as a digital nomad and work as a freelance translator. As with the dolphins, the what of my interest doesn’t really matter. Dolphins remain to be great animals, but the even greater thing is that the girl that sat at my table, is my best friend of over twenty years to this day. Whether I obtain this qualification is just a mere detail to the story as I, post-loss, regained

self-confidence and belief in myself, my resilience and my perseverance, and that is what matters. Coincidentally those are exactly the things I need to be able to tackle and conquer the next thing that makes me jump out of the water like dolphins do: publishing the book I’ve written with so much joy because it allowed me to connect with myself and my grief in a unique way, a book I hope can help others with their own grief journeys. Because, you know, that is one fact I do remember about dolphins; they jump out of the water out of excitement and joy, because they want to play. And so they do.