therealljidol week 29: the Bannister Effect
Sideways
The first time I slipped, I was nine.
I was in fourth grade, Mrs. Carter’s class, and we were supposed to be doing some project on colors in art: making our initials in this weird rainbow block pattern. I reached for a red crayon, and accidentally grabbed orange instead. Not a huge mistake, but noticeable.
“Roy G. Biv, Adam,” said Mrs. Carter, kindly. I don’t think she knew how to be anything other than kind. “Remember, red before orange.”
I was embarrassed--that she’d seen, that I colored over it and you could still tell -- embarrassed enough that I wanted to sink into the floor. I willed it, open up and swallow me, and in a way, it did:
Everything blurred, the colors ran together like melting--well, crayon--and I slipped sideways…
...into a dimension where another version of me was doing the same project, but had been embarrassed for something else.
“...right,” said my teacher, who was Mrs. Wilson in this dimension. “So don’t do it again next time.”
“I won’t,” I promised, and she nodded and moved on to critique the next student.
My name here was Aaron, not Adam, but it still started with an A, and my last name was still Stein, so it didn’t matter much that I’d gotten switched, the initials were the same -- so I kept coloring, and I pretended like nothing had changed.
I didn’t get much wrong, that first day. I still took the bus home. Mom was still waiting with cookies. If she thought I was someone different -- if I responded a little too slowly to Aaron, still expecting Adam -- she didn’t say anything.
I was nine, after all. I wasn’t worth paying attention to.
It didn’t happen again until I was sixteen. There was a girl I liked -- Genie, Genie Thompson. She was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, until -- well.
“Will you go out with me?” I asked, and she stammered something about not wanting to ruin the friendship.
I’d made the mistake of asking her out in front of the entire cafeteria, at second lunch, and so…
I wished the Earth would open up and swallow me, and it was just like before, when the colors had seemed to melt together, like runny wax. One minute I was standing there in the cafeteria, and the next, I wasn’t.
I was sitting at a table, instead.
“Dude,” one of my friends -- his name had been Steven in the other universe; it was Stephen here -- elbowed me. “Aren’t you going to ask her out?”
“Nah,” I said. “I want to wait for a private moment -- you know, maybe make it less weird, if she says she doesn’t want to.”
“Chicken,” he said, but he dropped it.
I asked her out later -- it felt weird not to -- and she said yes, much to my eternal surprise. “I’d love to!”
But she wasn’t the same -- not the one my adolescent heart had felt such a rush for -- and I knew it, even if I didn’t know why.
We dated for six months -- a record in high school -- and broke up amiably, when we both realized that we weren’t “into” one another.
“You’re just not the same, Aiden,” she said.
I never had the heart to tell her, how true that was.
I started seeing a therapist, while I was in college. It was free, through the student health center, and I thought I was going crazy, at least a little, with the sliding…
I tried to explain to them, what was happening, and when they tried to politely tell me that I needed help beyond what they could offer, that was when the third slide happened, colors running together and the therapist’s face distorting as she said, politely, “I think you could benefit from seeing a psychiatrist, we really only deal with students that are struggling with adjusting to college life…”
I snapped to in a different therapist’s office.
“So, you’re worried about sitting for finals?” she said, looking at the questionaire I had evidently filled out.
“Uh--yeah,” I said. “I mean, I know everyone must worry about finals, but I’m really afraid I’m not going to pass Math 1060, and--”
“Everyone struggles,” she empathized. “Let’s work on giving you the skills to overcome whatever mental block it is you have about math.”
I went through the session with her, learned some coping skills, how to deal with stress and the fear of failure.
I got a card about different student groups I could join, "mindfulness and better living through stress reduction", and I didn't go back.
The slipping kept happening. A physics final I hadn't studied for -- I slipped into a universe where it was postponed.
Tripping and sliding down a muddy hill in the quad -- I slipped into a universe where, instead of colliding head-on with one of my professors that semester, I was alone instead.
Bad dates: slippage. Any embarrassment, major or minor: slippage.
I got used to it, after a while -- used to answering to any old A-name, from Art to Ahriman; used to slipping into universes where things were slightly different, but still mostly the same. I had the same career, almost everywhere I went: working in HR, for different large companies. The policies weren't the same -- they varied from place to place -- but the work itself was easy enough, and I never had to deal with anything particularly tricky. Disciplining someone for stealing their coworker's lunch out of the work fridge was similar no matter where I ended up. The work didn't require creativity, or familiarity with the company's values -- mostly, it was easy. I didn't usually slip at work. It was elsewhere, that it happened: slippage when I asked my long-term girlfriend to marry me and she said she thought we should see other people; slippage when I drunkenly told my roommate I had feelings for her; a slip when I bent over at work and my pants tore; slippage when I accidentally implied a cashier at the local grocery store was pregnant (she assured me, very loudly, that she wasn't).
Slippage was a part of my life. There didn't seem to be a way around it.
I tried multiple therapists. I tried scientists -- contacting universities; reaching out to them to see if anyone was studying the possibility of multiple parallel universes, many worlds theory.
Most of those contacts resulted in slipping, again, but I didn't give up.
I met the first woman to believe me after the 35th slip. This one had been something work-related -- I was being reprimanded for not paying close enough attention in a meeting. The colors ran like wax, and then --
It was unusual, meeting her. Normally, when I slipped, I slipped right back to the same instant, in a different universe, where I hadn't been embarrassed, or hadn't been embarrassed in the same way.
This time, I slipped into her office. Another version of me -- another Aarne (my name in the last universe) -- must have been consulting with her about something, but I'd slipped and taken his place.
" -- believe you," said the woman in front of me, in the place I recognized as being a doctor or professional's office of some kind. "But you have to understand, your story is a little...out of the ordinary."
I blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"Your story," she said, looking down at the manila folder she held in front of her. She was of middling height and weight, with dark brown hair twisted back in a bun, horn-rimmed glasses and serious brown eyes. I would have guessed she was in her late 30s. "About -- what was it you called it?"
"Slippage?" I hazarded a guess.
"No," she said, frowning. "Sliding. Now, Mr. Smith..."
That, I guessed, was my last name in this universe.
"You have to understand that you're asking rather a lot of me as a clinician," she said. "There's little to no way to prove your story."
"I see," I said, standing. "You don't believe me."
She quirked an eyebrow at me over her glasses. "On the contrary," she said, "I do."
Her name was Jaya -- Jaya Friedman. She was a psychiatrist with a physicist mother. This, I guessed, was why I'd reached out to her. She'd done physics in undergrad -- had gone on to do a master's degree in the field -- before switching to psychiatry and going to medical school.
"Your face," she said, when I asked her just what it was that had made her believe me. "When I was in the middle of dismissing you, your face went blank for a moment -- just a moment -- and you seemed...disoriented. I thought that you might be entering a fugue state, but your answers were clear, and more importantly, you didn't look the same. I'd just embarrassed you, and you went blank, but then your hair was parted on the wrong side, and you didn't use the same vocabulary. I decided, at least in the moment, to believe you. Now..."
She had some ideas, about what could be done to prove that I was from a different universe.
"Isotope distribution," she said. "If you're from a different universe, there should be different stable isotopes."
Jaya couldn't, however, help me pin down what would stop the sliding.
"I've never seen it before," she said. "It appears to be unique to you. So..."
"I'm stuck with it, is what you're saying," I prompted.
"No," she said. "It's not -- it appears to be something to do with you, some kind of defense mechanism; something to keep you from being embarrassed."
She hesitated a moment. "I think," she said, "that you need to accept that humiliation happens -- that it's a normal part of life -- if you want the slides to stop."
"Right," I said. "And how would you suggest I do that?"
Jaya smiled slightly. "Therapy?" she said. At the look on my face, she quickly added: "You don't have to tell them about the slides -- simply that you have a severe phobia of being embarrassed. You can tell them about how it's led you to leave jobs, nearly drop out of school -- the, uh, 'slides' can be described as changes in career or focus. Describe that to a competent therapist, and I think you'll have an easier time."
I found a therapist. Jaya recommended someone. When I didn't quite gel with him, she recommended someone else.
I gelled with her all right.
"Let's talk about being embarrassed," she started. "How does it make you feel?"
I thought about the feeling of embarrassment, what it was like -- and that's when I slid for the 36th time.
I found Jaya again. It wasn't hard -- I knew that she likely still worked at the university, and that she would look about the same. A quick glance through the faculty directory located her.
Her name was Janine, in this universe. I managed to convince her that I knew her, told her what tests to run -- what she'd done in the other universe.
"Now..."
This Jaya -- Janine -- was a licensed therapist, not a psychiatrist.
"I think I can help you," she said. "Since my colleague elsewhere, er -- couldn't."
Her idea of 'help' was exposure therapy.
"Now," she said, "we have to start with the idea that embarrassment is something that happens. It's normal, and it's not insurmountable. We're going to work up slowly and get you used to the idea..."
I made it through four appointments with her, before she managed to do something that caused me to slide yet again.
I got into a habit, almost: finding Jaya-Janine-Jill-Jerri, and convincing her that I wasn't crazy. Learning relative abundances of different isotopes in different universes, what I should have been and wasn't, science jargon that didn't make sense at first, but slowly grew to fill me with mild dread.
I went through exposure therapy. Not always with her -- she was usually in psychology or psychiatry, but not always -- but most of the time.
We worked up to it: the grand finale, in which I would finally stop sliding.
Every time I tried to go through with it, I ended up sliding again.
"Mental block," said Jenny/Jada/Jyn. "You need to accept that it's possible, or you'll never manage it."
"I don't think it is possible," I said, during one of the sessions. It had been a particularly bad day.
"Come on," she said. "You can do it."
We tried, and I slid yet again.
"That was better," said whatever version of Jaya existed in this universe, as the colors stopped sliding and everything came into focus. "Are you still with me?"
I blinked a little. "What's my name this time?" I asked.
"Arnold," she said. "Shit."
"Closer," I said, and shrugged.
"What was your birth name, anyway?" she asked me.
I thought back to the very first instance -- the first slide.
"Adam," I said, slowly. "Adam Thomas Steine."
"How many names have you had?"
"I don't know," I admitted. "I lost track a while ago. Some of them repeated, and..."
"How many times have you slid?" she asked, intrigued. "Your -- predecessor -- he said that it had been eighty-something times, for him, but that it was getting better. It was slowing down, he said. He was starting to believe that he was getting better -- that eventually he wouldn't slide at all."
I blinked. "58," I said. "I didn't realize -- we haven't all slid the same number of times?"
This version of Jaya laughed. "The first one of you I treated had slid over a thousand times. The numbers keep dropping. I'm hopeful for you."
"The numbers keep going down?"
"The numbers keep going down," she said, and smiled at me. "So something must be working."
I nearly made it through the final exercise, that time. I felt things start to shift, the slide as the colors faded, and I nearly made it -- nearly managed to ground myself; to stay.
"Hang on, Arnold," said that version of Jaya -- and hearing her voice broke my concentration; let me slide all the way into the next reality.
I started asking, after that one, how many times the one before me had slid.
Always, I heard, the numbers were going down.
"We're approaching control," whatever version of Jaya told me. "Soon..."
I tried to make it through the final therapy session. Most of them, I wasn't successful. I'd get close to the end -- I'd feel things start to come on -- and something would distract me; break my concentration, keep me from staying in one spot. I'd fight off the urge for what felt like ages -- it can't have been more than a few seconds, but it felt like hours -- but it didn't matter. Inevitably, I'd go.
The last slide that happened was in therapy.
"Focus," said Jaya. "Think about..."
The first time. When my name had gone from Adam to Aaron. When I'd realized what had happened; what my power was.
How I could run from anything.
"We learn unhealthy coping mechanisms, but they can be unlearned," said Jaya. "Embarrassment is nothing to run from."
"Easy for you to say," I muttered, and she laughed.
"You can do this, Arlo," she said. "Come on. Focus."
I focused -- and when I felt the slide start to happen, the door opened and someone else walked into her office.
"Shit!" said Jaya. "I -- "
The colors ran, melting together, blurring, reshaping, changing and refocusing, and I felt myself -- shift.
"Excellent," I heard Jaya say. "Great work, Adam! You succeeded, you didn't slide, you -- "
Seeing me, she broke off mid-sentence.
"Um," said my double. "Well, I didn't shift that time, but I..."
I saw him blush -- red, bright red, embarrassed for both of us.
I felt myself start to lose my grip again, and I focused, willed myself to stay in the present, not to give in...
He vanished.
I stayed.
"Adam," said Jaya, calmly. "It looks like you've mastered it, too."
"Because he did it," I said. "Because -- it can be done, after all."
"Yes," said Jaya.
My name in that universe, I learned, was Adam -- Adam Steine.
In a box in my parents' attic, there was an art project from 4th grade. An initial project, done in the colors of the rainbow.
In the top left corner, a square that should have been red was orange -- the only flaw in an otherwise adequate project.
It wasn't much, but it meant the world to me.
The Roger Bannister Effect refers to a psychological phenomenon in which until we see someone else do the impossible, we do not realize that it *is* possible.
Thank you for reading.
The first time I slipped, I was nine.
I was in fourth grade, Mrs. Carter’s class, and we were supposed to be doing some project on colors in art: making our initials in this weird rainbow block pattern. I reached for a red crayon, and accidentally grabbed orange instead. Not a huge mistake, but noticeable.
“Roy G. Biv, Adam,” said Mrs. Carter, kindly. I don’t think she knew how to be anything other than kind. “Remember, red before orange.”
I was embarrassed--that she’d seen, that I colored over it and you could still tell -- embarrassed enough that I wanted to sink into the floor. I willed it, open up and swallow me, and in a way, it did:
Everything blurred, the colors ran together like melting--well, crayon--and I slipped sideways…
...into a dimension where another version of me was doing the same project, but had been embarrassed for something else.
“...right,” said my teacher, who was Mrs. Wilson in this dimension. “So don’t do it again next time.”
“I won’t,” I promised, and she nodded and moved on to critique the next student.
My name here was Aaron, not Adam, but it still started with an A, and my last name was still Stein, so it didn’t matter much that I’d gotten switched, the initials were the same -- so I kept coloring, and I pretended like nothing had changed.
I didn’t get much wrong, that first day. I still took the bus home. Mom was still waiting with cookies. If she thought I was someone different -- if I responded a little too slowly to Aaron, still expecting Adam -- she didn’t say anything.
I was nine, after all. I wasn’t worth paying attention to.
It didn’t happen again until I was sixteen. There was a girl I liked -- Genie, Genie Thompson. She was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, until -- well.
“Will you go out with me?” I asked, and she stammered something about not wanting to ruin the friendship.
I’d made the mistake of asking her out in front of the entire cafeteria, at second lunch, and so…
I wished the Earth would open up and swallow me, and it was just like before, when the colors had seemed to melt together, like runny wax. One minute I was standing there in the cafeteria, and the next, I wasn’t.
I was sitting at a table, instead.
“Dude,” one of my friends -- his name had been Steven in the other universe; it was Stephen here -- elbowed me. “Aren’t you going to ask her out?”
“Nah,” I said. “I want to wait for a private moment -- you know, maybe make it less weird, if she says she doesn’t want to.”
“Chicken,” he said, but he dropped it.
I asked her out later -- it felt weird not to -- and she said yes, much to my eternal surprise. “I’d love to!”
But she wasn’t the same -- not the one my adolescent heart had felt such a rush for -- and I knew it, even if I didn’t know why.
We dated for six months -- a record in high school -- and broke up amiably, when we both realized that we weren’t “into” one another.
“You’re just not the same, Aiden,” she said.
I never had the heart to tell her, how true that was.
I started seeing a therapist, while I was in college. It was free, through the student health center, and I thought I was going crazy, at least a little, with the sliding…
I tried to explain to them, what was happening, and when they tried to politely tell me that I needed help beyond what they could offer, that was when the third slide happened, colors running together and the therapist’s face distorting as she said, politely, “I think you could benefit from seeing a psychiatrist, we really only deal with students that are struggling with adjusting to college life…”
I snapped to in a different therapist’s office.
“So, you’re worried about sitting for finals?” she said, looking at the questionaire I had evidently filled out.
“Uh--yeah,” I said. “I mean, I know everyone must worry about finals, but I’m really afraid I’m not going to pass Math 1060, and--”
“Everyone struggles,” she empathized. “Let’s work on giving you the skills to overcome whatever mental block it is you have about math.”
I went through the session with her, learned some coping skills, how to deal with stress and the fear of failure.
I got a card about different student groups I could join, "mindfulness and better living through stress reduction", and I didn't go back.
The slipping kept happening. A physics final I hadn't studied for -- I slipped into a universe where it was postponed.
Tripping and sliding down a muddy hill in the quad -- I slipped into a universe where, instead of colliding head-on with one of my professors that semester, I was alone instead.
Bad dates: slippage. Any embarrassment, major or minor: slippage.
I got used to it, after a while -- used to answering to any old A-name, from Art to Ahriman; used to slipping into universes where things were slightly different, but still mostly the same. I had the same career, almost everywhere I went: working in HR, for different large companies. The policies weren't the same -- they varied from place to place -- but the work itself was easy enough, and I never had to deal with anything particularly tricky. Disciplining someone for stealing their coworker's lunch out of the work fridge was similar no matter where I ended up. The work didn't require creativity, or familiarity with the company's values -- mostly, it was easy. I didn't usually slip at work. It was elsewhere, that it happened: slippage when I asked my long-term girlfriend to marry me and she said she thought we should see other people; slippage when I drunkenly told my roommate I had feelings for her; a slip when I bent over at work and my pants tore; slippage when I accidentally implied a cashier at the local grocery store was pregnant (she assured me, very loudly, that she wasn't).
Slippage was a part of my life. There didn't seem to be a way around it.
I tried multiple therapists. I tried scientists -- contacting universities; reaching out to them to see if anyone was studying the possibility of multiple parallel universes, many worlds theory.
Most of those contacts resulted in slipping, again, but I didn't give up.
I met the first woman to believe me after the 35th slip. This one had been something work-related -- I was being reprimanded for not paying close enough attention in a meeting. The colors ran like wax, and then --
It was unusual, meeting her. Normally, when I slipped, I slipped right back to the same instant, in a different universe, where I hadn't been embarrassed, or hadn't been embarrassed in the same way.
This time, I slipped into her office. Another version of me -- another Aarne (my name in the last universe) -- must have been consulting with her about something, but I'd slipped and taken his place.
" -- believe you," said the woman in front of me, in the place I recognized as being a doctor or professional's office of some kind. "But you have to understand, your story is a little...out of the ordinary."
I blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"Your story," she said, looking down at the manila folder she held in front of her. She was of middling height and weight, with dark brown hair twisted back in a bun, horn-rimmed glasses and serious brown eyes. I would have guessed she was in her late 30s. "About -- what was it you called it?"
"Slippage?" I hazarded a guess.
"No," she said, frowning. "Sliding. Now, Mr. Smith..."
That, I guessed, was my last name in this universe.
"You have to understand that you're asking rather a lot of me as a clinician," she said. "There's little to no way to prove your story."
"I see," I said, standing. "You don't believe me."
She quirked an eyebrow at me over her glasses. "On the contrary," she said, "I do."
Her name was Jaya -- Jaya Friedman. She was a psychiatrist with a physicist mother. This, I guessed, was why I'd reached out to her. She'd done physics in undergrad -- had gone on to do a master's degree in the field -- before switching to psychiatry and going to medical school.
"Your face," she said, when I asked her just what it was that had made her believe me. "When I was in the middle of dismissing you, your face went blank for a moment -- just a moment -- and you seemed...disoriented. I thought that you might be entering a fugue state, but your answers were clear, and more importantly, you didn't look the same. I'd just embarrassed you, and you went blank, but then your hair was parted on the wrong side, and you didn't use the same vocabulary. I decided, at least in the moment, to believe you. Now..."
She had some ideas, about what could be done to prove that I was from a different universe.
"Isotope distribution," she said. "If you're from a different universe, there should be different stable isotopes."
Jaya couldn't, however, help me pin down what would stop the sliding.
"I've never seen it before," she said. "It appears to be unique to you. So..."
"I'm stuck with it, is what you're saying," I prompted.
"No," she said. "It's not -- it appears to be something to do with you, some kind of defense mechanism; something to keep you from being embarrassed."
She hesitated a moment. "I think," she said, "that you need to accept that humiliation happens -- that it's a normal part of life -- if you want the slides to stop."
"Right," I said. "And how would you suggest I do that?"
Jaya smiled slightly. "Therapy?" she said. At the look on my face, she quickly added: "You don't have to tell them about the slides -- simply that you have a severe phobia of being embarrassed. You can tell them about how it's led you to leave jobs, nearly drop out of school -- the, uh, 'slides' can be described as changes in career or focus. Describe that to a competent therapist, and I think you'll have an easier time."
I found a therapist. Jaya recommended someone. When I didn't quite gel with him, she recommended someone else.
I gelled with her all right.
"Let's talk about being embarrassed," she started. "How does it make you feel?"
I thought about the feeling of embarrassment, what it was like -- and that's when I slid for the 36th time.
I found Jaya again. It wasn't hard -- I knew that she likely still worked at the university, and that she would look about the same. A quick glance through the faculty directory located her.
Her name was Janine, in this universe. I managed to convince her that I knew her, told her what tests to run -- what she'd done in the other universe.
"Now..."
This Jaya -- Janine -- was a licensed therapist, not a psychiatrist.
"I think I can help you," she said. "Since my colleague elsewhere, er -- couldn't."
Her idea of 'help' was exposure therapy.
"Now," she said, "we have to start with the idea that embarrassment is something that happens. It's normal, and it's not insurmountable. We're going to work up slowly and get you used to the idea..."
I made it through four appointments with her, before she managed to do something that caused me to slide yet again.
I got into a habit, almost: finding Jaya-Janine-Jill-Jerri, and convincing her that I wasn't crazy. Learning relative abundances of different isotopes in different universes, what I should have been and wasn't, science jargon that didn't make sense at first, but slowly grew to fill me with mild dread.
I went through exposure therapy. Not always with her -- she was usually in psychology or psychiatry, but not always -- but most of the time.
We worked up to it: the grand finale, in which I would finally stop sliding.
Every time I tried to go through with it, I ended up sliding again.
"Mental block," said Jenny/Jada/Jyn. "You need to accept that it's possible, or you'll never manage it."
"I don't think it is possible," I said, during one of the sessions. It had been a particularly bad day.
"Come on," she said. "You can do it."
We tried, and I slid yet again.
"That was better," said whatever version of Jaya existed in this universe, as the colors stopped sliding and everything came into focus. "Are you still with me?"
I blinked a little. "What's my name this time?" I asked.
"Arnold," she said. "Shit."
"Closer," I said, and shrugged.
"What was your birth name, anyway?" she asked me.
I thought back to the very first instance -- the first slide.
"Adam," I said, slowly. "Adam Thomas Steine."
"How many names have you had?"
"I don't know," I admitted. "I lost track a while ago. Some of them repeated, and..."
"How many times have you slid?" she asked, intrigued. "Your -- predecessor -- he said that it had been eighty-something times, for him, but that it was getting better. It was slowing down, he said. He was starting to believe that he was getting better -- that eventually he wouldn't slide at all."
I blinked. "58," I said. "I didn't realize -- we haven't all slid the same number of times?"
This version of Jaya laughed. "The first one of you I treated had slid over a thousand times. The numbers keep dropping. I'm hopeful for you."
"The numbers keep going down?"
"The numbers keep going down," she said, and smiled at me. "So something must be working."
I nearly made it through the final exercise, that time. I felt things start to shift, the slide as the colors faded, and I nearly made it -- nearly managed to ground myself; to stay.
"Hang on, Arnold," said that version of Jaya -- and hearing her voice broke my concentration; let me slide all the way into the next reality.
I started asking, after that one, how many times the one before me had slid.
Always, I heard, the numbers were going down.
"We're approaching control," whatever version of Jaya told me. "Soon..."
I tried to make it through the final therapy session. Most of them, I wasn't successful. I'd get close to the end -- I'd feel things start to come on -- and something would distract me; break my concentration, keep me from staying in one spot. I'd fight off the urge for what felt like ages -- it can't have been more than a few seconds, but it felt like hours -- but it didn't matter. Inevitably, I'd go.
The last slide that happened was in therapy.
"Focus," said Jaya. "Think about..."
The first time. When my name had gone from Adam to Aaron. When I'd realized what had happened; what my power was.
How I could run from anything.
"We learn unhealthy coping mechanisms, but they can be unlearned," said Jaya. "Embarrassment is nothing to run from."
"Easy for you to say," I muttered, and she laughed.
"You can do this, Arlo," she said. "Come on. Focus."
I focused -- and when I felt the slide start to happen, the door opened and someone else walked into her office.
"Shit!" said Jaya. "I -- "
The colors ran, melting together, blurring, reshaping, changing and refocusing, and I felt myself -- shift.
"Excellent," I heard Jaya say. "Great work, Adam! You succeeded, you didn't slide, you -- "
Seeing me, she broke off mid-sentence.
"Um," said my double. "Well, I didn't shift that time, but I..."
I saw him blush -- red, bright red, embarrassed for both of us.
I felt myself start to lose my grip again, and I focused, willed myself to stay in the present, not to give in...
He vanished.
I stayed.
"Adam," said Jaya, calmly. "It looks like you've mastered it, too."
"Because he did it," I said. "Because -- it can be done, after all."
"Yes," said Jaya.
My name in that universe, I learned, was Adam -- Adam Steine.
In a box in my parents' attic, there was an art project from 4th grade. An initial project, done in the colors of the rainbow.
In the top left corner, a square that should have been red was orange -- the only flaw in an otherwise adequate project.
It wasn't much, but it meant the world to me.
The Roger Bannister Effect refers to a psychological phenomenon in which until we see someone else do the impossible, we do not realize that it *is* possible.
Thank you for reading.