Learning Bravery from a Pair of Mice

I learned how to live in this world when I was fifteen years old. And it was taught to me by perhaps the most humble of all mammals—Mus musculus domesticus, the domestic mouse.

This was not a lesson I was expecting to learn when I set out to adopt a set of new companions; I was simply hoping that the company of an adorable animal might bolster my mental health. I chose them impulsively for their beauty. The smaller of the pair had a shining black coat and was so quick and tiny that the pet-store employee struggled to catch her for me. The other was large among her peers, gray and white, with eyes I thought were kind and curious. I had no doubts they were meant to be mine as I carried them home in a little cardboard box, feeling their scurrying feet against the bottom. They needed no encouragement to explore their new cage and wasted no time finding their food and carrying it away to a more ideal location (hidden beneath a plastic hut). Immediately, the mice added life to my quiet home through soft reminders of their presence, sifting through their bedding and chasing each other on their wheel. At night I listened to them, considering these small creatures in my care. They relied on me to keep them alive. And, though I did not realize it at the time, I needed them too.

I was (and remain to this day) something of a sensitive queer youth, and the transition from middle school to high school was particularly difficult as I entered an era of sullen teenagedom. I was filled with loathing for my body, due to both my yet-unknown polycystic ovary syndrome (which would remain undiagnosed for several more years as doctors blamed my symptoms on being overweight) and my unacknowledged gender dysphoria. My mental health withered as the academic pressure of college applications loomed on the horizon, and I mistook panic attacks for overcaffeination. And, like many adolescents, I was discovering the power of endless, largely unmonitored social media access—echo chambers filled with homophobic, sexist, and racist rhetoric.

By the time classes began my freshman year, I had become disillusioned. Not only with my own self but with the goodness of humankind on the whole. How could I believe that humans were anything but cruel and selfish creatures when it felt like the world was constantly upheaving with hate all around me?

To protect what remained of my soft, bleeding heart, I became more machine than human. All my life I had been a musician, but the viola was too vulnerable an instrument. I stopped drawing and writing, despite a renaissance of interest only a few years before. I developed an obsession with grades and academics, hinging my self-worth on perfect performance. Like consuming tiny bits of poison, I engaged in toxic online communities, lying to myself that I was trying to stay “informed” while also hoping to build an immunity. But, like any poison, all it did was make me sicker and sicker. To this day I remain the stereotypical “snowflake”: Words hurt. They always will.

But perhaps worst of all, I denied who I was. There was nothing cishetero about me—I struggled with crushes on both my closest female and male friends; I hated being called miss or ma’am; I hated my body and hated myself but never told anyone to refer to me differently. I knew I was lucky to attend an institution that hung pride flags on the walls and hired queer teachers, and I knew my high school had a popular, supportive GSA—I was invited to it multiple times—but I never attended. How could I trust them? Would I not be cast out as a broken thing? I feared that humans had been built on the principle of survival of the fittest and that school was predestined to operate the same way, with the popular high achievers at the top of a chain that left the gender-nonconforming misfits to hide or be trampled beneath them. In history, I had been taught that when Homo sapiens marched out of Africa, they destroyed the Eurasian hominins that had evolved there—the Neanderthals and Denisovans. To be human was to stand alone against this world and march forward, no matter what kind of gender dysphoria stood in your way. That was what I told myself, because it was the only way I knew how to survive.

During this time, I became more familiar with my mice and quickly realized they were the most skittish mice I’d ever met. Their multistory, multicage spread (a penthouse level of luxury, in the world of rodents) had been donated to me by a friend, and they were easy to care for despite the occasional pungent odor.

Their sprawling mansion, however, proved to be something of an inconvenience to me, as the faintest whiff or whisper of my approach would send them dashing out from underneath their bedding or colorful plastic houses and into the tubing that connected their two cages, huddled together as they peered out at me with their huge beady eyes. Even the smallest human hand couldn’t reach them in that translucent tunnel, and neither treats nor coaxing could draw them out. They simply waited until I—the terrible predator who fed, watered, and protected them—was gone, and then they could resume their usual activities, forgetting I had ever been there. It did not matter that I left apple slices near their hiding spots as a peace offering or that I had never once hurt them while cleaning their cage. They were prey animals, and I was a huge, lumbering monster. Until the day they died, they did not trust me.

Unfortunately for them (but fortunately for me, a lover of petting soft animals), they had a fatal flaw: Their favorite place to sleep was at the very top of their cage, within quick and easy reach. And, as largely nocturnal animals, they slept for most of the day, curled together in a warm, furry ball, half-buried in their bedding as they rested from a night of vigorous wheel-running. If I was quiet and quick enough, I could gently grab one of the pair and lift her in my hands, petting behind her ears and cooing softly to the little animal I so adored while she froze, apprehensive, in my palm. The other mouse would go streaking off into the tunnels, where I could not hope to subject her to the same love and affection.

But then—her little muscles trembling from the effort—the free mouse would come creeping back. She would remain low in the bedding, peaking only her whiskers out at first, followed by her head and tiny paws. If I took too long before returning her companion, she would grow restless, turning tight circles, venturing out to dart from side to side of the cage. Had I been an owl or fox, this behavior would surely have led to both of them being eaten.

It was only when I softly lowered my captive back to her home that the pair of them escaped together, crowding alongside one another in the bright plastic tubing. Then, for several minutes, the emancipated mouse would be groomed and sniffed, checked over for injury or contaminant. This became our ritual; I lifted and petted one, and the other would wait until I was finished, at which point they would both disappear for a session of rigorous care and cleaning. And the longer it went on, the more it struck me: I had never met creatures more cowardly than those two mice, but, for some reason, they would never abandon each other, not even in the face of what they could only comprehend as certain-death-by-predator. How could an animal that lived its entire life in fear choose companionship over its own survival?

For all my life, I have been a very science-oriented person. As a high schooler, I excelled in biology and biochemistry classes, and I now study Phyllobates frogs alongside some of the leading amphibian experts in the world. But this interaction stupefied me; it went against everything I thought I understood about the workings of the world and what it meant to thrive as nature intended.

How could an animal that lived its entire life in fear choose companionship over its own survival?

Mice have one of the smallest encephalization quotients (brain-to-body ratios) in the mammal kingdom, with an entire 2 percent of their brains devoted only to smell (as opposed to humans, with a mere 0.01 percent). A mouse can never be capable of the complex social thinking of a human because their social network does not extend far beyond “males with hierarchical breeding access” and “other,” if that. Mother mice will cannibalize their own offspring for any number of reasons, and they are preyed upon by nearly everything that can catch them. You would not expect an animal such as that to experience bravery, let alone to act upon it. But here they were, able to both fear me and to defy me, to stand by each other’s side with no consideration for their own genetic continuation. Even to a mouse, there were some things—some friendships and loved ones—more important than self-preservation at any cost.

And what did that say about humans? What did that say about me?

From the emergence of the first hominins (barely more than modern apes, hardly able to stand upright) to our species now, we have been evolving increasingly large brains; a mouse’s EQ is dwarfed by even our distant australopithecine ancestors. But ours are not only large brains; they are large social brains: Paleontological records show the most growth in frontal regions that control sociality, learning, language, and symbolic expression. The last members of the Homo genus were smaller and weaker in body than those that came before but were more successful at sociality than anything the earth had ever seen before—the obedient drones of an ant colony can’t hold a candle to the cooperation we’re capable of.

Ancient humans of multiple species made seaworthy watercraft and crossed the oceans, hunted deadly megafauna, mastered fire, and buried their dead with ritual objects. They learned how to change landscapes with controlled burns and leech poison from deadly rainforest gourds to make them safely edible. At no point did Homo sapiens ever evolve to have fewer group members around the campfire. Nor were we a pure, conquering species, either, intolerant of the other hominins whose lands we migrated across. Nearly everyone of non-African descent has borrowed 2 to 4 percent of their DNA from the Neanderthals and Denisovans of Eurasia. We did not march to war with these archaics; we welcomed them into our social groups, interbred with them, and added their knowledge to ours. Though those species no longer exist, they did not truly go extinct. They became a part of us.

Sociality—respect, worry, and compassion for one another—is the entire basis for our existence. And the mice taught me that this was not a fluke: It is not against the laws of nature to protect one another, to help someone else before ensuring your own reproductive success. It is why we are alive today, after hundreds of thousands of years of hardship. Our ancestors knew that an individual’s survival was tied intrinsically to the survival of those around them and then learned to protect each other with no motive beyond kindness and comradery, because it is right and good to help those around us. Perhaps today we are not confronting daily death on the steppes and rainforests, but high school—and all of life in this modern world—is just another ecosystem in which we must band together to survive. When we turn away from one another, we are turning away from what it means to be human.

Some people are awful; young me wasn’t wrong about that. Some mice eat their own babies. There will always be those who are intolerant, who make places unsafe for others, and I was not unwise to guard my heart against those who were revealed to be venomous. But what I’ve since learned is that they are the outliers; not all strangers and potential friends are predestined to be that way. Compassion and companionship can be found at our very core, and we, too, are capable of incredible feats of bravery against all odds. My mice taught me how to be brave when they refused to abandon each other, despite their fear of being devoured. And I proved to myself that I could be brave when I decided that to be human was to choose love, again and again. Your heart is a campfire on the prehistoric plains, longing to be surrounded and tended by your chosen clan.

My fifteen-year-old self could not have imagined the happiness I experience now. Of course, there are still days I struggle with my self-image, and there are times of immense grief from living in a dangerous, cisheteronormative world. But none are so bad as they once were because I do not experience them alone, and the days between are filled with joy and exploration. And though my mice have long departed, their teachings remain with me. I am inspired by them to be stubbornly alive: to welcome others into my circle, to be passionate, and, most of all, to have the courage to reach out when I am scared of what lies ahead. I will face it head-on and stand by the side of those I love through whatever comes our way. And this is how we will survive this world—together.

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