ou are not in Kansas anymore,” said General Quaritch. And, boy, was I happy about that.

My journey with James Cameron’s “Avatar” began seven years after the film landed in theatres. Released in 2009, “Avatar” was, in my opinion, the greatest technological achievement in film since the invention of sound and color.

The first time I watched “Avatar,” I was in awe. Pandora, where the film took place, seemed like paradise. I didn’t care that we weren’t in Kansas anymore; I hated Kansas compared to the beauty of the Na’vi’s planet — the bioluminescence of the night and of the star spots on their skin, the shades of purple and blue found on the native wildlife. Upon my first watch, I actually didn’t like the movie because every time the main character Jake would wake up, we, as viewers, would be forced to spend time in the human world, which left me disappointed. If I were him, I’d never wake up, I thought.

I suffered as a child from an acute desire to escape my life. I found everything boring because most of it was easy for me (that is certainly not the case now). I was good in school. I could talk to adults. I found sports were easy. I could pick up an instrument and know what it was supposed to sound like. I dove into the fantasy worlds I was exposed to, hoping that perhaps one day, I would stop feeling so trapped in my seemingly pointless existence.

After watching “Avatar,” I tried to find Pandora in the world around me. After all, Cameron’s design of the foreign planet was very intentional. The Na’vi ultimately bear mild resemblance to people. The animals are uncanny: we recognize their snouts, or their legs, or the sounds they make, but overall every life form on Pandora is a foreign form to our eyes.

Daydreams about Pandora turned me into one of those kids who really wanted to be an animal when they were younger. While I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that publicly, it is true. My favorite movie growing up was “The Lion King,” my favorite books were series like “Warriors” and “Wings of Fire.” I loved “How to Train Your Dragon” and was devastated when they shut down “School of Dragons” on the App Store. You get the point.

Funnily enough, my family is the complete opposite. My dad never wanted pets, my mom was terrified of insects, my siblings hated snakes and cats. I, on the other hand, had a pet snake for a short time and pulled frogs out of our pool with my bare hands. I loved horseback riding and being around horses. When we went hiking, I chased after the cows.

Most famously, though, I befriended a bobcat that we caught in our backyard.

My grandma loves to tell this story, and I vaguely remember it. We set a trap in our backyard for a bobcat that my parents were concerned about. It fell for our ruse, and soon enough, sitting in our driveway in a cage, was a three foot long feline covered in spotted fur, with long ears and mean eyes. Naturally, the bobcat was very frustrated about its situation. We did relocate it, but for a short time, this cat was sitting pretty in our driveway.

It was summer. I was home every day with barely anything to do. Most kids go to sleepaway camp or go spend a few weeks with their friends, but I never did. My siblings and I had other ways of amusing ourselves. Mine during that time was to go outside and sit on the burning asphalt in front of that cage, in a staring contest with an angry bobcat. The first time my grandma saw me doing it, she erupted in panic. My parents and siblings rushed outside, only to find that this supposedly territorial creature was calm. At the time, I thought that perhaps we simply recognized something in each other. I felt trapped, and so did he.

My family rarely rewatched movies, so it was many years before I watched “Avatar” again. By that point, I was much older, and my vision of life had completely changed. I was in boarding school, voluntarily, with great friends and playing sports I loved. Nature, and my experience with living things, had significantly diminished in priority in my brain. I watched “Avatar” then in a dark room with a huge computer screen, alone. What surprised me most was how unsettled I felt as I turned the lights on and came back to reality. The planet disturbed me: the animals were unpredictable and strange-looking; the native residents didn’t feel familiar; and the humans were doing what they did on Earth, on Pandora.

The scene from the movie I particularly couldn’t shake off came right after Grace dies and the Na’vi deity, Eywa, is unable to save her. Jake goes to Tree of Souls and he prays to this deity, though she is foreign to him. He pleads with her: “See the world we come from. There’s no green there. They killed their mother. And they’re gonna do the same here.” His words stuck with me. Combined with the sublime feeling, the mingling of both awe and terror, I began to wonder: When did I become afraid of living things? Is that fear what motivated my family to cage the bobcat? Does it prevent us humans from choosing to protect our own mother?

As I’ve grown, I’ve inherited this fear of living things. It is buried in each of us, even in a child who constantly sought out animals and plants as a way to connect. The less time we spend around nature, and the more we believe the cultural norm that living things can be dangerous, that animals are somehow “not like us,” the more that buried instinct rises to the surface. I don’t think that “Avatar” pushes this rhetoric on us. But my experience watching the film has allowed me to recognize the change inside me.

The last time I watched the film was about two months ago, shortly before I moved to Harvard. Coming off a summer of travelling and partying, it was a return to something familiar. But Pandora had changed. Or perhaps it was less that Pandora had changed, and more so that I had.

While the planet was still beautiful and the animals were still wonderful, the comfort was gone. The sense of safety was gone. Pandora is not for humans; we are meant to be afraid. For a child trying to escape, that message got lost in translation. But as an adult, I felt it in my bones — James Cameron’s sublime and uneasiness. “Avatar” taught me that there is beauty in the fear, there is inspiration in the sublime, and our world may be dying, but she is not dead yet.

I don’t pick up frogs from our pool with my bare hands now; I use a net. I’m scared of insects. Having a pet snake sounds like a crazy idea to me now. I think about petting the cows on our hikes, and then I chicken out. Most famously, I would never befriend a bobcat.

Back in Kansas once more, I search for Pandora in my own world.