Scared of the Dark

I had always been an anxious child. Every happy event came with a fear of what could happen. I cried on each first day of school and hated talking to a crowd, but it wasn’t just people that made me shiver. It was the sabotaging thoughts I had that kept me up at night. I wasn’t only scared of the dark in ways a normal seven-year-old would be. There weren’t only monsters in my closet, but strangers lurking through my window. The trees in my backyard were perfect for people to hide behind and the blinds had a gap that could be seen through. I wasn’t sure what I would do if someone came bursting through my window and pulling me out with them. What would I do? Who would come and save me? Surely my parents would try to help, but who would win? The kidnapper or my frail mother. It wasn’t a likely victory. Every night was filled with a new fear. A new nightmare that would have me folding my blankets on the floor of my parent's bedroom. It wasn’t much help to be alone on my own to my own brain that even suggested that the smoke alarm's little red light was somehow foreshadowing a fire that I would have to save my family from. I forced my parents to remove the batteries from my bedroom’s alarm as if that made me safer. My love for reading fueled my imagination in more ways than one. It allowed me to create my own fairytales during the day but allowed for new, scarier stories to form in my head when the sun went down.