I am afraid of the dark.

I didn’t figure this out until recently. And by that, I mean someone told me.

“It’s not a fear of dark spaces,” I said.

I denied it. I started to get a little annoyed. This woman doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know where I come from or what I’ve been through and here she is making all sorts of ridiculous assumptions about me. I am NOT afraid of the dark. I am afraid of…monsters and ghosts. Badness takes so many forms and sometimes it is a person and sometimes it is a thing that goes bump in the night.

“I am afraid of monsters and ghosts. They’re real, you know. Not that I’ve seen any but have you seen Jesus? Same concept.”

She asked me to name the places that scare me the most. I didn’t want to humor her because, really, what did I owe this know-it-all semi-stranger? But I wanted to be right and I needed her to be wrong so I listed the spaces that made me feel small and naked.

I do not like going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Sometimes I try to close my eyes because it is such a short distance and I’m sure that I can make it without bumping into anything. Every morning as I get out of bed, my feet pause a dozen inches above the dark wooden floorboards. That space between the bed and the floor. I don’t know what hides there. Those public restrooms that require my presence before the lights switch on, I don’t like those. Closets. My garage when my car is almost all of the way in. I do not like driving at night. My head throbs. Sometimes I call my husband. He listens to me talk about unimportant things that are important to me. It helps to pass the time. My head aches worse when it is late at night and hardly any cars share the road.

“Those are all dark places,” she said.

“Oh.”

Sometimes a truth that seems so obvious to everyone else escapes us because we are so deeply entrenched in our own version of reality.

I quit being stubborn for just one minute and I allowed myself to entertain the thought that this obviously dumb semi-stranger might be right. How could someone else be right besides me? That’s some bullshit. But I opened my mind and then her words hit my insides and I could feel them settling in a corner that had been empty because it was waiting for the truth. Oh, I guess…I’m afraid of the dark. That explains so much!

I thought I would know everything about myself at this point but I was wrong (again? wtf). I will take my truths as they come….very, very slowly.