How I overcame my fear of the dark

There are different kinds of fear. Most of them are not named and some are even impossible to describe. Others are only known through experience. But the fear that actually intrigues me is the terror that every child knows, the unknown feeling that prevents every living being from crossing a busy street in the rush hour or adventuring in the dark woods all by themselves.

Biologists and psychologists could describe what evolutionary process has driven us to know fear since the first day of our life, but I am ignorant on that matter. However, I can tell that we know fear before we know death. We are born in fear but we only understand death later in life. Years ago I met a Russian girl who grew up in the Siberian countryside with her grandparents. Once she learned that every living being has to die, she sat by the window staring at the snow. She would repeat that for days on, wondering about the fact that it would end all of our lives. Our biggest fear. Our, so far, unavoidable fate. She also told me what the Russian word Тоска means. But that’s another story.

There were things that I feared only by night. During the day I could deal with any possibly supernatural situation that would eventually cross my way. A lot of my time was spent thinking about the unknown: spirits, aliens, the afterworld. At night, however, I feared everything that wasn’t from “this world”. I know that being afraid of the dark is a common thing, but what I felt back then was bordering phobia. Being susceptible to insomnia also didn’t help my cause. In order to sleep, I had to lay in bed for hours and hours, doing nothing, staring at walls and the ceiling.

I eventually became obsessed with the lights that were coming through my window when it wasn’t properly shut. Sometimes I would stare at those lights coming from the street through the Venetian blind. Being creative, I liked to anthropomorphize the shadows that they use to form, but it was a risky habit since I was prone to believe in my fantasies.

I was fifteen and I was robbed more than once, and I would walk the streets normally at any time. But the darkness of my room or the staircase from my parent’s building was too much to me. First I tried to understand the source of that fear, and I couldn’t. Then I tried to overcome it.

Every night when I was coming back from a friend’s house I climbed the stairs to the apartment without turning the lights on. In the beginning, I could walk only a few flights of stairs, and then I had to turn on the lights of the corridor. I kept trying, day after day, to reach further stairs in the dusk. After some weeks I could reach the third floor. The windows of the hallways projected the light outside. I realized that actually, the darkness wasn’t my biggest fear but the atmosphere of low-lit environments that sparkled my imagination so well.

With time those stairs became more familiar to me at night. It was always silent, and I enjoyed staring at the city outside, spreading through the hills, painted by a faint yellow light.

Sometimes I would hear the choirs of the neighbor church. They sang anthems, without using any instruments, only the voices of dozens of faithful god-fearing men and women. And that suited the staircase so well. It created the perfect atmosphere for that place. It sort of comforted me.

That’s how I overcame my most childish, yet terrifying phobia, and now I have other fears. Now I fear looking myself in the mirror; a guilty conscience; farewells. I fear the years going by. And as every conscious soul on this planet, I have a creeping fear of death. Will we ever overcome this one?