I’m Fucking Afraid of the Dark

Girls.

In all my youth involvement over the years, I’ve never worked with young girls. Not exclusively, at least. Not in the classroom and certainly not in the wild.

I’ve grown quite accustomed to boys of all ages. Boys who swear and fight and fart. For the second week of my new wilderness therapy job, however, I was working with four teenage girls and it proved enlightening on many levels. For one, I had no idea teenage girls swear and fight and fart, too. Fart openly in front of others.

Fascinating.

In any case, they were good kids. Just like the boys were good kids. But these girls had their issues. Just like the boys of last week had their issues.

These girls were entitled. They expected not to hike too much. They expected to talk to staff however they liked. They expected hot meals every night regardless whether they could bust their own fire.

They expected to go to bed before dark every night. They freaked out if anything they deserved was not, in fact, delivered.

Especially that whole bed-before-dark thing.

“I’m sorry, did we say for y’all to get your packs on backs?” my fellow instructor asked the girls. They’d already grabbed their things to take back to shelters after completing their dinner and cleanup and brushing teeth and tying the bear hang.

It was the usual routine of most other nights. But this would not be just another night.

“What? Are we not going to bed?” one girl asked. Let’s call her Noelle.

“We are not.”

Within seconds, an indignant fury rose among the group — especially from Noelle.

“Why not? The other staff shift let us go to bed before dark!”

“We are not the other staff shift,” the instructor stated. “We have a little discussion group planned before bed.”

“But I get anxiety in the dark!” Noelle shrieked. “Why can’t we just go to bed now?”

The staff held firm — group first, then bed.

I didn’t know what to say or do, so I simply stayed quiet, followed the other instructors into a circle around a fire mound that held no fire because the girls couldn’t make one as darkness fell upon an escalated agitated group. Noelle’s disdain rose to a swear-laden diatribe against the entire staff.

“You guys are being so inconsiderate right now! I was traumatized my first night out here, and I’m fucking afraid of the dark! Like I don’t understand, it’s still light out, why can’t we just go to bed?!”

“You’re okay,” the instructor offered. “We’re all okay. We’re all together. Nothing bad is going to happen.”

“No, I’m fucking pissed!” Noelle started to cry, she started to hyperventilate, and within a few minutes she took herself “out of group” because she couldn’t keep calm within the group.

Twenty feet away from our circle, Noelle sat and sobbed into the cold black night.

I’m still an intern at this new wilderness therapy job, and I’m certainly still learning. Learning what to do and learning what on earth to say. I watched the only other male instructor walk over and sit with Noelle, her cries growing indignant again before softening and eventually turning quiet.

Twenty minutes later, Noelle returned to the group and “checked in” with her emotional state. It’s a five-part formula the kids use to analyze their feelings at any given moment, whether positive or negative.

“I’m feeling scared,” she said. “I feel this way when it gets dark. I feel this way because I start to think about my life outside this place and whether my parents will send me to boarding school next. I’m afraid of the future.”

Suddenly, it wasn’t just a silly little being afraid of the dark thing. It wasn’t just the critters and the Bogeyman.

It wasn’t a physical darkness but a metaphorical one lingering far beyond these blackened Blue Ridge Mountains. A darkness stretching back across the country to California where Noelle lives and where she might not soon live again.

The darkness is the future, and the future is fucking scary.

“My hope inside my control is that I can stay calm with you guys supporting me,” Noelle continued with her check-in. “And my hope outside my control is that my parents don’t send me to boarding school.” She sniffled.

I sat in that circle nodding with Noelle’s words. How I’ve often dreaded the unknown of the snaking path ahead or where the path even was in the engulfing night.

I realized it didn’t matter that Noelle was a girl and 15 and I was a boy and nearly twice her age.

We were the same, she and I. Hysterical and pathetic on the dirt floor. Terrified of the darkness looming, the darkness here.

And yet surrounded all the more by fellow pilgrims in this piercing dark.

We are okay.

We are together.

Nothing bad is going to happen.