We Are All Still Children

A lot of my fears have been made real by the last year. And somehow, some way, I have returned to an insatiable appetite for things that scare me.

This is Scaring Children, a column by A. E. Osworth that explores children’s horror media from the nineties and early aughts through the lens of queer adulthood.

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I was the kind of kid who was scared of the dark. I could never articulate why, not properly. I remember being very young and saying something I thought was very deep: “It’s because I don’t know what’s there. I am scared of the unknown.” I got praised for it by adults, so of course I kept on saying it.

And it’s a version of the truth. I never did see very well in it. (I still don’t.) I’d stub my toes wandering down the hall, down the stairs with my hand outstretched until, mercifully, it would land on a switch and everything would flood with light. But it’s a more frenetic, more feral experience than that. My body conjured things from the deep space behind a closed eyelid or the witching stillness of a rural 3 a.m., things that would make me run and scream and jump and cry.

It wasn’t just the dark either. I was a fearful kid. It seemed like I was afraid of everything. Demonic possession, my parents dying, snapping turtles for some reason? My earliest memory is a nightmare about my house filling up with snapping turtles. It must have been shocking, then, for the adults in my life to discover what spooky tastes I had.

I longed to be terrified. I was thrilled by it. I spent my childhood chasing constructed fears, rather than dealing with my wordless ones. If it was scary, I wanted it. Picture a tiny girl-child writing a series of Dewey decimal numbers and discovering a whole row of books about ghosts and telekinesis and aliens and the devil, none of which were made for her. Imagine a kindergartener who refused to wear anything but dresses to school, hair down to the top of her flared and floral skirt, choosing a Goosebumps book at the Scholastic Book Fair only to be told at checkout that she would have to wait until fourth grade to have it.

“But I can read this now,” she said. I said. And I meant it. I could, in more ways than one. Because with this provocation, my anxiety fell away. I slept at night. Sometimes, even, I slept in the dark.

What it feels like: And then, one day, I was over the horror thing. Nothing.

What it actually was: I cannot remember the point at which I stopped.

But what I do remember is not only the profound inability to watch The Blair Witch Project when it hit theaters at the age of eleven, but also not feeling the least desire to. Somehow I understood it to be a bridge too far, even for me, who never loved to be treated like a child. I don’t really know why. I still don’t.

I am still scared of the dark. I am thirty-two. I choose to live in cities and in buildings where darkness never actually occurs; the light streams through my blinds at night from the main road on which I live. I have a panic disorder, a pretty gnarly one, and I am still scared of everything, though “everything” is an updated list. No to demonic possession; yes to my parents dying; no to snapping turtles although they can reach your fingers even if you grab them around the middle where you think they cannot possibly reach your fingers because they are far more agile than any person would believe by looking at them and I will never ever touch one and you shouldn’t either. Added to the list: getting hit by a car on my bike, looking stupid in front of a lot of people, being queer-bashed, getting extremely sick, death.

A lot of my fears, in fact, have been made real by the last year: I am going through a catastrophic breakup, one that means my whole life is different than it was this time last year; the world is yet ruled by Covid-19 and the United States especially so; we witnessed a coup attempt this January; last fall, Portland, where I live, had its worst wildfire season in recent memory and I couldn’t breathe for a week and now I know too much about go bags.

And somehow, some way, I have returned to an insatiable appetite for things that scare me. I noticed it when I was huddled in a friend’s basement (where I lived in the aftermath of my breakup), watching the German television show Dark in the dark. Around episode three, I resurfaced from the binge and I looked at myself in surprise. I did not know what I was doing; I hadn’t even thought of it. Every light was out. Every muscle was tense. I wasn’t even skipping the introduction, with music that caused a bodily shiver every single time the first three notes sounded. I am so afraid of the dark, yet I couldn’t stop.

I have, as of late, found myself deeply in community with other trans people who have experienced life-atomizing breakups. I texted one of them, my friend Carolyn Yates, who also happens to be a queer-relationship-expert-about-town and a sex-toy concierge. Did you by any chance have a horror thing while you were getting divorced? They responded quickly: Yes.

We Zoom nearly every day, Carolyn and I. We’ve talked so much about “the horror thing,” something that they’re long since over; they do not watch horror anymore. “My horror threshold is extremely low,” they told me. But during their divorce, “I found that it was much higher, in that it was possible for me to engage in horror at all. I think because I was feeling so many challenging feelings all the time, and because I was so sad, I didn’t notice the normally off-putting parts of horror as much. Also, a sad scary thing was already happening, so sad scary media was a lot more chill.”

I tweeted about “the horror thing,” and several folks tweeted back. One was Darcy Cooper, who said that after every big breakup, they watch horror movies where the protagonist lives in “a closed system of terror. It aligns with my vibe while also allowing me to get outside of myself.”

When I spoke to them further, they clarified why a closed system of terror feels so much like ending a relationship, and specifically ending a relationship badly: The monsters are everywhere, no matter what you do. Everything is bad regardless of what you try. “You’re still up against whatever it is that you’re up against. And you try and you try and you try, you spend the whole movie trying, but everything fucking sucks.” That—that’s a solid fucking point, Cooper.

In addition to watching and reading things I have not been able to stomach in my adult life, I started reengaging with the things I loved as a kid. I’ve done nearly every episode of So Weird. Watched The Addams Family on repeat. Started listening to a whole podcast dedicated to rereading Goosebumps books as an adult.

This impulse, too, is strange to me. I like looking forward. It isn’t that I have no use for nostalgia; it’s that I don’t like to think about myself as a girl or as a child, now, when I am a trans adult.

It isn’t that I have no use for nostalgia; it’s that I don’t like to think about myself as a girl or as a child, now, when I am a trans adult.

“Every trans person has childhood shit,” said Alo Johnston, a licensed marriage and family therapist who works primarily with a trans population (and is, himself, trans), about his theory of reparenting the trans inner child. “We have a lot of unfinished business. It has a lot to do with recreating a sense of safety. That could be physical safety, but for most people [it] is emotional safety” and is about not having been allowed to do and like the things we wanted to do or like during our childhoods.

As he says this, my mind flashes back to the girl with the books in her hands—her perceived innocence and the way adults wanted to protect her from herself, whatever that wound up being.

Johnston found it really fascinating that this reparenting instinct would come up in the form of horror, because the act of watching it doesn’t immediately read as trying to recreate a sense of safety. But he mused, “If you know what feels unsafe or dangerous or horrifying, then there is a way that it feels, potentially, like you could protect yourself. By going into the dark piece, you’re also gonna potentially find the bounds of where safety is.”

I spoke with Johnston for a grand total of fifteen minutes. I had never met him before; he didn’t know anything about me. And yet it felt like he was speaking truth directly from my own experiences: “It feels like exactly the wrong advice to be like, you should actually let your brain go to your worst-possible fear,” he continued. “But for most people, we get right up to the edge of whatever our worst-case scenario is, and then your brain goes into panic mode, where there’s flashing lights and a siren, and you’re like, Nope! Can’t take another step further! I’ll die. If I think about that any further, I will die.”

I thought about the weight of everything, how when I have a panic attack in the middle of a breakup and a pandemic and an insurrection, my body gives me every symptom of Covid-19, including the cough, including the fever. And when I take my meds, all the symptoms go away like they never happened. I thought about the years I spent falling asleep saying the whole sentence “I am probably trans and I will never do anything about it” to myself in my head only to wake up the next morning having forgotten it was ever on my mind. I thought about all the ways my body has protected me from accessing my worst-case scenarios, even as my mind grinds upon it—even when, it turns out, they aren’t worst-case scenarios at all.

I brought my attention back to Johnston, who was still speaking: “And I think there’s something freeing if you keep walking right up to the line—step over the line, even—because I think that’s a situation where you’re already there, you’re just not letting yourself actually get the relief of thinking it all the way through, you just get right up to the panic point. And you keep experiencing the panic point. So I think something like horror is potentially being able to walk over the line and [say], Let me consciously think about all the horrifying things.”

“I think something like horror is potentially being able to walk over the line and [say], Let me consciously think about all the horrifying things.”

In this deeply terrifying and destabilizing moment in my adult life, I have reconnected with my childhood self in ways I could never have predicted. And perhaps it is a way of reparenting this inner child, this spooky weirdo with a high level of anxiety. Which is, honestly, why I’m writing this column. To write toward some kind of understanding of what it means to feel afraid and what it means to long for it; to find community in all the people who are doing this very thing, right now, as all our lives look drastically different than they did this time last year. I think if I put anyone else’s answer in my mouth, even anyone so brilliant as Mx. Yates or Mx. Cooper or Mr. Johnston, it would be much the same as the way I answered as a child—too neat. For someone else’s benefit and not, truly, my own.

But I do think the answer is somewhere at the intersection of all three—for me, a fascination with horror during a horrible time comes from a deep place of reparenting and reassurance as I feel my relationship to both the concept of adulthood (what does it mean to construct a life without a partner?) and uncertainty (while we are all existentially threatened by massive external forces beyond our control).

It also comes from a need to protect myself from the monsters that are everywhere. A need to look and think about the worst-case scenarios in order to provide myself with a sense of security, convince myself rightly or wrongly that I will be left standing at the end because I will know how to protect myself.

It comes from the need to get my head out of my own ass, to experience a story that matches the vibe of my life while allowing me to walk outside of my own mind for two hot seconds at a time. It is also the simple fact that I can like what I like now and no one can stop me, not on the basis of gender or age or perceived fragility.

I can order Goosebumps books on the internet and read them in order with a giant box of chocolates. I can pull the covers up and devour them by flashlight and let the dark press around me, let it hold me and hug me and squeeze me even as my heart races. And so I do.

I give myself permission to be terrified, to find the lines I drew as a child and the lines I draw now and to give myself the gift of play about it, to step across those lines and find out what might be hidden there, ready for me to bump against, hand outstretched, until I find the switch and flood it, flood it all, with delicious light.