Blanket.

There's talk now, about how a good deal of people experience a brief period of wakefulness midway through the night.  Puberty, for me that was the wakefulness.  Up all night from three until dawn reading Jules Verne.  Terrified.  It wasn't the book, that was to keep my mind quiet.  To shut down the fact that if I didn't sleep with my blanket tight around my neck, that if the window wasn't shut, that vampires would come in an suck my blood.

It was only briefly that I felt this way.  That I knew, almost simultaneous that these things weren't true.  But still, it felt good.  So it was even surprising to me, on an overnight trip for school, that I made the choice to not be afraid of the dark.  I remember at the age of eleven, making that choice.  Saying, no.  I won't be afraid.  It was the same thing the first time I ever took my clothes off in front of someone else.  This will be fine, you know what's under there.  It was the same when I opened up my mind to meeting new people, and the dam broke.  That we can all change, that we can all get better, but we don't need to at first.  It's not immediate.  And that sometimes a nervous, imperfect energy is the comforting.  It's honest.