⛺ The tent
For a good part of my childhood, almost until my pre-teen years, fear was a constant companion. One fear above all: the fear of the dark. 🌑
Every night was a drama. 😰 When the lights went out, I would end up going into my parents' room. And what terrified me most wasn't just the night, but the possibility that one day they wouldn't let me in.
That fear also crept into my days. I felt I had to behave a certain way to please one of them and make sure that, when night came, they would let me in. There was a kind of manipulation in all of it, a pressure I felt on me all the time.
Over the years, that gave me a lot of insecurity and discomfort. I was already a teenager, I was in school, I was a big kid by then… and I couldn't even sleep alone. 😔 I would ask myself: if I can't even sleep alone, how am I going to relate to girls, to other teenagers, the way my classmates did? I didn't feel I deserved it, or that I was capable of it. Because deep down, I felt like a coward.
There were many months when I couldn't sleep in my room. I spent the nights awake, crying, very afraid. 😢
📖 A magazine and an idea
One day I was looking through a magazine and I saw a tent. And I thought: the tent! ⛺ I can sleep in there. In there, I feel like I won't be afraid.
I went to my dad and said: "Dad, buy this tent. It will be worth it, because I'm going to sleep inside it."
My dad didn't really believe it. Even so, he decided to buy it for me, and I'm very grateful to life for that. 🙏
🌙 The first night
I set the tent up inside my bedroom. It was really hot 🥵, and inside the tent it was even hotter. But once I zipped it closed, you couldn't see anything. It was completely dark.
And that's when I realized something: my fear wasn't of the dark. It was of what could be seen in the dark.
In that tent I was safe. No cockroaches 🪳 were getting in, no dead people 💀, no ghosts 👻. Nobody could get into the tent.
✨ The nights that followed
The nights went by and I felt really good inside the tent. Little by little I started leaving those fears behind and getting back something I thought I had lost: confidence in myself. 💪
🪵 When the tent broke
Eventually, the tent got damaged. I propped it up with sticks until the very last moment; I tried to keep it standing as long as I could. But when it finally gave out, I felt deep inside that a cycle had closed. That I could sleep alone now.
And so my first nights sleeping alone in my room began. It was so much better than before, because now I had tools: I had the experience that, in all the time I spent in the tent, nothing had ever happened, and that nothing was going to happen. Within a few days or weeks, sleeping in my room already felt like sleeping in the tent. And the fear was gone. 🌅
💛 What I want to say with this
When you're a child, facing your fears doesn't mean being let go and thrown into the abyss with a "go on, sleep in your room, you have to face your fears". Very often those fears are too hard, too complicated, and without tools they cost us a great deal. That's how it was for me: that shock therapy didn't work.
What really worked was an alternative, a balance between one thing and the other: a safe place from which, little by little, I could learn to trust myself again. Sometimes what a child needs isn't to be pushed into the dark, but a tent. ⛺💛
✍️ By Santiago Perea Restrepo