My Name Is Iden | Alone in the dark
- Published: January 15, 2026
I have PTSD. People who don’t have PTSD have a hard time understanding what that is like. Living with PTSD is like being a kid who is afraid of the dark. People can’t understand why you’re scared, what you’re scared of or what to do to help you in those moments of darkness. They know something is wrong but they don’t know how to fix it. That not knowing makes them feel scared — scared in a way that they are not always prepared for, scared in a way that makes them turn from us when we need them the most.
This experience isn’t unique to PTSD. That is just my frame of reference. I am sure people with terminal illnesses, or who have lost a child or suffered an assault, etc., would understand this moment. What I’m talking about are those darkest moments when a person is facing something hard and frightening. They reach out to us, but we don’t know what to do or say. We become uncomfortable, afraid and we turn away — not because we are cruel people, but because we have forgotten something fundamental about being human.
I used to be scared of the dark. When I was a kid, I would insist on falling asleep with the light on. After I fell asleep, my parents would come in and turn the light off, which was fine and reasonable — unless I woke up. If I woke to a dark room, I would become very frightened and call for them at the top of my voice until one of them would come downstairs and bring me back to bed with them. This obviously used to annoy my parents, who were tired people, and maybe weren’t always the best at trying to understand why I did what I did. I don’t blame them, though. Every kid needs to grow up. It’s just that, for whatever reason, growing up seems to always mean suppressing basic instinctual knowledge of what it takes to be human. My parents, most parents, most people, have forgotten what they were born knowing.
When I was a little, I understood that darkness isn’t just a lack of light. It is a lack of knowledge, a lack of understanding. Being in the dark means knowing there is something wrong, but not knowing what it is or how to handle it. When I was very small, the solution was to cry out — not for help, but for company.
My parents didn’t turn their light on when they brought me to bed with them. That didn’t matter to me, because it wasn’t the darkness that terrified me. It was having to face it alone.
I’m guessing that there are a lot of us who had a similar childhood experience. And I bet most of us would say that we grew out of it. Did we? Or did we just bury something fundamental beneath some misguided social conditioning?
Eventually, I was able to fall asleep in the dark, and I stopped calling for my parents. But I didn’t stop being afraid. I just learned to keep it to myself. I had learned that the dark was something a person had to face alone, and I’m guessing that I’m not alone in that, either. It wasn’t until much later that I understood how many different types of darkness a person can find themselves in, or how wrong I was to think that we had to face them alone.
It was my career in EMS that forced me to confront, and to understand, the darkness. That job puts you into some dark places — physically dark, morally dark, emotionally dark. More than that, being a paramedic — a good one, anyway — forces you to enter another person’s darkness and to sit with them there, and someone else’s darkness can be just as terrifying as our own.
My patient was a young mom miscarrying twins. They were pretty far along in their gestation, but not nearly far enough to be viable outside of Mom. She had delivered the first before we arrived on scene. I delivered the second while we were driving to the hospital.
The baby was the size of my hand, and I remember how my palm looked like a tiny bassinet. The movement of the truck meant that it wasn’t safe to cut the umbilical cord. The cord was wrapped around its little legs and I was afraid I might cut the legs if we hit a bump while I was using the scalpel on the cord. So I stayed where I was, wedged between the cabinet and the stretcher, crouching between Mom’s open legs, and cradling the deceased fetus in my hand.
That is a hard way to spend seven minutes with a person. There was nothing I could say, nothing I could do that could make that moment not full of pain and sadness for her. And there was nothing I could do to escape the reality of my experience as I steadied myself with one hand and held this fetus in my other.
In that moment I was a child again, waking up alone in the dark, calling out for help. I could see on my patient’s face that she was there, too, waking up to her own darkness. I felt absolutely helpless and so scared of that helplessness, of this whole dark terrible moment. I wanted to help her. If I could help her, if I could fix this then I wouldn’t have to squat in this darkness with her. I wouldn’t have to be afraid.
It was then that I understood why people so often turned away from me when I showed them my fear. I understood why everyone tells us to grow up and stop being afraid: because our fear makes them acknowledge that there is a darkness in this world for all of us. It was then that I remembered.
I remembered what I should never have had to forget: that it isn’t the darkness that is so frightening, it is facing it alone. My patient didn’t need to be fixed — could not be fixed, not in that moment. She had just awoken to find herself in a very dark place, but she didn’t need me to turn on the light. She needed company. So I stopped trying to find something to say, or some medical thing to do with my free hand, and we sat together in the darkness of the moment.
That isn’t something they teach you. Not in medic school. Not in any school. No one teaches us what to do for a person when there is nothing we can do for them. I think the tragedy is that we knew what to do as babies. We called out for it instinctively. You cannot banish the darkness, not the literal or the metaphorical kind. Night will come, the dark will come for all of us, sometimes many times. We will hurt and be scared many times, and many times we will call out. That is instinct. What we must all relearn is how to answer that call.
The next time you find yourself in one of those situations, my advice, as someone who has been there many times, is to remember that it’s OK. That person you’re with doesn’t need you to turn on the lights. They understand that you can’t always do that. They just want you to come sit with them in their darkness, because it’s too scary to be left there alone.
This one is dedicated to my friend Stacy, who isn’t afraid to be scared. May we always be there to keep each other company as we walk through the valley.
*The author is an artist and writer. She lives in Yellow Springs with her wife and three children. You can follow her work at mynameisiden.com.
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