Cool people are afraid of the dark

So I'm almost twenty-five years old, and I'm living alone for the first time.

BEFORE living alone, it occurred to me that I am the biggest scaredy-cat in the whole world, and I started to warn people close to me that they should be expecting late night phone calls from a tiny-voiced me saying I can't get out of bed to use the bathroom because there is without a doubt someone waiting to kill me under my bed, etc., etc. However, it's become blatantly and instantly clear to me that there is only one real fear I have that enters my mind like a creeping crescendo-ing ant trail every time that 1.) I am ALONE and 2.) it is NIGHTTIME. And that, my friends, is my all-consuming fear of...

 (drum-roll please)

SEEING

A

GHOST.

I realize this is not the most USEful or inTELLigent fear. But it's been what I picture every time I get spooked, for as long as I remember. Psychos, murderers--PFFFT-- they're all human and do humanly things that may suck but at least remain within the realm of things that are physically possible. GHOSTS on the other hand, who knows what the FUCK they can do. I've never SEEN a ghost (and yes, I just took a timeout to knock on wood after typing that) so it's even SCARIER to me to think that I have no idea what one would even LOOK like.

I can't believe I'm typing about this at night. Such a stupid idea.

Anyway, it just so happens that the woman I am renting my new place from is a spiritual healer. And somehow, no idea how actually, she overheard me talking about this ginormous fear I have that I'm going to see a ghost sometime when I'm by myself at night. She asked me to elaborate, so I told her how years ago the father of an ex-boyfriend ruined my whole life because he thought he was being kind and he told me that I was a sensitive spirit and I would be very susceptible to the presence of spirits and "ghosts" as I call them. He was smiling warmly and thinking I would be flattered, but I'm sure the grotesque slack-face expression of horror that came over me made him feel a little bad. I fucking hope so. I have seriously been ON THE LOOKOUT ever since. Like, okay, this is how it goes.... I'll be by myself, la dee da, maybe closing up the restaurant I used to manage, so it's nighttime and I'm alone and yeah. Then I'll think, "Oh hey, wait, you're alone and it's dark. That's kinda creepy." And THEN, I'll start hearing little noises, and feeling this sudden awareness of my body in the room, like that feeling you get when you can tell someone's looking at you. And slowly, I'll start getting more freaked out to the point where my cheeks flush, my ears ring, and at this point it doesn't matter WHAT I see, whether it's my own shadow or a kitten with a Jesus halo, I'm GOING to FREAK out. It's usually best at this point to get to "safety," which is usually where other people are to save me from the thing that was creeping me out that totally exists in the first place.

Oh yeah, so ANYWAY, I was talking to my landlord (who also happens to be my new boss, but that's not important) about this, and she took me very seriously because, like I said, she's a spiritual healer. And she said that automatically I'm stronger than any disembodied spirit because I have a body (and actually I have a lot of body going on, so that made me feel a little better). She ALSO said that if I feel a spirit's presence and I don't want it there, I just have to announce to it loudly THREE TIMES, "By the power invested in me from [insert some sort of religious entity or something here], I COMMAND you to leave." She then said that when someone has been healing people long enough, a tunnel of white light forms above her healing table and shoots up into the...sky(?) and that wandering spirits are attracted to the energy because they feel that she can help them. It was at THIS point that I remembered that her HEALING room is *nervous laughter* on the other side of my BEDroom. Yaaaayy.

So after this half awesome half not-so awesome conversation, I returned to my studio. And promptly got to work. It was about 6:00 at night, so definitely dark enough to get some insta-heebie jeebies when I walked inside with a head full of images of bodiless spirits spilling through the adjoining wall from her healing room. I got my best "teacher voice" on and started COMMANDING away. The best part is that I kind of forgot what she'd said the universal lingo was for shooing away spirits, and also I was nervous because I could just feeeeeel those spirit eyes judging me, you know? So I heard my shaky wanna-be-strong Disney-mouse-voice saying "Begone!" a lot of times, and I felt good about the assertive look on my face and the firmness of the way I was holding my jaw.... Yeah, it was a good jaw face. Anyway, then I waited in silence for a minute. Johanna (my boss/landlady) said that I would instantly be able to feel the lifting of the weight of the spirit's presence. I'm not sure if I did or not, but I maaaaay have seen like a white silky cloud-ish substance escape through my living room skylight. I mean, probably.

Toootally.

All in all, I'd have to say that after my educational conversation with Johanna, and after trying out the standard method of ghost-banning, I think I still feel most confident in my previous method of soothing my fear whenever it gets unbearable: I log on to facebook and lose myself in status updates and drunk pictures and "friending" and "unfriending" people until I'm so distracted that the ghost clearly gets tired of my indifference to its presence and wafts away pouting. Good ol' trusty facebook.

On a completely unrelated note, apparently no one gets enough Vitamin D from sunlight anymore due to sunscreen and indoor jobs and whatnot, so I'm going to start taking a supplement of like 5 micrograms daily of Vitamin D2 (animal-product-free), and it's lookin' like any other non-milk drinkers should do the same. Whattup!!

P.S. What you DON'T know is that halfway through typing this post I had to get up to go tinkle and thought I heard some weird noises slash saw the shower curtain moving so, yeah, you bet I commanded that spirit away. I'm totally kicking ass at this living alone thing, by the way.