As I'm writing this, my eyes are darting across my room. I'm tense, and I feel like I keep seeing things.

A small creak that is probably from the people living above me quickly turns into a visualization of something in my closet that started to turn the door handle. When I say I brace myself before opening any door in my apartment, I mean it. I never know when there will be someone with a knife ready to hurt me or an almost human-looking figure looking dead in my soul. This paranoia is crippling, and it prevents me from living my life like a normal person.

Since I was younger, I have always been slightly afraid of the dark.

But I've always tried to sleep with lights off so that the bright light doesn't keep me awake. Once I realized I couldn't sleep, especially with all the lights off, I would do smaller things, like set the TV on a timer and have it turn off halfway through the night, just so that I could have the time to fall asleep with the comfort of natural noise and know that the shadows I thought I saw were just movements from the TV.

Then, I started to sleep with a lamp on all night, which I realize is indeed wasteful of energy. However, I would possibly go insane without it. At 20 years old, I sleep with a huge lamp on and with soft piano music playing. It doesn't always work. One moment I'm relaxed, thinking about my day and what I need to do the next. The moment immediately after, my eyes shoot open because I'm afraid of a figure looming over me.

Oh, but this does not only affect my home life. It isn't just me peaking around corners, my fight or flight instinct preparing themselves for the tenth time in a day. It's also when I'm at work, going into the storage room to put up a rack of chairs. My eyes see 15 rows of stacked chairs, my mind sees Samara from "The Ring" with blood running down her face, peering at me through the cracks.

When I'm faced with a room I know will be dark, I think to myself, “If this is the moment before something finally gets me, will I have lived my life the way I really wanted?" It's a depressing way to think, no kidding, but I can't help those thoughts.

Deep down, I know how unrealistic and borderline insane I sound. And you would think that would be enough to comfort me. I wish I could tell you that my intelligence trumps my fear, but my imagination is a disease, only I've been sick for years. My life is a psychological horror film. Nothing is happening in the outside world, but the inside of my mind is Stephen King's playground. I sleep with everyone's door in my unit locked, and I keep a lamp in front of my closet because the door has a habit of swinging open. If I come home after a long day and one of my belongings aren't where I remember leaving them, I quickly come up with the hundred worst-case scenarios as to why it probably ended up there.

Sometimes I'm jumpy, and sure, I never take my eyes off the areas around me, but I guess this is my body's way of keeping me safe.

I wouldn't be caught dead going to an abandoned warehouse or walking by myself in my neighborhood at two in the morning. I will never go anywhere with a stranger, and I will never let anyone try and get too close. You never know who could hurt you.

I don't think that I'm afraid of death. I would welcome death if it were my time. No, I'm not afraid of not living. Not as much as I'm afraid of losing at life. All actions have consequences, I just hope mine do not get me in the wrong situation. I should have checked that closet one more time. I should have triple-checked my bedroom door to make sure it was locked. I should have made sure I didn't tell that stranger my first name when I shook his hand. When I closed my eyes, I should have opened them once more to make sure that dark mass in my room was just a trick of the light, and not something out to get me.

I've tried praying and I've tried to just not be alone, but when I'm with a friend in my living room, how can I explain what I just saw down the hallway that I'm sure I need to check on without sounding like a lunatic? If I can't even be alone in my home without bursting into tears, how can I live a secure life? When I'm driving down the road and think something is in my backseat, how can I be sure I won't crash if I can't keep my eyes away?

Suffering from so very many sleepless nights (the occasional sleep paralysis doesn't help) is what made me realize that I may need help getting through this.

I've accepted that my heart constantly is racing and that I will always feel weak because I can't do something as simple as going into my bathroom to turn the light on without using a flashlight to get there. Monsters under my bed don't even begin to ice the cake of what it's like inside my head. I'm not even afraid of the dark, just what lurks in it.