Fear of the dark...

Can you imagine how freeing it would be to feel safe outside all winter?

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Photo by Filip Mroz on Unsplash

I still remember the first time I had an anxiety attack.

I was at the theatre with my mum and my gran, having what should have been an exciting night out. I think I was eight.

We were seeing 42^nd Street, a show my tiny, tap dancing self had been a bit giddy about, and I remember the first act being magical. There were huge coins which doubled up as stages, and a train on stage that blew my mind.

I was madly excited about it all. At least, until the show’s intermission when, halfway through my Cornetto, panic set in with the sudden realisation that soon, after the show, we would have to walk back to our car. In the dark. In the city. I remember my hands getting clammy, my heart thumping and my head reeling with the absolute certainty that multi-storey carparks were where the bad men lurked.

It should be noted, I’d had zero experience of bad men at this point in my life. If I consider it seriously, I’m pretty sure the closest I’d ever come to any sort of tragedy was my brother attacking my Gordon the Gopher colouring book with our mum’s lipstick. Threat was not really something that should have been on my radar.

Yet somehow, even at that young age, I was convinced that the rest of the night was going to be dangerous. That bad men hid in multi-storey car parks seemed a certainty and nothing else that happened on stage was able to distract me from that for the remainder of the show.

It probably goes without saying that the panic attack was the worst thing to happen that night. Almost an entire theatre’s worth of people departed the Playhouse to the same well-lit multi-storey en masse at the end of the show like a herd of musical-loving wildebeest, even the smallest among them well-protected in the crowd. The anxiety had been totally unnecessary, yet I still remember that night vividly, not only as the day I became aware of my own anxiety, but also as the day I learned to be scared of the dark.

I thought about that moment last night, as the three of us jumped on the Metro system to head to the opera house for Matilda The Musical, Arthur’s first trip to the theatre here in Dubai.

Make no mistake, this is a car city, with LA-level congestion increasingly becoming the norm. So we chose our apartment in part because of its proximity to the Metro - essentially a city-wide monorail system that deposited us about twenty minutes’ walk from the theatre. In the dark. In the city.

Only last night was different. Because in the UK, while I’ve continued going to the theatre my whole life, there's always been that voice in the back of my head preventing me from getting fully immersed, the nagging reminder that come half 10 or 11 o'clock at night, I’ll need to find my way home, or to the car. And last night, I was halfway back to the apartment before it occurred to me that I hadn’t questioned my safety once.  

It's October now, a time when the days start closing in and many women stop running or walking on their own, when we move our exercise regimes out of the park and onto a treadmill or a yoga mat on the living room floor, start telling our friends to let us know they get home safe after a long lunch as well as after dinner.

And just as I don’t know where my anxiety emerged from or how it came to be ingrained in me at such a young age, I have no idea when I absorbed the idea that winter was a time of warning for so many of us. Like holding our keys between our fingers, it became something I just knew. An instinct. A self-preservation tactic passed from generation to generation with reluctance and a sense of necessity.

But as I thought about it a bit more deeply last night, I realised that the opposite is true in Dubai, where October is the month we start heading outdoors. Yes, the nights are drawing in here too, but as they do, the temperatures fall to balmy, the terraces put out their tables and the beach bars start throwing open their doors.

On Monday, I had a long overdue catch up with a friend and for the first time since spring, we sat outside to eat, wiggling our toes in the sand as we tucked into sushi and chatted until long past 11. Had it not been a school night, we’d have chatted much longer, and we were still going as we each headed to our own cars. Neither of us suggested a text. There was no need.

One of the odd things about living abroad is the sense that you’re constantly re-evaluating your life. When you're in your home country, it's never really a conscious decision to stay so much as just the expected norm. But when you move abroad and leave family behind, there’s a sense that you have to constantly check in with yourself to assess whether the sacrifices are worth it. When you miss your loved ones constantly and you’ve given up many of the safeguards and certainties you’d previously have taken for granted, you always have to reaffirm the idea that the benefits outweigh the downsides.

As a family, we check in with each other at least once a month to discuss whether the good is still prevailing over the bad. And as we did that this week, I realised for the first time just how transformational the experience of always feeling safe can be.

I say this in the full realisation that I was lucky to live in a very quiet, peaceful and safe little town in Scotland, a bubble in which everyone knew everyone else’s name, their dog’s name and their coffee order. And yet still, if I ever took a late train home, I’d leave my headphones out for the walk home, the soundtrack instead being a hum of low-level anxiety and danger.

Now, my mind is at peace in the dark. My friends and I don’t tell each other to text when home. If anything's going get us on the way home, it's the terrible driving, but though the roads are hairy, we don’t fear violence. Of course, there’s a deeply uncomfortable debate to be had about how some nations keep crime rates so low, and there’s definitely a part of me that doesn’t want to think too deeply about the justice systems underlying all these differences. I prefer, niavely and optimistically, to believe our law-abiding city is driven more by tolerance and respect than by fear. But whatever is behind it, after decades working in news and subsequently fearing the day I never saw, the quiet headspace has slowly crept to the top of my list of living abroad benefits.

It’s headspace I haven’t had since I was eight. And right now, for me, that’s winning the battle over where I choose to call home.

Do you change your behaviour over winter to counteract the darker evenings? What would make you feel safer? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic…