We Are Not Here Alone

My mother did not believe me when I said to her “I am no longer scared of snakes”.

I don’t blame her. See, I did not have a regular fear of snakes. It was a phobia, diagnosed by multiple therapists and to the point where it was almost life-altering. 

I used to be unable to sleep at night without the covers and layers of blankets of my bed tucked airtight underneath my legs and feet. A cocoon of safety.

The thought that a snake could somehow slither through my closed door or shut window into my room, climb my bedpost and find my heat-emitting sleeping body had popped up in my mind at a nondescript time, and I could not shake it. Never mind the fact that I grew up in rural central Alaska, a place ecologically devoid of snakes. It didn’t matter that the “somehow” was a “never”. It paralyzed me in every sense, and some nights even with the covers mummifying my small body I still could not find sleep. 

If I had been so terrified of snakes in my childhood home, far away and safe from the creatures, I was even more so when in a location where they did have a thriving population. Panic attacks sleeping in an RV during a family reunion, checking every inch of each room the second my family got off the plane on a trip to the lower 48 states; it all lives in my memory with crystal clarity. These hauntings shaped every decision, and when the time came, I almost did not move away from my northern birthplace for college. 

I was terrified to go to a state where there may be a garden snake curled by the dorm buildings, or a water moccasin run into on a hike. Up north was safe, up north was cold and devoid, but up north was killing me. 

When I ended up in Reno, Nevada, even my parents were surprised. They warned me this is the desert on one side, the high Sierra on the other. It is home to rattlesnakes and sidewinders and the western yellow-bellied racer and I am to live by myself here, in their home. 

They were partially right. 

I spent my first year in Reno, living in a city-center high-rise dorm building on the second floor, checking the toilet pipes for signs of reptilian life that had slithered up. I refused to walk through fields of tall grass. Water that was not crystal clear and scanned for all inhabitants was off-limits to me. 

It sounds crazy, paranoid and a little insane, but this is how a phobia works. It takes over your life outside of you and exists almost as a separate consciousness. A voice whispering in my ear to look out. 

I don’t think my mother fully believed that I no longer had any fear of snakes until my graduation from college. Days after, after the rest of my small and tight-knit family has flown out, when it is only my mother left with time off afforded from work to spend with me out in the desert, we see a snake while on a hike early enough to beat the morning heat. 

It has been crushed through the middle, in the center of the neighborhood road our chosen trail winds through. Dead and starting to dry to the black-tar concrete, I can tell she expects me to jump, to start to run anxious thoughts through my mind and out my mouth, to respond in my typical way. We know where my propranolol prescription is kept for situations like this, what dosage I take and the half-life it will have in my body. 

Truly, I don’t think I fully believed myself that the fear was gone until I looked at the carcass of the snake in the center of the road, and felt nothing but sorry for it. 

There is this quote I love from Michael Reynolds, the creator of the New Mexico Earthship architectural revolution. He was born on the day that the bombs dropped from U.S. aircrafts onto the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. 

He says that he passed a lot of souls going out as he was coming in, and he dedicated his life to doing his part to make the world better than that. 

We share this world. With every person around us, every animal on this land. In most cases, this land is not ours at all. We are simply visitors here. 

I have always loved being in the sunshine. Since the day I was born into a -45 degree Fahrenheit snowstorm I have been trying to find patches of sunlight and joy in my life. My best friend, a person of moonlight garage concerts and cool evening breezes themselves, jokes that I photosynthesize like a plant does for my energy. That I am of the Earth. 

It was during a therapeutic psychedelic trip that I was sent on by one of my professors as an experiential journalist that I realized if I wanted to be in these sunlit patches, basking in the solar power that gives me and the planet life, I would have to share it with those who it truly belongs to. 

Lizards, birds, the blowing sagebrush, and yes even snakes all bask in the light along with me. They are my co-conspirators in this secret of what the sun can bring. We all have the same intention for being here, the same purpose to take what we need and contribute back to what we can. We can share it, and in such a commonality, there is no need for fear. We are not here alone, and that is a beautiful thing.