I’m here to write my way out of a mini traumatization, because re-writing the stories we tell ourselves about our lives is an evidence-based intervention for improving mental health.

This is a tiny story of minor fear. It definitely gave me some intense feelings, but not so many that I’m uncomfortable writing my way through them in public as a model for how to write our way through larger scale pain.

What happened was this: my worst nightmare came true.

I’m camping. I’m half asleep, listening to the nighttime woods: insecty noises too ambient to notice how near or far they are, coyotes howling as a pack far away, human footsteps walking toward my tent then past my tent then into their own tent.

As a woman alone in the woods, I listen to approaching footsteps with a heightened level of alertness. The alertness recedes as the footsteps do.

There are small animal noises outside the tent. Or large animal? Hard to discern. But they are behind the tent, coming around the front. My alertness heightens. It’s one of those gigantic tents set up on wooden decking, like you see army generals working in on the front lines of WWII movies. Tommy Lee Jones has meetings with Agent Carter in tents like this. The noise goes from the front to the back, half way around, and stops right in front of my tent.

“If I hear I zipper,” I think, reaching for my phone just in case I’m about to be in a flashback from Mindhunter, “I will scream bloody murder.”

Worse than a zipper, I hear animal footsteps on the wood decking inside the tent and the scream that comes out of me isn’t remotely voluntary. It’s the instinctive horror-struck response to my worst nightmare coming true.

My worst case scenario of that particular moment had been realized. I heard the noises, they came around the tent, but that’s all fine, I thought. Unless it comes inside, I’m safe and cozy here in my Tommy Lee Jones nest. Unless it comes inside. Lying in the dark, listening and waiting. And then it’s inside with me and my nest is a place where anything can happen, and my body screamed without my making the choice to do so.

But it did. And that moment was horror like I haven’t felt maybe ever.

It was a skunk, and harmless, and the story has a happy ending, but in that moment all I had was the darkness, my wariness preparing me for fight or flight, and then the thing was worried about actually fucking happened.

And that’s where that scream came from. That slasher-movie scream came from the understanding that the thing I fear can happen. That I’m helpless, there was never anything I could to stop it. It feels like the night my husband came to bed muttering, “Looks like Trump’s gonna win. Electoral college.” And my mind rejected it as impossible. The world can’t be that bad. Voters can’t be that gullible. I felt so unhinged by it that I sought out a new therapist that week. (My therapist said she got a flood of new clients that month.) It was the same feeling when Kavanaugh was confirmed. For me, it was confirmation that the world is full of as much evil as I imagined it might be.

That moment of confirming my worst fears is the moment that is sticking with me today, the moment I need to purge from my psyche, the story I need to rewrite. Because it’s not about the stressor. It’s not about the skunk,* though it was what started all this. Today, I’m dealing with the stress itself.

So here’s the ending:

The worst had happened. It was inside with me, and my body said “Oh Hell No” by contracting my vocal apparatus into an instrument of unmistakable communication. The scream was the duration of a complete exhalation, then I inhaled and screamed again, but the second time I was aware that it was going to happen, and knew I could stop it if I wanted. I let the second scream happen.

Somewhere in my subconscious I assumed a nighttime woodland creature would be more afraid of me than I was of it, and to skitter away, shocked and awed by the volume and ferocity of me. But it didn’t. It walked toward me as I screamed, and then past behind the head of the bed.

This was the loudest sound I could make, and it didn’t even startle the thing, didn’t make it veer from its course in the slightest.

My first thought in response to this was “Oh, god, there’s nothing I can do; I have no control.” So after the four seconds it took me to scream twice, I decided not to scream again. It didn’t do any good. I switched on a light and, phone in hand, rolled away from the animal now behind the bed, and I perched on a low stool while texting the campground managers.

Now I’m pretty sure I’m not in any immediate danger. The animal didn’t stalk me or attack me. It went to the garbage can behind the bed and started digging out food scraps. It’s clearly occupied by that and definitely not interested in giving me rabies or having me as a midnight snack.

I immediately start blaming myself for this. I knew it was a bad idea to keep food scraps in the tent — why didn’t I take the garbage out? I knew there was a rip in the zipper by the front — why didn’t I mention it to the campground manager? I remember that victim blaming is wrong, that I had done the best I could with the resources I had available, that this wasn’t my fault.

The only fear left in me now comes from the fact that I don’t know what it is, and that leaves the field of Worst Case Scenarios wide open. I start narrowing down the list in my mind, but none of them comes true. It’s the same process I went through waiting for this situation to happen: I wait and prepare for every possibility, only this time I know more deeply than I have ever known before that the worst really could happen.

But it doesn’t. My stupid subconscious thought screaming was the best response, but what actually worked for me was that moment I had reached for my phone. It meant I was prepared. It meant I wasn’t alone.

My raw fear hadn’t protected me, but my alert wariness had. Yes, the scary thing had happened, but I wasn’t going to have to face it alone because my intellectual, calm, knowing self is good at protecting me. Help was on the way because I really had known what to do.

There remained the unanswered question as to what the threat actually was, which was the only scary part remaining. But as I watch, I see it snuffle away from the bed to the back corner of the tent. It is a skunk. Why didn’t it spray when I screamed?

In addition to my intelligent preparation, I was also very, very lucky.

This skunk had probably been coming in and out of this tent every day for weeks. That rip in the zipper was plenty big enough for a small mammal to crawl under. Probably Tommy Lee Jones and other campers before me had been sleeping through this animal’s nightly rounds. Now that I’ve called management, and the poor night shift guy had to evict a skunk at 2 a.m., they are definitely going to fix that hole. This skunk will not get into this tent again.

My hyper vigilance and experience of terror probably helped ensure that no one else would have to go through this again.

Next time the worst happens, I’ll freak out again. But I know I’m as prepared as I can be, and if I can see myself through it by getting the appropriate help, I may even be able to protect someone else from experiencing it or something worse.

You’re welcome, Tommy Lee Jones.

Tommy Lee Jones begrudgingly approves

*Feel free to replace “skunk” with “Trump” or “Kavanaugh” or any other representative of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchal capitalist oppression.

Tommy Lee Jones is not kissing the hero