One of my biggest fears growing up was the dark. There was something about the sudden feeling that everything around me had disappeared that terrified me. Maybe it was all the ID Channel shows my mom used to watch at bedtime, but I was convinced someone was going to break into our house and take everything I loved away from me. I would wake up in the middle of the night and run downstairs to my mom's room for comfort. The thought of being alone, even for one night, was simply

I used to think growing up meant becoming one person. Turns out, it just means collecting more of them. I can still picture every version of myself if I try hard enough. The girl who collected Pokémon cards. The girl who forced her parents to buy her gymnastics equipment, even though she could barely do a cartwheel. The girl who created a Twitch account to stream games she rarely played. For a while, I thought becoming an adult meant leaving those girls behind. Almost as