It’s not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you…

A couple of weeks ago, I ventured out in the dark to do a little bit of photography.  I actually prefer shooting at night because the relative quiet and calm of a world with less people affords me the opportunity to find details often overlooked in the light.  There is a downside to this same quiet and darkness: Creeps like to hunt at night for the same reasons.  Less people means less witnesses after all.  Yet in the five years I’ve been shooting on nighttime excursions, I haven’t had a single incident until a couple of weeks ago.

In a way I knew the odds of nothing ever happening were fairly slim.  I mean I go out to pretty isolated places, oftentimes between 10 pm and 1 am, by myself, carrying equipment that is not inexpensive.  Short of painting a target on my forehead, there really isn’t much more I could do to attract unseemly individuals.  With that said, I’ve been aware of the inherent risks and have always taken some steps to mitigate them.  While you’d be hard pressed to generally find my feminine traits by day, when I shoot at night, I blur the line as far as possible with a baseball cap and wicked baggy clothes for example.  I also tend to, as best I can, remain in close proximity to my car, keeping my keys accessible at all times.  Furthermore I tend to shoot around safe* locations that I know well.  Most importantly I am aware of myself, my surroundings and others around me.  I do not go out in a state of ignorance or denial.  I’d just like to stress, for a moment, that I am cautious, prepared, not paranoid.  As I said, in five years I’ve not had a single incident nor even an inkling of one.

But on this particular night, my five year streak came to a close.  As I was taking a shot, a red pickup truck cruised slowly past.  This is not entirely uncommon since I often am in bizarre poses trying to frame a shot.  This car though, drew my attention.  The man behind the wheel watched me as he went past.  He turned left on the cross street ahead of me still watching me as I stood on the open common.  When he disappeared from view, I shrugged the feeling off and finished up the shot.  As I collapsed my tripod, the same truck came back up the same street I initially saw it on.  It travelled by me at a glacial pace this time.  He watched me again and I him.  As he pulled to the side of the road to park, I noticed that I was standing in shizen with my tripod loosely gripped in my hands as if it were a hanbo.  As he got out of his truck, still watching me, the only thought that crossed my mind was, “My body is trying to tell me something.”  Even as the thought went through my mind, I found myself turning and walking towards an area where I would be likely to find a crowd.  As I walked the couple of blocks towards some restaurants, I noticed, almost casually, that he was following me, but at a distance.  I never looked nervously back nor did I quicken my pace.  I could somehow just feel him behind me and was able to maintain a fairly consistent distance.  I reached a restaurant with a crowd of people outside and loitered among them.  The man walked by and similarly waited nearby.  After a few minutes, he eventually moved on.

What is significant about this experience for me was not some feeling that “OMG something could have happened!  How frightening!” but rather that my physical being recognized a threat and I trusted what it told me.  As women, we often shrug off our internal warning bells as being silly or paranoid.  I know that I usually do and have been caught up in situations panicking as a result.  By recognizing and trusting the physical warning, the walk down those couple of blocks was not filled with fear.  Extreme alertness yes, but fear no.  Somehow, instead of fear, I found confidence in my physical being, that it would do its best to extract me from the situation.  Either I would move myself successfully to a safer location or, if the distance had been closed, make some move to defend myself.  This was not confidence in my “mad skillz” since we all know I have neither skill nor confidence in said skill.  It was confidence in my physical self that I would do something if I had to.  No contradicting thoughts, no doubt, just action.  The outcome was irrelevant in that it was outside the moment and therefore not predictable.

As I sat in the relative safety of my car jotting down notes for this post, my brain exploded a bit.  With the absence of an adrenaline rush and “what if” type questions, I found myself smirking, amazed and thankful.  Sure I was thankful of myself for having removed myself from a potentially dangerous situation, but I was more thankful, once outside it, for the test that allowed me to see.  Our training really does just seep into our core and rise when necessary.  We need only to get out of our own way to see it.

*I use “safe” here in the sense of low crime.  In truth, when it comes to being in public places, you can never be 100% safe from harm in my experience.  Even in broad daylight, in a crowd of people, in a “safe” area, bad things can and do happen.

Danielle DeBlois
SMAC Student