I am the scary thing.

It’s hard to remember a time before I entered the world of horror. But there was a time like that once. A pretty significant chunk of time actually. I didn’t wake up to who I was until after college. That’s over two decades of living a life that was…not a lie, exactly. But a half-truth maybe.

I’m a woman. That’s obvious. But to tell this story I have to go back to when I was a little girl. I grew up in the 90s in an environment where girls were still largely expected to wear pink and play with Barbie dolls and scream at the sight of bugs. As I child, I accepted this and acted accordingly (I tended to follow the rules as a kid). But as I grew older something about that really started to chafe. I was blonde (surprise, red isn’t my natural hair color) and, when my figure came in, I was busty. And so, I started to experience a new phenomenon. Without fail every single time I wore pink someone would call me Barbie. And I hated it.

Now, nothing against Barbie. I loved playing with my Barbie dolls back in the day and absolutely appreciate what Barbie has done for countless children. But Barbie wasn’t me. I was not the stereotypical blonde woman who loved pink and I didn’t want people labeling me with that. So I stopped wearing pink. For a decade.

An overreaction, perhaps. But what are teenagers if not occasionally overdramatic?

No shade to blonde women who like pink. I just knew that that wasn’t me. The thing was…I didn’t quite know what was me instead.

Then I chopped my hair off and dyed it red.

Before and After: I told no one I was doing this and made many people do a double take at work the next day.

It was a game-changer.

I didn’t even do it because I thought it would suit me. I did it for a cosplay. I’d been thinking about it for a while, sure, but Captain America: The Winter Soldier was coming to theaters in April of 2014 and I wanted to be Black Widow. So I just did it. It was in a word: transformative.

Every single friend, coworker, and even passing acquaintance exclaimed how well it suited me. And it did.

I found myself being treated differently by strangers. I wasn’t Barbie anymore. People weren’t automatically assuming I was a sweet, bubbly, likely dumb and helpless woman anymore.

People were wary of me.

Suddenly, I was an unpredictable element. Everyone assumed I had a bold, fiery personality. They assumed that I might say or do something out of left field. Something a “lady” wouldn’t do. So many expectations were lifted from me overnight. I didn’t have to fit into people’s incorrect ideas of me anymore. People’s ideas fit me now. My outside finally matched my inside.

Now, with age comes wisdom. I came to understand that I don’t have to mold myself to fit other people’s ideas of me. What a concept, right? But I was young and didn’t know any better back then. I had been raised under a rather controlling thumb, and that’s just how it was until I was able to move out the house. I grew up and I figured things out eventually. My red hair was the first step in that.

It was far from the only step though. Dying my hair unlocked a level of self-expression I had previously been unaware existed, and it only led to a heap more exploration into who I really was as a person from there.

Enter: horror.

I loved monsters. I knew that. If it was supernatural, I was into it. But horror scared the bejeezus out of me. I’d seen maybe two and half horror movies at that point in my life and I had no desire to watch any more than that. It was too scary for me. Despite my fondness for shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Teen Wolf, which held many horror elements and even had some downright terrifying episodes once in a while (looking at you “Hush”), horror just didn’t seem like it was for me.

But then! Empowered by my new life as a redhead, I started to really ask myself “who am I?” Apparently, I had had it wrong all this time, so it certainly bore examination. I did just that. I sat down with myself and examined each and every shred of data available to me over the next several years. Slowly, each piece of me—the real me—was revealed with each question answered.

Do I really hate the color pink?

Well, no. I just hated what wearing it made people assume about me. So, I guess it’s okay for me to start wearing pink again (surely no one would ever call a redhead wearing pink Barbie. To this day they never have).

Did I really like playing with Barbie dolls when I was younger or was it forced on me?

I liked it. I liked it a lot actually. Barbie dolls are a great outlet for imagination, and I had (and still have) a lot of imagination.

Was I really afraid of bugs?

No. For Pete’s sake, no. Not even a little. Why did I ever think I was? Oh, that’s right. Expectations. Well, that’s stupid. I’m not going to pretend to be afraid of bugs anymore. In fact, as far as creepy crawlies go, I actually like spiders specifically. Who would have ever thought? (Certainly no one who raised me).

So then, given this information, it’s not that I didn’t like any “girly” things. I did. But I liked a whole lot more than that too. Wearing a dress did not prevent me from liking spiders. What else was I missing out on?

My transformation steadily progressed until one day I tried watching horror movies from my new, so-called enlightened perspective. I found that they were everything I never knew I was missing. There was something there that was speaking to my soul, as I binged all the classics like The Exorcist and Halloween.

I reveled in the mayhem of a slasher, the atmosphere of a gothic setting, the chills of a ghost unseen in the corner. The blood, the terror, the screaming. I loved it all.

It was only a matter of time before I realized:

I am the scary thing.

It was like I’d woken up. Not from a single night’s rest, but from a sleep much, much deeper than that. A sleep of the soul. Realizing this fact was freeing. I could now explore everything the dark had to offer, for what did I have to fear of the dark when I was fearsome myself?

Then, horror was everything to me.

I began consuming as much of it as I could. No longer was I terrified. If something got a scream out of me, I was delighted by it.

The Evil Dead trilogy? Phenomenal.

John Carpenter’s The Thing? I’ve never loved anything more.

Friday the 13th? A revelation. I wasn’t an Alice. I was a Pamela.

I was not the Final Girl. I was the Monster.

This discovery started bleeding over into my other hobbies. I was already a cosplayer and already a writer. I primarily wrote fantasy or action with supernatural elements at this point, but I was exploring other genres. I even tried writing a romance once. A mistake, if ever there were one. But hey, it doesn’t hurt to try.

So I tried horror.

Writing horror proved to be invigorating.

This. This is where I was always meant to be. This is what I was always meant to be writing.

Sure, I still write other things. Comedic pieces or works that tend to lean more toward thriller in genre and, yes, even stories with a heavy dose of romance (but never only romance. I’m pretty sure that will always be outside my wheelhouse).

But once I found horror, I never went back. Just as I never went back to being a blonde. Just as I never went back to trying to fit into someone else’s idea of me.

Because I am the scary thing. And I’m glad for it. I’m proud of it. Fighting against that for so many years was a lesser existence that I would not wish on anyone. I’m glad I found my true self. I think there’s a lot of people out there who never do.

So, ask yourself those questions, the same as I did. Why does that one thing chafe so much? The answer might surprise you.

And if you’re the sort of person who thinks that someone who looks like me couldn’t possibly be scary, then reconsider. Because it might just be the last mistake you ever make.