I grew up with a rare condition that meant I could never sleep.

Since I can remember, every night after my family went to bed, I would creep downstairs into a world of my own. I’d tiptoe through my house as if it were an abandoned palace, armed only with a notebook and a bag of chocolate chips. I heard voices echoing all around me, clearly human but just beyond recognition.  

My walls seemed to vibrate with swarms of insects crawling under the paint. I was claustrophobic and impossibly small, surrounded by wonder to the point of suffocation. Aching with exhaustion to my very bones, I dragged my heavy feet even as my hands shook. Desperate to hide my worsening illness, I spent these hours — nearly half my life — alone. 

I had endless free time and I wanted to do something important with it. I had vague ambitions of learning languages, memorizing poetry, or making a scientific discovery. That was what the notebook was for, I think, but I ripped up every page after I had written on it. Instead, I would curl up on the couch with a mountain of blankets and a mouth full of chocolate, and stare at the television until the sun came up. 

After 2 a.m., there were two things on cable: horror movies and trashy reality shows. I tried to avoid the horror at first. Sure, I watched the occasional scary movie, but mostly I tried to find something interesting in real housewives and celebrity wife swaps. I had just turned 8 years old when I encountered “The Shining,” and from then on I was hooked. 

Horror became a haven in my house of waking dreams. It was comforting and gross, and I let it wrap its arms around me like a warm and bloody hug. My life of constant awakeness often felt like it would never end, and I could feel the lack of rest draining my body and soul. I had no idea what would happen to me, but the prospects weren’t great.

Horror acknowledged my fears that maybe everything wouldn’t be all right. Sometimes a character would survive — the odd final girl or exorcism subject — but usually they were careening toward a terrible and terrifying death. The value they hold in the story isn’t determined by how they end up. 

Horror stories don’t rely on resolution; they are about process. I’ve seen characters be ripped apart, perverted, and destroyed in almost every way possible, but I don’t watch for the bodies left behind. Horror takes care of the doomed. It honors the hopeless. The characters scream and run and fight with every scrap of strength in their bodies. It goes nowhere, but we still watch it because it matters somehow.

When I was 9 years old, I watched the movie “Saw,” the first in a franchise about torture. Occasionally it will put up a façade of plot or insight, but people usually go to those movies to see complex traps rip apart sacred human bodies like meat. Still, those bodies fight and die, so I watched. 

It was dark, and I had moved my blanket fort to the floor, inches away from my TV. Having not yet built up my truly legendary tolerance for gore, I was shaken. I was also mesmerized by the characters’ furious struggle against their circumstances, so I didn’t turn it off. I don’t remember which trap, which act of cruelty finally did it. Maybe I was feeling sicker than usual. For a moment, my secret world looked less like a palace and more like one of the traps on screen. I felt my helplessness deeper than ever before, and I cried. 

But I was a child who went to Sunday school — so I knew of one person’s story that didn’t fit into the mold horror movies seemed to follow. 

I’ve thought it over so often I’m no longer sure, but I think I felt the Holy Spirit then. The metal torture device in front of me seemed suddenly like a cross — a symbol originally of dehumanization and cruelty. It wasn’t a dream, and it wasn’t a hallucination. It was a moment of deep recognition. I looked at that trap, and I knew I had seen it before. 

In front of me at that moment was Christ, the only person to ever win the battle. I was doomed to lose, but he had escaped the bloody trap forever. I began to pray as the screaming from the television went silent.

Humans fight, even if it would be less painful to submit. We hate death, and we hate torture. That we fight is a profound statement about how we think things should be. In horror, struggle is good, not because it will lead to survival, but because life is worth fighting for. 

When I was a kid I didn’t know if there was a point to my struggle. Horror stories taught me that my struggle mattered for its own sake, and reminded me that my unusual circumstances didn’t actually make me exceptional — all our stories end in death. 

Horror movies pointed me to the cross, and suddenly I wasn’t afraid of fighting a losing battle, because I understood that I didn’t have to win. Because the battle had already been won, my struggle was enough.

We are all living in a haunted house. We are all trapped with an alien on a closed ship. But we have all been given a piece of the greatest victory ever won. Christ shared his triumph on the cross with me. I first understood that at 9 years old, while watching “Saw.”