Woman Conquered Her Fear of the Dark at 55. Then Her Coping Mechanism Became an Unlikely Second Career (Exclusive)

NEED TO KNOW

• Fiona MacBain has made her name on social media documenting her outdoor travels around the Scottish Highlands

• The 55-year-old mother of three started posting TikToks about her camping pursuits on her page, @FionaintheWild, in November 2023

• In addition to garnering an audience of over 185,000 followers and making a significant supplemental income, MacBain says creating content helped her overcome a long-held fear

On most days of the week, Fiona MacBain can be found working in local government administration, but whenever she gets the chance, she ventures off the grid.

MacBain’s 185,000 TikTok followers know her as @FionaintheWild, the outdoorswoman who documents her nights camping out in the Scottish Highlands, where she was raised. However, despite her demonstrated exploration expertise, the 55-year-old content creator only recently became comfortable sleeping outside and cooking her meals on a portable stove.

She followed her upbringing in the Glen Nevis area with life in larger cities. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh, she worked in London for a couple of years before relocating to her then-husband’s home in Tunisia. She eventually made her way back to the United Kingdom, where she raised her three kids: a daughter, now 27, and two sons, ages 16 and 17.

Since 2004, she’s lived in Inverness, where she took up long-distance walking as a hobby as her children got older. For years, MacBain wondered what it would be like to sleep out in nature. For a while, the only thing holding her back from giving it a try was her nagging fear of the dark, something she acknowledges most people wouldn’t expect from someone who grew up in such a remote place.

“When I was a child, I think I had quite a vivid imagination,” she tells PEOPLE. “My mum and dad would say, ‘Oh, go out and shut the garage, Fiona,’ and I would find it terrifying … Irrationally, I’ve never really minded walking about in the dark in cities, which is probably obviously a lot more dangerous in actual fact.”

In 2023, she decided to put those fears to rest and try camping out for her first time. In hyping herself up, what she describes as a “trial night” by Loch Ness, MacBain tried to dig deep and figure out why she was actually afraid of.

“I tend to read thrillers and watch horror films and stuff, but I don’t believe in anything supernatural. So I managed to think, okay, let’s put all of that stuff aside — the monsters and the ghosts and all that kind of thing — and just looking at it logically, what are the chances of somebody coming across me?” she recalls. “I suppose I just realized it was an irrational fear.”

During her trial evening outside, she punctured her sleeping mat, rendering it unusable. The day was nearing its end, but she mustered up the courage to walk back to her car, drive home and retrieve a replacement.

“By the time I came back, it was completely dark, and I had to walk the first time from the street light into the woods,” she explains. “I was so, so close to just thinking, ‘Never mind, I’ll just leave my tent. I’ll go home. I’ll come back and get it in the morning because this is just too scary.'”

As she ventured into the woods, MacBain struggled to remember when she’d actually set up camp. Instead of reacting with panic, she found herself distracted by the question of where her tent was located. Once she found it, she realized she’d taken a massive step forward in conquering her fear of the deep, dark night.

“Before I went to sleep, I went to just sit on this rock down in the woods by Loch Ness. I looked up, and you could see all the stars,” says MacBain. “I sort of looked around in the dark woods and I just kind of managed to tell myself, ‘This is nice rather than scary.'”

Since that first night by Loch Ness, MacBain has used most of her spare time to camp out around her home country, relearning the Highlands she knew as a child. At first, the outdoors was something she experienced in isolation, but in November 2023, a new pursuit was born out of sheer boredom.

The mom of three was situated at Slaggan Bay, far out in northwestern Scotland. Knowing how early the sun would set, she put up her tent early and snuggled into her new — and very expensive — winter-friendly sleeping bag. It was beautiful, but it was dark, and there wasn’t much else for MacBain to do beyond reading her book.

“It’s really uncomfortable just lying in a sleeping bag, and it’s a tiny wee tent, so you can’t sit up [comfortably]. So I was just turning over and over and reading on my Kindle, then just thinking, ‘Right, this is getting a bit boring,'” MacBain tells PEOPLE. It was too cold to come out from under her blanketing, so she whipped out her phone, hit record and started talking to the camera.

“It was my genuine emotion: I was a bit bored and a bit fed up in the dark and a wee bit scared, because that was also my first camp where … there was no phone signal,” she shares. “And I didn’t realize that until I’d got into my tent, and I hadn’t expected it, but I couldn’t be bothered moving my tent. That was the other thing — I couldn’t scroll or phone anybody or text anybody, so I just talked about that.”

The next day, when she returned to her car, she posted the full video on TikTok without any edits at all. Within two days, she noticed it had garnered far more attention than expected; the video currently sits at over 181,000 views, and it motivated her to continue creating content, especially when she felt that surge of emotion.

She saw the same success a couple of weeks later, when she packed up her tent in the middle of the night to avoid getting stuck in bad weather forecasted for the following morning.

“I was feeling quite exhilarated because I wasn’t used to walking in the dark. That was my first time walking a good distance in the dark,” she reflects. “When I got back to my car, I just talked to the camera about it. Again, I posted that and it was also really popular. So that kind of got me into the bug, and it got me used to speaking to the camera as well.”

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In the past couple of years, MacBain has built a significant social media presence, and TikTok has even turned into a supplemental income to her day job. She tells PEOPLE that after a couple of £1,000 (about $1,350 USD) monthly checks, she was able to take her sons on a vacation abroad, which wiped away any doubts the two teenagers may have harbored about MacBain’s viral page.

“I used TikTok money to take them on this fantastic holiday to Sicily. We visited volcanoes and stuff, and so I said, ‘This is being paid for by TikTok,'” she notes. “I think when I first started to get popular, they were a bit uncertain about people seeing their mum doing TikTok dances outside her tent, but now they’ve got used to it and they’re very supportive.”

Read the original article on People