Escorting the Shadow Walkers

By Betty Schram

My flight was on time, and security was moving at a fast pace. I had hit a day in what I’ve soft-calculated to be approximately the 60% of the time the TSA didn’t pull me aside to manually inspect my hair. They confirmed my protein powder was protein powder, and I was off to wait at my gate.

I rarely do something without knowing exactly why I’m doing it. Purpose-driven is the operating system my brain is most comfortable with. Know your reason and get to work with the parameters before you. It was out of my scope to board my plane not knowing why I was leaving. It was equally uncharacteristic that I had accepted it so easily.

Once I’d arrived at my destination many hours later, I messaged a few friends from my Airbnb and sent them images of the resident cat, whom I referred to as “my host.” I worked out and went to sleep, still uncertain why I was there but resolute that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Even though I couldn’t define my mission logically, I was following my gut and “trusting my instruments.”

The next morning, I was introduced to a handful of attendees before the first of the sessions began. We gave the military version of our respective elevator pitches over coffee and started to navigate, with cautious optimism, the initial layers of conversation each seemed willing to broach. The two who connected most with me sat to my left and right.

It was shortly after the first speaker began when I was initially hit with the overwhelming certainty of why I was sitting there—a certainty that would revisit me throughout the duration of the event: I was there for the ones next to me. I was about to find my path intertwining with theirs as each traversed an incredibly dark personal valley.

Most of us have heard of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and many of us have walked our own versions of it—a plethora of times over the multitudes of lifetimes we’ve lived. There are Valleys for each one of them. I am intimately familiar with the Valley. As these warriors began to share their torments with me, I recognized their responses and could feel the weight these world-crushers were being crushed by as their worlds were imploding around them.

There is a desperate kind of pain, a cavernous damage, an internal carnage that easily would render helpless those walking in the Valley should those walkers be convinced that they are indeed alone. The danger is not the Valley itself, but in the despair, isolation, and consuming lies that dwell there—hunting, haunting, and devouring souls.

It can’t take you down, but it can persuade you to surrender. Your bones are broken, your soul hollowed out, after all. It can convince you to lie down and die in the Valley. What more is there but to lie down? What is left but to die?
You are alone.

This is a message designed to slaughter from within. This is poison. In concert with isolation is defeat. It waits for your knees to buckle, for you to embrace fear and agree with the lies—circular thinking that howls against the walkers’ ears. But truth is also in the Valley, whispering contralaterally to the lies.

You are not alone.
You were never meant to die there.

The Valley is not your enemy. The Valley is your circumstance, not your fate. We are not subject to the Valley. In the Valley, we have choice. We have agency. We are instructed not to fear. There is opportunity in the struggle. There is growth; there is a call for immense courage to be taken up and used as a weapon against every lie that would ask you to surrender your life, your love, your dignity.

There is a fire that will either burn your bones to ash or refine you and torch off everything you were never actually meant to bear. In the Valley, you become. The lie screams that you don’t have the choice in your destiny. It would have you relent your heart. It would have you abandon yourself.

But you are not alone.

The only way out is through. The only way through is by partnering with honesty, courage, and a merciless mission against the entangling lies that you were meant to die in that Valley, that it will crush your bones and consume your soul, and that you are alone.

I could not carry them, these walkers in the shadows. But I could walk with them for the days we were together. I could offer them dignity, courage, strength, clarity, and solidarity. I could remind them that I knew they were not themselves as they saw ragged imposters in their reflections they once recognized. I could whisper truth against the howling lies, if only for the short time our paths in the Valley came to an anastomosis.

I could lock eyes with warriors and tell them I saw them for who they truly were. They were not hollow; they were not done. They were not dead. This was not over.
They were not alone.

I had the privilege, the gift, and the honor to walk with warriors who had forgotten how dangerous they truly were, to see them for who they are, and to speak truth and life back into their ghosts. In those moments, they knew they were not alone.

And in those moments, neither was I.

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This first appeared in The Havok Journal on April 29, 2025.

Betty Schram is an allied health professional, model, and actress. Fitness of mind, body, and spirit are of great value and continual endeavor. 
@bettyschramofficial (Instagram)