The Darkness

The night can be a savage place, terrors lurking within.

Terrors.

And apathies.

Each of us has walked in this darkness, thrust into it neither by choice nor design, the result of blunt-force emotional trauma or a slowly-growing virus of numb. We linger, avoiding the monsters of loss and regret, despair and loneliness, self-doubt and self-loathing, anger and rage. We linger, perhaps wallow, perhaps even start to drown in that inky blackness rather than face those gatekeepers of the path back to light. In the dark, we are silent. We are still. We are alone.  The darkness coats us in its weight. And there we can crumble.

No one wants or sets out to enter this place. It sucks you in. It infiltrates your life: your passions, your relationships, your work. Some of us are better at pushing through, keeping it at bay and let it in when it won't matter: after work, after the dinner party, after it would inconvenience others. And it is an inconvenience to others. It is hard to support someone who is next to you but not there, who can't seem to snap out of it, who can't seem to just move forward. Who "can't." It is inconvenient, certainly.

It is also inevitable.

As a society, we acknowledge but reject this inevitability. We offer elixirs and practices to avoid the darkness. We offer elixirs for the elixirs. We maintain that it shouldn't be that hard to just live, that this darkness is an unnecessary barrier one must get over, so here's a pill, here's a meditation, here's a workout which will remove that barrier and let you get on with your life. Why spend so much energy just trying to function when we can give you ways to use that energy to thrive instead? Why bother with the struggle if you don't have to? The struggle isn't relevant. It isn't helpful. It isn't part of your character. The night and the terrors that it holds are, in short order, to be avoided like a bad section of town or contaminated water. Nothing good can come of it.

And yet, there are those of us who are frequent travelers in this place, those of us who find it every bit as painful as others but find a certain sense of comfort in its familiarity. Those of us who find inspiration there, who find ourselves, our strength, our identity, our voice, and, yes, those ugly aspects of ourselves we try to hide in the folds of black. There are those of us who greet its arrival with bittersweet acceptance and free ourselves slowly, appreciating the struggle to get out, the way it will change us, the things it will teach us, the things it will allow us to see. And there are those who, once free, flee like rats from a sinking ship, never to venture close again, not matter what.
It's an understandable response. Consider how much more you can achieve and give when you are not fighting those monsters in the dark. Consider how much better your relationships could be when you have the fiery passion to embrace them, rather than one dimmed and smoldering.

Consider also the life that has always been in the light. One that has never been touched by the long fingers of heartache, anger, disappointment, despair, insecurity, embarrassment, regret, jealousy, failure. How is such a life defined? How is such a life able to grow? Is such a life really one that has even been lived? Because to live means to risk experiencing all of the light and the dark one can find. It defines itself by both love and loss. By both the songs of bliss and the wails of sorrow. To live means to walk in both the dark and the light, to embrace the terrors and the joys, each necessary to be able to say at the end of the day that you have lived.

Perhaps even thrived.