I was surrounded by darkness. Friends and family wanted so badly for me to come out of it, but were powerless against it. They came with flashlights and inner light and lanterns and lamps and matches and candles and neon flashing signs. . . but how can they fight my battle? How can they know the fix for a machine they know nothing about?
There was nothing they could do, no matter how many acts of kindness and love they showed me. And when the patience ran out, their wrath and frustration didn’t work either.
The lack of darkness is hard to fathom… darkness is there when there’s nothing left. So what does it mean to get rid of the darkness, to stop having darkness when it’s the only thing that’s left?
Darkness is essentially the lack of light, and that’s exactly when I felt inside my brain, inside my skin, inside my bones. What gets rid of darkness? Light.
What’s light? For me, it’s being able to express myself, to be joyful, to by in touch with my feelings and write them down, to be fearless and bold, to find the comedy in everything, to feel trusted and loved and free, to create… all that good stuff. I wasn’t creating. ANYTHING.
I didn’t have any creative thoughts. I didn’t see potential in anything. I couldn’t create an enjoyable day for myself, much less create light to shine across my entire life.
There was my problem: I had no light. I wasn’t creating any light & couldn’t dispel my darkness. The light that other people were trying to shine went away when they did, either by physical distance or when they simply couldn’t accept that their “help” wasn’t helping. I had to find a way to stimulate the light that I knew I had inside — the light that not only made me smile, but made others smile when I smiled. The light that made me the bounciest, loudest person around had gone out at some point, leaving the gaping hole that was my life.
I had to get my light back. I was determined to get my light back. I had to get out of the darkness.