Someone said the other day, “If you don’t face your own darkness, you will end up dating it...”
And I have to admit, it kind of rocked my day!
This has been my experience. But it is worse than that. Because for 29 years I have been facing my own darkness and I still dated it. Fuck!
So what is one to do if you are facing your darkness and you still end up dating it?
Keep working at it is really the only thing.
So I do.
Sometimes we are given the best gift. It is darkness. And it takes us a very long time to realize that the darkness is also a gift. I didn’t see it that way, and still don’t some days. I wish I could just be “normal” but I know that no one really is. We are all amalgamations of the shit we have survived. Warped and broken fragments attempting to assimilate into some sort of cohesive whole.
And most of us have mixed results.
We make progress then we don’t. We backslide. We capitulate. We acquiesce. We fuck it up and then attempt to fix it, again.
I think one of the most interesting journeys I have been on is this one related to men and dating. Fuck! It is has been one of the most revealing and interesting investigations of my life. Seeing how my childhood and all that shit that went down, causes me, still to this day, to chose what I chose and like what I like. And how hard wired it all is.
I am not sure where I learned the best way to get someone to like you is to ignore them or pretend they don’t exist but it has been a very wonderful strategy at self protection. Because when they never know you cared in the first place, it is fairly easy to save face and move on. Literally no one but you knows.
But that is a lonely existence. And it has taken me a very long time to even begin to eradicate this whole thought process. Once upon a time if you would have told me that owning my feelings and being honest about them, even when they make me look weak or vulnerable, would be what I would be willing to do, I would have told you, you were a liar!
But here I am attempting to own and share how I feel when I feel it. Letting you in and letting you know that you matter is one of the hardest and most fear and anxiety provoking things I have ever done, and continue to do.
I really would prefer to act like this is for me to know and you to find out, maybe, one day, in retrospect.
Contemporaneousness is something that kicks my ass every single day. I like the safety of feelings processed. So I would prefer, always to talk about how I used to feel. Talking about how I currently feel is fucking terrifying!
Mary Oliver in her poem “Uses of Sorrow” said this:
Someone I once loved
Gave me a box full of darkness
It took me years to understand
That this too, was a gift
And I am not sure I have ever heard anything ring more true for me. Once loved, and then handed a great box of darkness has felt like, for me, the worst fucking thing repeatedly. All the horrible shame, self pity and sorrow that emanated from that fucking box of darkness. I got so lost in it. But somehow, the box of darkness morphed into something I can use and do use every single day of my life.
Would I prefer I was never given all the darkness I have been gifted in my life?
Fuck yes.
But darkness is required in this life. It helps us stay here to fight for another day in the light. And the light, what a fucking grace that is to participate in. If you have never walked in it, bathed in it, then you really need give it a try. It is the most life affirming thing: to walk out of your own darkness and expose it all to the light of understanding, forgiveness, love and peaceful abiding. Fuck if that isn’t amazing!
But today I know that the greatest growth comes from that fucking box full of darkness. It is because of it I have grown, I have changed, I have deepened my understanding of you, of love, of living. And without that giant box of darkness I would never have gotten to this place, today, where I can say, I am grateful and at a tentative peace with it all.
I do not expect to always feel this way. But in general, most days I do. And when I am in need of a jump start or leg up, I need only glance toward my very prettily wrapped box of darkness to get me the fuck moving. Doing the work. It is the velvet lash under which I do the work that I don’t want to do, that somedays I am absolutely sure I do not need to do...
But it is there always to remind me of a past I survived and have done the work to make peace with...and when you neutralize any part of that darkness and turn it into light, you know that you and life and this whole random fucking shitshow, not only is worth all the effort it seems to require, but it is the mother fucking gift that keeps on giving.
So today, I work, I write to share the light. Because it was only after climbing out of my own darkness and hurt that I found it. And now, I feel compelled, unflaterring as it may be, to share it.
Again...still.
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