when darkness overtakes you

maybe we should all just lay down for a while.

Photo by Boba Jaglicic on Unsplash

“What is amazing: wax is made by bees that have never seen the light. But they have been nourished by the light. Pollen is, so to speak, materialized light. And they have the ability to free the light they have ingested, making snow white wax. It is really a big wonder. And then, man can collect this wax, make candles, and in the dark period of the year, he can free the light again. For me, it’s kind of a big imagination.”

Dr. Johannes Wirz
Molecular Biologist

*

Fingers on keys in the early dark, dog curled up on the couch (his couch), space heater warming my ankles. Wind blowing the last few California-dry leaves off the plum tree, branches smacking staccato against pane. I am trying to make sense of this. Not the dark, or the wind, or the dry, or the dog (blessed dog). I’m trying to make sense of time, of this time, of no time.

I am exhausted, for obvious reasons. But what makes me most tired, what rents up my neck and strains my eyes and mangles my brain is the persistent horizon scanning and subsequent let downs. I can’t do it anymore. I’m tired of this, of these pulses of hope followed by low-down nadirs.

I keep pulling the Hermit card.

*

There was a time when I was afraid of life. I believed there was a darkness inside that would overtake me if I wasn’t careful.

In my attempts to tame this darkness, I was meticulous, and vigilant, and obsessed with control. I developed certain strategies to cope with just, you know, dealing with myself, and this approach worked for a time, and then those strategies suddenly stopped working, and I knew they’d stopped working because instead of finding relief, I started engaging in behavior that confused me. It was the usual risk-taking behavior: willingly placing myself in borderline dangerous positions and clumsily dancing around fine lines and precipitous edges, memories that to this day have me scratch my head in wonder that I didn’t get into more trouble (tip-of-the-hat to grace; tip-of-that-hat to, yeah, privilege). This is somewhat of an oversimplification of what at the time felt insidious and complicated. In retrospect, I was just following a sort of playbook for those of us who are not bad people or “addicts,” but simply humans in pain doing the best we could with the tools we had.

I share this to say: I know how it feels to be afraid of the dark. I lived in this fear for more years than not. I fled the dark, my dark, by any means. I was a hungry ghost, consuming anything in front of me, and yes I mean substances, but also, I mean men, and snacks, and Big Life Experiences, and media, and other people’s opinions. More more more, fill this yearning up so I don’t have to feel. I don’t ever have to reckon, I can just spin, spin, spin.

Spin spin spin turned into numb numb numb and in 2017 something inside me said enough. This is the same something inside that has me facing my dark, this Dark, staying with it, all my skin sloughing off, over and over, and I’m sitting here in this room of my own mostly itchy as hell but occasionally smooth and cool and shiny and fresh, with a clarity that has me slicing through tall grass and slithering through mud into a quiet safe underground from which a wild vision for the future is gestating.

*

I am still afraid. The difference now is that trust walks in tandem.

Last summer, some friends were going away for a long weekend and asked me to stay at their house to babysit their kids while they were gone. I leapt at the chance. But why was I so excited? As I tracked my inner response, it dawned on me: I was someone who people trusted with what they love most in the world. I had become a person I never thought I could be. These humble signals are lanterns. They spark me out of small thinking, and remind me of all I have changed. I did that. I am a person worthy of trust. I am a person capable of change.

None of this is written. We have a say.

The point is not to get rid of fear—that’s stupid and impossible and just another way we stay stuck on the hamster wheel exhausting ourselves. And this isn’t the pithy “feel the fear and do it anyway!” either. This is about increasing trust. This is about creating conditions in which we are more able to be with our dark. Until a new belief steps forward, one that reminds us that we are not lost, that we can never be lost, that we can trust ourselves to return, to find our way back, always; we can trust that part of ourselves that stands up, holding a lantern, who lights the way across the river just when we think our legs are spent and our breath is dangerously shallow and our vision is too murked up.

*

One hundred thousand years ago, in April 2020, I wrote about how those of us in recovery are uniquely skilled at dealing with difficult life circumstances because we know how to stay in shit for a very long time, as long as it takes, for things to transform. I still believe that. And. We’re being tested. I know now that whatever staying I thought I was doing before was the littlest of babiest steps. I only ever scratched the surface of what it meant to stay.

One question I’ve asked myself a few times over the course of this mess is: what if this is something that I chose? Not the pandemic—of course not, god no. But. What if this slowdown was something that I chose, to barely move around, to pull away from horizons by choice. To go inside. To spin and churn my immediate surroundings up into something that might sustain me through the future dark. That I might use to add a spoonful of to sweeten up my chai or rub gently on a burn, that I might mold into wax and set on fire to light this quiet room.

*

Realm Of Hungry Ghosts: Working with Attachments and Addictions (dharma talk by Tara Brach)

Queen of the Sun - gorgeous and most highly recommended documentary about our friends, the bees.

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Slow Motion Sober is a newsletter and community for creative types who are sober or curious about sobriety, and all the life-y intersections along the way. It's written by me, Dani, a writer and sobriety advocate in San Francisco, CA. 

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