I recognize that monster. That darkness that swirls and discombobulates you. You don’t know which way is up, down, in or out. I am lost in it alone. It is a thick mud it covers everything. It’s so viscous I can’t even reach a hand up or out to ask for help. I can’t open my mouth to speak the words and if I do the darkness fills my mouth to the point that no words escape, and I drown in my despair.
I’m here.
Can you see me?
I’m in it alone. Only me. I can’t see the world around me. The faces that care that stare down at me in my pit of darkness are disfigured and seem to far away.
They don’t understand.
This darkness, this monster is a familiar comfort. This is what I know. I did know light. How do we know there’s anything different? I hear the stories, the fairy tale of a place where light grows and glows from within. Where there is freedom of soul and spirit, but all I know is this darkness that consumes me. That weighs me down and holds me. I lose myself in this darkness. It WAS my world. This WAS all I knew. I did not know another way or the possibility even existed.
Looking back, I remember that monster, that darkness, that familiar place. I don’t know how I escaped. It wasn’t overnight. It was more like the way the sun slowly creeps over the horizon and all of a sudden, I could see the first foothold to escape my pit of hopelessness and walk in the light with my feet in the grass. A world of possibilities around me.
How did I come here?
Did I die?
Did I wake up?
Did I sprout through the surface?
I recognized a choice, and I made it. I chose to grow. Death was also a choice, but this time I chose to live. I took one step then another 1 millimeter at a time. I sprouted. I grew. I broke through the surface of my dark monster. To realize that that darkness was the soil I was planted in. It Is what gave me the strength, It was my teacher, not the monster, not a beast. Oh, when I was lost in it. It seemed so infinite, and now that I’ve grown through the surface of it, I love it and am grateful for it.