The Dark

For a majority of my life I was deathly afraid of the dark.  Like the kind of kid who would sprint up the stairs two at a time because I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being tailed.  I was also the one who would never be caught dead with my feet outside the blanket with the lights off because in my head that was just an open invitation to drag me away.  As I got older I was able to control these fears for the most part but that was only because new ones had been introduced. I didn’t like even walking out to the car at night because I was scared of the dark.  Well, it wasn’t so much that I was scared of the dark itself because if that were true I’d assume I would be terrified to blink, or sleep for that matter.  I was scared of what was in the dark, what would transpire with near perfect cover of darkness.  I’m not exactly sure when it changed but I started to grow more comfortable in the dark, and I couldn’t exactly pinpoint why.  I mean of course you only get to see the stars when it’s dark and they could be breathtaking but unless you lived in a rural area they really didn’t fulfill their Potential.  So it couldn’t have been that, and it wasn’t that dangerous situations didn’t still happen because as I said before the dark is near perfect cover.  It hit me when I was watching my brother in his room and he didn’t know that I was there, and in that moment he was entirely in his own reality and that was an eerie thought to me that he was more himself in that moment than anytime I’d ever interacted with him, no matter how comfortable he is with me.  But in that moment it hit me, the things I was afraid of because of the dark was the same reason I’d grown to love it.  When nobody is watching, This is the ultimate expression of who your true self is, the darkness gives you the type of cover that it requires to be whoever you really are.  I never thought about it in this way before but, everybody always references quotes that allude to “coming to light”

Or “ shedding light on a situation” as almost being synonymous with coming to terms with your true self. But I truly believe the darkness is what sets us free, I mean maybe that’s why so many of us are inherently afraid of it because it forces us to be who we are on our own terms not influenced by prying eyes. As I said before,If we were truly afraid of the dark we couldn’t go outside or to sleep or even blink. I think the phobia of the dark stems from what’s in the dark or what could happen within it, or who we are when we have its cover. Just take a second and ponder if stepping into the light is just expressing yourself for who people see you as, because this could very well be true, but maybe it’s the dark that gives you the freedom to be who you really want to be.