A New Year's Reflection on Darkness

There are people who run away to react to bad situations and people who run away to react to scary inner landscapes. This is about the latter, about mental health crises.

The funny thing about darkness is how completely it blinds you. I guess it's really more blatantly obvious than particularly funny, but it matters because it's really the only power darkness holds. So when I found myself in a dark place over the holiday, nothing had changed. Not really, not since the week before. But now I couldn't see the before or the after, only the inside of this thick and suffocating smog. And that smog's beguiling tendrils were what led me to be sitting in another city, in a bookstore parking lot, sobbing on new year's eve.

As every over-done running away movie plot will tell you, if things are going wrong, you have to get away. I guess fleeing danger is a pretty human instinct. Only, as the ending of any over-done running away movie will tell you, it doesn't work. You end up stuck with the same sad sack of a person you were when you started your journey, and maybe a little extra disappointment that this half-baked adventure didn't fix you or your life after all.

It's easy to feel like I started this new decade in much the same way I came into the last one, desperate and struggling. But maybe the difference is what I know this time around that I didn't know before. See, if you feel your way around, you'll eventually run your fingers along a wall. And in the right hand corner about three feet up, there's a switch. And when you hit that switch, goddamn. You realize you're not on a forest floor, but in a room.

I spent near ten years of my life not realizing it was there, or that there was anything recognizable or manageable about the darkness I was scooting around in.

So maybe it sounds like a little thing, but I turned it on. And I cancelled a lonely hotel reservation, and I drove myself back to my home and the people who love me. Because I know that there's a before and there will be an after and I will find my way to it one way or another. Yes, one way or another, I'll make it out.