Throughout the Darkest Hour, I Found Light
How I got used to waking up at night and defeating fears in the dark.
I think I made one of the biggest leaps to conscious adulthood.
Back in the days, when we were little, we used to think about the dark nightly hours as some kind of a doorway to all the scary monstrous entities and nightmarish experiences.
As a child, of course, I had my fair share of torches, candles, and TV sets being on throughout the night. To me back then it seemed that the scariest thing ever would be to sit alone in a dark room, clueless about all the uncertainties and well-hidden beasts under the bed.
But sometimes, as we grow older, we realize that there could be nothing scarier than the broad daylight
The thing with panic, grief, and sorrow is that they often love to embrace you and suffocate you during the day when you are expected to behave like an adult, to work, communicate, have fun, go out and engage in different kinds of experiences. As if those intense and crippling states of mind, body, and soul know that the only way for them to exist is to feed off both your life and your will to live.
Maybe there comes a time in anyone’s life when the daily habits and activities become difficult and unbearable. You begin your day shaking in your bed, facing utter denial about getting up and doing human stuff. You hardly go to your coffee machine in one attempt.
Ah, there’s a chair I may use for supporting my drained body.
Perhaps there are mornings when you burst into tears the moment you wake up having absolutely no idea how are you supposed to change into some decent clothes and give your folks a phone call acting out that you are fine.
Perhaps there are days in your life when the ringing of the telephone makes you jump off your chair, dreading bad news approaching. Frequently you might feel nauseous by the sight of food. Sometimes you may choose to face the empty refrigerator than go outside to the supermarket, because, well — the world is scary, it’s hostile, it’s incredibly unbearable. There are times when you fail to breathe correctly and you rush over to the balcony in pathetic attempts to fill up your lungs again. You face missed calls, missed conversations, missed opportunities for a smile, for warmth, for someone out there being there.
But there comes the night — silent and safe where the air is clearer and the fears seem oddly blurred and out of lines
That’s the moment when your childlike fears of the dark face reality’s monstrous experiences and hostile surroundings.
As the night falls down, you subside to your half-awaken state feeling oddly safe while the day is fading out in the distance. The world is sound asleep and so are the grief and suffocating sadness.
You almost anticipate the moment when you wake up and it’s still dark outside. You get up and get close to the window of your bedroom — perhaps there are trees outside, a street lamp, a stray dog. You inhale deeply and realize with great relief that the world had stopped just for a little bit. For the first time, you are not scared of the silence. You find it healing as the fears from the day perish and let you see them for what they are — just a tiny dot somewhere far over the horizon.
During the peaceful evening hours, fears lose their shape. They might even start to look like tree leaves. Or stars. Or street stones. They fade into the nightly scenery outside of your window and stop looking so overwhelmingly undefeatable. You think it’s funny how it’s possible for you to fear a tree leaf.
And that’s how maybe you start waking up at night
One time, twice, three times. People think you have trouble sleeping and yet you have never slept so good before. You take your small doses of fresh air, battling demons and crippling fears. During the night you go back in time — you dream of doing things differently, you dream of doing things the same way. You forgive people and you forgive yourself. You part ways, you let go. You dream big and hope. You learn not to go so hard on others and on yourself. You build up stamina for the next day.
Then you wait for the nighttime. You go through your day and go back to bed again. No one knows how long you will be anticipating the dark hours to find the light between the tree leaves but in the end, it doesn’t really matter.
Because, eventually, you come back home.
