The Dark Path

Around two years ago I wrote about a path less travelled, which was my account of my past, my mental health, and what I had experienced since I met the woman I am still very happy to call my most beloved friend, because of her role in guiding me towards a more fulfilling and authentic existence.

How have things progressed since? Well, let me tell you something about famous last words. ‘Famous last words’, in British parlance, is a fairly sarcastic expression used when someone makes an assertion with such confidence and certainty that they are practically begging fate to intervene and make an example of them, never mind just tempting it. As such, it happens to be a beautiful and amusing example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action, where by you might perceive the horizon of your own knowledge to be the horizon of all knowledge.

When lacking awareness, we experience this all the time. We celebrate but we also celebrate prematurely, and what we see as our horizon is a tidal shift obscuring something much bigger. The summit of a mountain that reveals the summit of an even greater, taller, mountain.

My path less travelled also happened to become my famous last words. While still being a beautiful and profound expression of my truth in that moment, it was also completely ignorant of the greater challenge I was inviting to myself. It’s very important to celebrate every achievement, but you really can’t take that single celebration and call it quits before the game is finished.

I was totally unprepared, failure abounded, and my path less travelled took a thorny twist into the deep, dark woods.

Getting lost in the darkest of forests isn’t something to be completely afraid of; it still possesses beauty. Light occasionally breaks through the thick canopy, reminding you that it’s still there, symbolically suggesting that you may be in the lowest of lows, but you will reach it again if you raise yourself higher. And what you see in the darkness, in the thick of it all…what you will learn is to notice the difference between a twisted fantasy conjured up in your head — an illusion that heightens your fear and keeps you stuck — and what is really, genuinely lurking in that shadow of yours.

If that doesn’t make much sense, it’s more like you don’t know what monsters are hiding under your bed unless you get down on the floor and take a peek. There will be something there for sure, and you need to pull it out and put it on your pillow with your other cuddly toys.

That’s more or less where I was and I use the flowery language because it takes you out of the labelling game, where the story changes its flavour because you have your own preconception of what mental illness, trauma, fear and vulnerability is that might not be compatible with how others perceive it. But, I digress.

That dark path of mine revealed to me a horrible, depressing history of rejection and abuse and how it was so persistent that my self-esteem stabilised at precisely zero. If you imagine the pressure gauge on your heater, or the tachometer on your car dashboard (the thing that shows you how revved your engine is, which is ironically apt for this example), you know that the needle rarely, if ever stays in one place. Instead, it wobbles around a general point. So for me and my self-esteem, when that needle shifted into the negative I found myself attempting suicide, not wanting to take care of myself, not feeling worth any of it.

When the needle shifted into the positive, up from zero a tiny bit, there would be a general sense of elation that was very hard to control. My expectation of self-esteem was that it was non-existent — my standards were incredibly low — so the awareness of even the slightest improvement felt like I was saved, or better, despite my self-esteem realistically still remaining incredibly low. This would happen a lot after a sort of jump-start: an experience at a therapeutic or spiritual group that gave me a profound, transcendent high that would ultimately fade out after a couple of weeks, because integration of a process is better counted in years and not days.

So for two years my famous last words that I posted to the world became a haunting epitaph — I’d already experienced the best I could possibly get from this life, things are getting a lot worse, it’s never going to get better, and as I turned 30 it mutated into an existential, spiritual crisis. This is going to happen to anyone not in touch with themselves and their life, mental illness or not. The mental illness and the past add layers of complexity to the crisis, and a lot of confusion and frustration, but they are not necessarily the root cause of it.

That was darkness and I was shrouded in it, subsumed, engulfed. It was almost comforting and when I saw myself creeping out I could just create even more. I’d be depressed, reliving trauma, abandoned, and feel like absolute shit with barely any will to live, but at least I was comfortable with those known quantities… and what an upsetting, torturous thing to become aware of, own up to, and hold myself accountable for.

I didn’t know any better and I was doing the best I could, but because I had misled myself into believing numerous false truths, or alternative facts if you will, I was completely out of touch with what really was best for me. I was so identified with the pain and my past that everything was filtered through those experiences, and even with my best efforts I had ultimately closed off to what I really wanted from life.

This is where I tell you that just because you’re lost in the darkness doesn’t mean you become one with the darkness. You need to become one with yourself and who you really are, whoever the fuck that is! He or she is going to be beautiful, powerful, divine, so long as the whole of them, literally all of them, is honoured and cherished.

And what I mean by that is you embody that darkness just as much as you embody your lightness, the other, opposite side of it, but it is absolutely not your entire story and it’s not the entirety of who you are. It has been instrumental in your development and getting to the present moment, and at one point it may even have been your lightness until it stopped serving its purpose for you, and twisted into something that holds you back. It’s not bad and it’s not evil and it needs to be loved all the same.

That’s more or less where my dark path took me, as I begin to climb the trees and reach out to the bright sunshine above. I’d wandered around in circles in the thick underbrush for a good two years and suffered enough for it, and it has become time to start moving upwards to appreciate the light that has been there the entire time.

Lightness for me means beauty, divinity, and grace, which I perceive as spiritual qualities that are powerful, intense, and otherwise hard to define in a substantive way. They come from your soul and your body is the expression of that otherworldly quantity. Lightness also means compassion, empathy and love, from which come a whole breadth of other feelings and emotions.

The sadness you feel from losing your dog to old age is an expression of love as much as it is grief, because you would not feel sad if you didn’t love your dog so much. The anger, channeled appropriately and positively, is your fire and your passion to do more, or better. These feelings we call bad, those we repress, often have their source in something beautiful, or something beautiful that was taken from us, that we were deprived of when we needed it most.

Your compassion is how you connect and so deeply want to share yourself with someone else, romantically, or as a friend or colleague or just one human to another. And your empathy is how you allow the other to share themselves with you, and really feel them. These aren’t qualities we all possess in equal measure, they are just how they are for me specifically, and it’s really valuable to take time and reflect on what qualities you feel you have yourself. The deep ones, not the achievements that come out of them.

All in all, while that part of the journey was genuinely terrible and painful — also for those I hold so close to me who were there for me the whole way, not just myself — it is never a wasted effort so long as you learn something from it, or find some of yourself along the way and become unstuck. That I did: it had meaning and gave me a whole new perspective on how I embrace life… myself.

🕉