3 Things to Remember During Your Dark Night of the Soul
You’re here again — or for the first time. What Lincoln probably felt when he wrote that he was “the most miserable man living.” You’re depressed, despairing, in the dullest thick of a dark night of the soul.
Or maybe you’re in the midst of being destructive: of burning bridges, filling your unmade bed with candy wrappers, seeking redemption that evades you, and taking scissors to your pillows and your bangs and your manuscript.
Remember these things.
#1: You don’t have to be happy to have meaning in your life.
Particularly in Western culture, we’re happiness-obsessed, often falsely equating temporary emotions with long-term fulfillment and meaning. Emotions we perceive as “negative,” though, can be productive.
Depression and anxiety have been linked to creativity and intelligence. Anger can spark activism and change. Grief and remorse can show us what we value and who we want to be. Profound sadness is still, well, profound. While depression shouldn’t be romanticized, there is beauty to be found along the full spectrum of human experience.
#2: You are not alone.
You’re probably aware that millions share and have shared your current predicament; the World Health Organization estimates that over 300 million people around the world are living with some form of depression. But this, the not-alone of depression, is about more than numbers. Depression is woven into our collective history. It’s written into our bones and our books. Passed on through our children.
Luminaries have, and have had, it. Kafka. Churchill. O’Keeffe. We’d have a lot less great art and critical thought without depression. Or is it the other way around?
Your sister has it. She’s felt the kind of emptiness that left her grasping at commercial taglines for a sense of clarity. Your coworker that you don’t like has had it. He’s emptied bottles and clutched at sweaty 3 A.M. sheets, his hands white-knuckled in prayers for love that never came.
It doesn’t make it easier, the not-alone of depression. Not-alone is not everything. But it’s something.
And oh, yeah, that thing about having to love yourself before you can be loved by anyone else? It’s a lie. And if someone you love has told you that, find someone who loves you better.
#3: It will change.
It will. Everything will. It’s inevitable.
Odds are, you won’t wake up tomorrow with the knots in your shoulders permanently undone and your breath full and slow and even (though, hey, you might) — but there will be days when you don’t feel like this. Nights when you rest easy, so easy that you forget ever feeling this way. Other times, the sadness will settle in like a weighted blanket and you’ll wonder why you ever hated it in the first place.
Dark nights of the soul are presumed to come just before the dawn of revelation. We’re especially fond of this notion in Judeo-Christian traditions. The truth is probably a little more complicated.
Revelations come, it’s true. Yours might appear to you in a chant or a pew prayer. They also might arrive in the smoke of a blunt or the join of a kiss, or many (in both cases). You might have a long winter of dark nights and return to them every season, learning each year to bear them out a little better.
You might find that the darkness is your friend and the nights could be longer as long as you have some wine and a candle and a spellbook. Magic doesn’t always require immediacy, and certainly, it doesn’t require a smile.
You might find that the dark night hangs well in the sky of your soul, revelations scattered across it like glittering constellations that you discover bit by bit.
You’d never have seen them if all the lights had been on.
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