Darkness, My Old Friend

I was afraid of the dark until I was 26 years old. Afraid, not in a grown-up anxious sense, but in the irrational way a child might encounter it for the first time. As I grew into adolescence, I learned to cope when it became socially unacceptable to vocalize that particular fear. I learned to suppress my fear such that it would never manifest outwardly, all the while my emotional insides churned like a raging sea of infinite and possible terrors. Sleep never brought rest because it required I first sail that sea, and sunrise brought only a few hours of relief, knowing I’d soon have to face my fear again. So, you can imagine that the fall-end of daylight savings and I have never gotten along. A 4 pm sunset and 8 am sunrise shifted the balance of my day so that more time was spent afraid than not. I could tell you about the moment I overcame my fear, but that’s a longer piece for another day.I can say now that it required, as you might imagine, that I wrestle with it—with and in a sort of darkness. In that wrestling, I was marked by an affinity. I discovered an appreciation—a thirst, even—for the infinite nothing. Almost overnight, that warzone became a playground. Of course, it didn’t actually happen overnight, but it was nearly. And the metaphor is too good to leave on the cutting room floor. When I wrestled with the night, I met a new friend or, better yet, made friends with an old foe. My fear itself. I learned that the dark and all that my imagination could conjure within could be an accomplice to my creative impulses. That the very same imagination conjuring those ghoulish worst-case scenarios looking to harm also contained equal capacity to generate all manner of weapons to combat those demons. I learned that perhaps light and dark weren’t opposed in the way I thought they were, but interrelated and interdependent.