Don't be afraid of your darkness

Don’t be afraid of your darkness. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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When I started my journey through writing, I took a lifetime of numbed and buried feelings, memories and stories from my past and started writing about them. For the words to flow, I had to allow myself to feel the feelings I had worked so hard to suppress…feelings of despair, loneliness, not good enoughness, abandonment, loss, sadness… Writing became an exercise in unearthing all the buried wounds and most of it was done with the shedding of a lot of tears. I would start thinking about something I wanted to process and let that sit for a while. When I felt ready, I would listen to melancholic music to help open me up. The process of writing was incredibly frightening but cathartic. With each shared memory (I did this through my newsletter), I felt lighter and started shedding what didn’t belong to me. It’s what I still do today.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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I have since worked on making friends with my darkness and shadows…it is hard and that work will last a lifetime but I am learning to be comfortable with them, allowing them to exist because they are an important part of who I am. When I am on those down days, instead of resisting, I am learning to surrender because on the other side are always gifts…valuable lessons and realizations I couldn’t learn otherwise. We are all shadows and light. One cannot exist without the other and if we want to love our “truest, most beautiful lives” (as Glennon Doyle writes), we have embrace both and all the gradations in between.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀