24. Feb, 2021

Let the darkness in

The plantation shutters shielding my bedroom windows and door tilt upward slightly. I have adjusted their trajectory to darken the room a little. Rain runs gently down the recently cleaned glass and forms in spherical droplets obscuring the view.

At my feet lies my fluffy canine companion, he warms them as they sense a slight chill in the air. My toes are a great barometer. Outside the dampness of another summer’s day permeates the air and as the rain eases and the sun pierces its way through the layers of cloud, the resulting humidity thickens the air, it is like breathing in a thick soup.

Very few days this 2020-21 summer season have remained moisture free – it is a stark contrast to the smoke-filled air of last summer when bushfires charred earth to the north, south and west of this land of changing moods.

My mood has been more in line with last seasons weather…sunny and upbeat for the most part, not so suited to this damp and drab season we find ourselves in.

Hearing of my sunny and upbeat mood must be news to your ears, but in truth, I am tiring of the energy needed to sustain such a sunny persona. It is, for a body coping with ME/CFS unsustainable. In fact, I told my therapist yesterday that I feel my mask is wilting. Dripping with humidity and perspiration it is melting and warping and slowly slipping down my face like a messy ice cream exposed to the noon day sun.

So why the constant sunny persona? A great deal has changed in my life over the last 12 months or so. My husband and I have moved to a beautiful little waterside home by a tranquil bay, it is calm and serene most days except when a howling nor-easterly blows and whips up white horses on the surface of the water. But in my new surroundings, which are more transparent and open than my old home, I feel acutely aware of my need and desire for approval from the new people in my life.

On reading that back it kind of makes me sound a bit pathetic, that I should need to try so hard to seek acceptance in my new community, but it is different here, much different to my previous home where I so easily became too isolated on many occasions.

But like the bay in a howling nor-easterly I forget that it is still possible to find beauty in a broody moodiness. Why is it that I can seem to accept and recognise that beauty in the wind-swept swell of a stirred-up bay, but when it comes to how I see myself I find that broody moodiness to be totally unacceptable?

Sitting with my therapist yesterday recounting how exhausted I feel being constantly switched on in my new surroundings she told me I need to not be afraid to let my darkness in…that it is okay to accept it as a part of me. I suspect that darkness will always be with me and if that is the case, then why do I work so hard to banish it?

In truth, I am afraid of it and the power it possesses over me. For many years it kept me in a suicidal stupor. Suicidality became my backup plan and I have worked so hard to beat those thoughts down, but I realise I haven’t let myself stop for one moment to allow those thoughts to sneak back in, I have been running from them.

When watching a recent TED Talk by Andrew Solomon, a survivor of depression my ears pricked up when he said, “shutting out the depression strengthens it – while you hide from it, it grows”. These thoughts are in line with mine after talking with my therapist…you see by letting it in and learning to coexist with it, its power over me will eventually weaken.

She told me that I have proven I am able to make room for both, that light still shines within me and while my light glows, the darkness will never conquer. Hearing these words made me kind of speechless when I realised just how right she is.

You see, it is okay for me to take time out to let the darkness in without guilt, I don’t need to keep waging a war with a part of me which I have been afraid of for so long. We can co-exist; I just need to give myself permission to “be”. To just be whatever I am feeling in the moment, to rest and to recuperate and if that means allowing a howling nor-easterly to blow through my soul then I should allow it to pass through me without so much resistance.

It is the resistance, the fight, the fear, the avoidance that is killing me – not the darkness itself.

So here, right now, I am giving myself permission to lock the doors, dim the lights, close the shutters, to listen to my heart so that every once in a while, I can step up, be brave and let the darkness in.