Give in to Your Despair and Your Hate for the World

What do we do with darkness…?

Disclaimer: I know how this sounds…but don’t put up your guard just yet. Sink into your own unique darkness and those times of anger and loathing. It will help you understand. Love you reader.

Have you ever been so desperate to live that it aches?

Have you ever pleaded with a higher power so desperately to help you find your way, that you become almost hysterical?

Have you ever lost your breath to the anxiety of the unknown and the loneliness of your own story?

And…

What did it mean to you?

What was created from those moments?

Truth?

Epiphany?

Paralysis?

And when you’re alone and directionless, how often do you hate everything around you that made it so?

Often, it’s our own story of a dark world that creates hate and despair, just as much as our desperation for direction and growth.

The brighter the light, the darker the shadow

There is no one without the other.

In my deepest anger and resentment, surrounded by a suffocating cloud of why’s and why not’s, I’ve choked on my own hate for the world.

I’ve sat in not just self-pity, but a whirlwind of blame, and conceited and convinced purity about myself, all while spiraling into the questions with impossible answers about the world and it’s repulsive, selfish human decisions made every day.

Why the pain?

Why the deceit?

Why the abuse?

Why the corrupted power?

Why the tribalism?

Why the intentional misdirection?

Why the blatant destruction of physical, mental and emotional health?

I’m no fucking angel…far from it.

Yet, I’ve made sure in my ‘therapist absent growth’ to give myself credit for wanting the world to be good. It’s one of the few pedestals I stand on.

And within the wanting of a good world, I’ve realized that the only way to recognize good is to know anger and hate and all the other impulsive emotions that we use to discard care for the world as it is, and find excuses for our plans of destruction and self intended exile from a domain we can’t stand.

To know only good, means to demonize half of who we are. All because we fear what we do not know, and label it negatively. We stray from it, run from it.

Then we objectify and exile not just others in pain and feelings of anger, but those same parts of ourselves.

Ive found that to include anger and hate into my questions of the world and my discussions brings sense and empathy.

But why?

Why is this darkness so necessary?

How does darkness make sense of anything?

The truth about this darkness, yours and mine — better yet, let’s say the test of darkness — is not in our attempts to dissolve it, but in finding out why it exists and why it will be to our detriment to fold under its unfathomable pressure, leading us to carry out the same pain and tyranny we despise.

The test of all internal, emotional darkness is an unfolding truth about our character and our resiliency.

It will tell us who we are…and what we may or may not become. It screams our potential into the abyss of what doesn’t yet exist. Leaving us to decide what to make true.

It’s the moments where Bond is pushed to limits by the Villain, the ultimate antagonist of the ultimate white knight.

Can he withstand the punishment? Can he hold his resolve through torture and mutilation and psychic manipulations? Can he walk the fine line between justice and a grievance? Can he control and direct his pain, his aggression, his violence?

Or will it turn him into the same monsters he vows to bring to justice?

Comparably,

Can we as people, within ourselves, sustain character and remain aware of the good of humanity, when tested by the deep darkness of our own minds?

Can we hold against loneliness? Judgment? Accusation? Unfair odds?

Can we stand solid…never to become the very evil that tests our resolve?

Just as the individuality of millions is crucial to democracy, that same individuality is crucial to the goodness of the world.

Yet, the intimacy of knowing darkness does more than only defending against it.

Without darkness

If all we knew was goodness, there would be no reference to understand why it was good.

It means that even within our own ranks, our community and our groups, evil exists in order for us to see what we could be. We see each other’s criticisms. We see each other fold under the pressure of bias and beliefs and our own theories of good and evil, truth and lies.

And it’s the discussions of the shadow in all of us that keeps true evil at bay.

Democracy or Communism?

Is War the creator of peace?

Is capitalism freedom or suppression?

Can we evolve out of primal violence, aggression, and impulsivity?

What is better for us, absolute acceptance of everyone or blatant skepticism?

Only…

The world we live in is persistent about removing darkness instead of being intimate with it enough to control it.

But darkness can never be dissolved, only shifted.

So, we have to learn to accept the infinity of darkness.

We have to see why it is there and where it comes from.

We have to seek what it means to us…as individuals and as a society.

How we can use it and direct it?

I believe that darkness is there, not only to help us fight, but to also lead us back to what is good.

Darkness is the great paradox of growth.

We can’t JUST grow…we have to have reason to grow. Darkness is that reason.

And as much as people want the sun to shine bright enough to remove the darkness, it only creates a darker shadow.

We can’t eradicate it….but we can become it, control it.

It’s a shadow that holds not just nature’s undeniable truth, but human truth:

The human species will always be capable of, and therefore a creator of evil. Meaning, the same human species will always be at a test to either further our existence or destroy it.

Will it be us to destroy humanity, or the universe?

Apocalypse…or Armageddon?

And…

Will it be us to destroy our own potential?

Can we use our despair and our hate?

The shadow must exist.

Evil must exist.

It’s what we do when we have to face it.

Inside and out.

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