Is Dark Really Bad?

I was taught to fear the dark and the dark side of things. The light is good and the dark is evil. This religious black-and-white thinking led to hypervigilance and the constant judgment of all things. This teaching or I guess we could call it a belief system says everything is either good or bad. All things are either good and to be accepted or bad, evil, and to be feared. If someone embraced the perceived “bad thing,” that meant that they were either broken, lost, or bad themselves. Even as I type this, I feel that familiar heaviness and ick that came with this type of belief.

The longer I journey away from religion and harsh beliefs, the more I see and feel light and love. I also see how small and dark the prison of religion is. I once thought I had been set free from the box of going to church and being a part of that culture. That seemed so freeing and liberating to have left the toxicity of church but what I didn’t realize was that was the little box inside the bigger, darker box. And that is ok. It’s one step at a time.

I later realized that I had been traumatized and basically brainwashed. Hahaha, seems like a movie but no, it happens in real life.

What I really choose to share with you is this, and I heard this from someone else who simply tossed it in as an afterthought, the dark is simply the contrast to the light and vice versa. If we never experience the dark, we wouldn’t know how great the light is. We wouldn’t be grateful for the light bright love. We would only know the light and that would be mundane. The same goes for the dark. When we are experiencing life in that dark little box, it becomes normal. We only realize how dark and small it was when we get the courage to open the lid and jump out into the light. While we are in the dark little box, we think it’s a big light world because that’s what we have been taught and we’ve believed that teaching and lived that life.

So I am grateful for my time, as painful and destructive as it was, in that dark little box and my time in the dark bigger box.

The night sky is dark yet it isn’t evil. It is beautiful and serves an amazing purpose. It displays the stars and the moon. The day sky is bright and beautiful and still imperfect. The sun shines in all its beauty. But is the day sky “good and safe?”

We can’t have the day without the night. We can’t have contrast without both black and white.

We can’t appreciate the light without the dark.