hello darkness, my old friend.

"There's a darkness upon me that's flooded in light, and I'm frightened by those who don't see it."

That's a line from my all time favorite songs from the Avett Brothers. (The title of this is also a favorite song.) It's the same song one of my tattoos is from and it's one that's resonated with me long before it was popular. There's various lines in it that have a fairly obvious meaning. There's others that can be interpreted a few different ways. This particular line always drew me in but left me unable to explain it. It struck me this morning why. I am not frightened by those who don't see the light, I'm frightened by those who don't see the darkness.

This may not be the way the artist intended it to be understood, I can't possibly know what they were thinking when writing it but these words were meant to find me and this morning I figured out why. For so long people have seen me as happy and fun and optimistic and "good". And I am absolutely all of those things. I probably am one of the most genuinely happy people I know. But it so often stops there. People don't reach for the depths, they don't even see there's more there. Not just in me, but in most of us. Hell, most of us are scared to see it in our selves and yet that is where I am constantly being pulled. In myself and in others.

I am drawn in by those who want to go there, who bare their soul and aren't scared of sharing their darkness with me. I'm incredibly turned off by those who sit on the surface and don't even know there's anything below. I'm the queen of small talk and yet my soul absolutely hates it. I want the dark, the dirty, the wild and raw. I want to go where so much of the world is so scared to go. I am frighted by those who don't see the darkness because that is where we heal. That is where the world heals. Humanity's obsession with wealth and "finding" happiness and accumulating crap and chasing temporary highs is all about chasing a light that we're never going to find until we're willing to walk through the dark.

There always is a light at the end of the tunnel, but if we try to just run through to catch it, we'll always be running. We need to actually see what's in that tunnel before moving through it. I happen to enjoy in there and am in zero hurry to get to the other side.

xoxo,

Ali