UCWG 010: Do You Own Your Darkness?

We live in a world that encourages us to acknowledge only the bright and positive parts of ourselves. We are trained to ignore or outright deny anything capable of causing great sadness, sorrow, suffering, rage, or negativity of any kind. We run from the dark side of the force.

David portrays himself as an overly positive man in his thirties. But under that shiny surface in another world of emotional capacity. Among other things, he is afraid to admit he is like his father, who he resents for not being a good husband to his mother. Many of the same patterns show up in his own relationships with women, though he doesn’t equivocate them at first.

He is ultimately afraid to show his negative emotions in anything other than a neutral tone and a list of synonyms to eloquently express his unhappiness. He resorts to describing his negative feelings only one word at a time in a very controlled state. “Skeletons in the closet” and “demons” are conceptions of the past that we refuse to let fade away with the natural flow of entropy.

Society teaches us to appear comfortable even when you are deeply uncomfortable so that no one around you will know. We believe it is necessary to be in a safe and supportive space when we reveal our demons to the world. Too much awareness to quickly can cause us to rearrange our constructs of self to show us the only real terror is us. The monster is you.

We fear the social repercussions of sharing our weaknesses publicly. Personal development seminars and other safe spaces offer limited personal growth so that we don’t have to take it out into the real world. What is the story you are so desperate to uphold for others? Doing things publically makes them real because it changes other people’s perceptions of us. We cannot easily return to how things were before because expectations are different.

The longer you wait to clean your skeletons, the harder it will be.

What are the dark things about you that you struggle to keep hidden from yourself and others?

What would you lose by being completely authentic with even your own darkness?