Choosing Not to be Afraid of the Dark

I was afraid of the dark when I was a child.

Truth is, I was afraid of the dark when I was a 21-year-old newlywed. That was a bit of surprise to my husband.

I had both real and imaginary reasons to be afraid of the dark.  Make believe monsters are scary enough. The real-life ones? Those are harder to face, both in the dark and in the daylight.

As a child, I created elaborate rituals to protect myself when it came time to go to bed and to turn off the lights. I surrounded myself with a barricade of stuffed animals and backed myself against the wall.

A little comfort. No real protection.

I also dragged out my good nights with verbal mantras of “’Night. Love you. See you in the morning. Sleep tight. Sweet dreams,” as if my words wove some sort of magical defense through my room.

In my teen years, dealing with my fear of the dark was simpler: I just left the lights on. All night long.

As a mom, I didn’t want to pass my irrational fear of the dark on to my children. It was time to find my brave, even if I had to fake it for their sakes.

Sometimes we grow up not because we know how to, but because we know we need to … first for someone else, and then for ourselves.

This process seems out of order. We should value ourselves enough to do the hard thing, the needed thing. But we don’t. Maybe it’s because we’re comfortable in our normal, even if normal is hindering us.

Our fear isn’t harming anyone else, right? No one even knows how we walk hand-in-hand with fear because we cope so well, surrounding ourselves with grownup rituals and mantras. Sometimes we disguise them as prayers.

But fear limits us. Fear tells us we can’t. Fear tells us we shouldn’t. Because of my fear of the dark, I dealt with an undercurrent of anxiety every day of my life for years. The sun started to set and my fear ratcheted up.

Faking being brave only accomplishes so much.

Fear is the belief that someone or someone is dangerous – usually because of something that happened to us. This is my very unprofessional, non-medical definition of fear.

Darkness is just that – dark. There is nothing bad or evil about the darkness. God made both day and night – and he called both good. Do bad things happen at night? Yes. But bad things happen in the light of day, too.

Am I still afraid of the dark?

No, no, I’m not.

Walking in the light of freedom started with not wanting my children to be afraid. Then I realized I wanted to not be afraid – just for me.

I had to do the hard work of getting to the “why” of my fears. I had to walk back into the darkness of my abuse and drag it into the light. Allow reality to be as ugly as it was, while realizing God is bigger than what happened to me. Allow him to heal me. To gather up all the broken pieces and make me whole.

Choosing not to be Afraid of the Dark https://bit.ly/3dM5mKP #courage #choices
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'The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It's our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows.' Quote by @BreneBrown https://bit.ly/3dM5mKP #darkness #light
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