Let The Light In

^{Image: HBO}

"Well, once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light's winning."

👆 Rust Cohle, True Detective

Anxiety is the result of believing that the darkness can extinguish the light. 

I've done things I'm not proud of. So have you. The more pastors I watch "fall from grace," or celebrities get cancelled, or whatever, the less and less interest I have in success laced with darkness. That doesn't mean every secret is for the masses, but it does mean that were every one of them to come to light, at least there'd be no surprises. 

If the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it, then one of my working definitions of anxiety is the refusal to allow the light in. 

Anxiety is living in the avoidant refusal to let the light of what is true shine into the darkness that one has habituated oneself to believe can somehow suppress what it cannot.  

I’d like to better understand Jung’s shadow work. I’ve found a lot of freedom in pressing into what I have always avoided. “The only way to is through” resounds more and more the older I get, which is unfortunately, considering that the way through is absolutely terrifying and laced with horrors (mostly imaginative horrors, I’ll admit, but they’re certainly real enough to a false-prophet catastrophizer). 

Anyway, I really enjoyed Rust’s melodramatic philosophizing out the window of his detective beat before he moved on to Lincoln commercials.