Darkness is more honest than any light.

Sometimes the most painful moment isn't when someone leaves you. It's the moment you realize how long you've abandoned yourself, just so others could stay. Year after year, you've laid pieces of yourself down like offerings on a stranger's altar—your truth, your silence, your own unique voice—and the altar never gave anything back. It only took.

We spend half our lives trying to be understood. We fulfill expectations like rituals whose meaning has long since evaporated. We cling to people who have stopped truly seeing us—and call this clinging love, loyalty, duty. But it's a slow disappearance. Those who bend over backwards to be seen are seen in precisely the form they are not. That is the silent curse of conformity: it works. And its price is you.

Darkness as a threshold
Then comes the darkness. It always comes. The mystics called it the dark night of the soul, the alchemists called it Nigredo—the blackening in which everything inauthentic is consumed before anything genuine can emerge. Darkness is not an accident on your path. It is the path. It is the threshold where everything that never truly belonged to you falls away: the masks, the roles, the borrowed expectations. And when the final curtain falls, only one remains. You.

In ancient Egyptian spiritual teachings, the shadow was a distinct part of the soul—a companion that carries a person through this life. But even this most faithful of companions has one condition: it only exists as long as light falls upon you. When darkness descends, it is gone. No farewell, no betrayal, no drama. It simply ceases to exist. Therein lies its teaching.

Don't rely on others, because even your own shadow will abandon you in the darkness.

Perhaps that is precisely its purpose. Darkness takes nothing from you that ever belonged to you. It merely reveals what was borrowed. The shadow remains as long as light falls upon you—people remain as long as you give them something: attention, benefit, luster. This is not cynicism. This is the law. And whoever has recognized it once in the darkness ceases to take it personally. You must learn to know your own path even without light. Not because the world is bad, but because your path never lay in its light. It always lay within you. Fate does not lead you into darkness to break you. It leads you there because only there can you hear what your own voice is—when all others have fallen silent.

Ultimately, strength doesn't mean needing no one. That would just be another mask, colder than the others. Strength means no longer losing yourself just to avoid losing someone else. It means having a place within yourself that is non-negotiable. A place that no abandonment can reach because it has never depended on the presence of others. Those who have found this place can love without surrendering themselves. Can hold on without clinging. Can let go without breaking. The darkness will return; that is its very nature and its promise. But those who know their path even without light no longer fear it. Others leave when your light goes out—they always have and always will. Stay. Because you are the only thing the darkness cannot take from you.

(inspired by Rudolf Wagner)