Sometimes It Is In The Darkness That We Find The Light

My first MS episode began Christmas night close to twelve years ago. It started as just a terrible headache that I attributed to the hectic Christmas season entertaining family, staying up late to prepare Christmas for our small children. and just plain and simple running myself a bit ragged.  However,  the following morning, I woke to an unusual sensation in my eyes. To move my eyes was excruciating.  My husband assured me it was an optical migraine, which he had suffered from before.   As the day passed by my vision began to fade and I knew that something was not at all right with this situation.  A trip to urgent care resulted in being told to take sinus medicine, which didn’t make sense to me at all.  I was not a doctor but I knew that I wasn’t congested,  I was loosing my vision!  By the end of that day, I had lost all vision in one eye and the other was fading fast.  The rest of the story is a long and tedious one but in the end I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, a potentially debilitating disease of the central nervous system. My immune system was attacking the myelin sheath protecting my optic nerves. Over the next six months my vision slowly returned.  I was left with color blindness and the loss of peripheral vision in one eye but despite some remaining blurriness, I was fortunate to regain my vision. There is much that I will be sharing in the future about what I have learned living with this chronic health condition and the ways that it has been an enormous blessing in my life, despite some of the challenges along the way.  For today, I wish to share with you the gift that temporarily loosing my eyesight gave to me. I hope to share with you about how I believe the darkness can teach us what we need to know.

Whether it is a literal darkness we are in or we are going through a dark time in our lives, we can ask the darkness to teach us what we need to know.  It can guide us if we allow it to and it can be a great teacher. 

As frightened as I was, I knew that I needed to allow the darkness to teach me whatever it was I was meant to learn from this experience.  I knew that this was not happening to harm me but rather to guide me. During the dark times in our lives, we can choose to hide in fear and to keep ourselves so busy that we don’t have to feel anything. We also have another option and that is to walk straight into the pain, challenge, or fear.  We can go inward and if we can just sit still with things, profound changes can occur. 

For me, during this time in my life, when my vision left me for those six months, I chose to give up being in control.  I was frightened and I had a lot of bumps along the way but I allowed the darkness and the fear to be my teachers.  I learned to say “no” out of necessity and to give myself permission to no longer live my life trying to be some version, that I had created in my own mind, of what it was to be the perfect mom, wife, daughter, and friend. I could quite simply do the best that I could do and honor that. I could love myself despite my flaws and in fact, at times, because of them.

I have learned things in the dark that I never would have learned in the light, things that have changed my life in the most profound and remarkable ways.  The extent to which I learn to live in the darkness, I also learn to experience the light with all of its magical brilliance. So I can determine that I need darkness as much as I need light.