as small as a world and as large as alone

4:55pm November 27, 2014

I Am Not Afraid Of The Dark

I used to think I was afraid of the dark.  But now I know I’m not.  I’m afraid of a combination of being in the dark, and what you might call negative or malevolent energy, for lack of a better term. Or malevolence in general, to make it even broader.  It is reasonable to be afraid of the dark when around soemone or something malevolent.  They could be using it to hide things from you, unless you have really good skills at getting around in the dark.  (I have better than average dark skills, but still terrified of dark+malevolence.)

I grew up in a malevolent house.  I don’t mean a house where the people were malevolent.  I mean the whole house was saturated with malevolence.  We got the house cheap because nobody else wanted to buy it.  It was in bad shape structurally, but there was also the near-impossible-to-erase pot smoke smell in the main bedroom, and the fact that all the doors to the kids’ rooms had the locks on the wrong side of the door: They were regularly locking their kids in their rooms.  And there were the responses of the neighbors:  "We’re so glad you moved in.  The last people here were awful.“

I believe that this kind of awfulness leaves an imprint on a place that can lead to a cycle of awfulness.  I don’t know if the last family was the cause of the awfulness or simply the latest people to get sucked into enacting it.  At one point I tried to do some homework but got nowhere, and when my thoughts started turning to horror movie plots I realized it was time to back off.  Anyway, my family eventually got sucked into the awfulness too, and the awfulness has only grown.  I can’t even look at Google Maps pictures of the house anymore without getting blasted with it.  And real setate listings keep showing people buying the house for shorter and shorter amounts of time before leaving again.  I don’t think even my parents’ massive redecorating job before they sold the house for good, could paint over the fact that there was something seriously wrong with the place.  (And whether anyone perceived the wrongness as directly as I did, everyone reacted to it equally.)

Malevolence likes to make you think you’re afraid when you’re not.  It can do this with any emotion, but in the dark, it likes fear.  So it’s almost as if it throws a ball of fake fear at you.  And it latches onto any part of you it sees as vulnerable, starts poking and prodding and trying to jam its way into any holes (it’s doomed to ultimate failure, because malevolence can’t see good and everyone has a spark of goodness deep in their soul, but that doesn’t mean it can’t muck about with your surface levels, including thinking and eomtions, quite competently).  And one way it does this is it says "This is you.  This is your emotion you’re having.  This is you being afraid.”  And you open the doors and let it in because what else are you going to do for something you believe is a part of your own self?  Convincing you that they are you, that their tricks are you, is the easiest way in.  (And it’s one that psychiatrists encourage.  Psychiatrists are generally bad at dealing with negative energy because they prescribe drugs that lower your defenses against it, and  then try to convince you that it’s actually a split-off part of you.  Which, even if the energy originates from you somehow, the last thing you want to do is take it back into yourself.  What you need are ways to fight it off, keep it from getting near you, and neutralize it, as well as recover from any long-term cognitive effects of having your head screwed with long-term.)

So anyway.  I grew up in the most malevolent house I’ve ever seen.  Not the most malevolent building – psych wards and other institutions like prisons and nursing homes are the worst.  There, it’s like being pelted with nastiness so much you can barely stand up.  But my house was pretty malevolent.  So by comparison, anything else is pretty good.

Which is why I didn’t notice that the last three places I’ve lived haven’t been too great themselves.  And the last place I lived, where I really started feeling like I was afraid of the dark, now that I’m out of there I realize that not just my apartment but the entire building had a bad feel to it.  Like it didn’t even want people living in it.  My apartment certainly didn’t want me, in particular, living in it. 

So in the dark in that apartment, I always felt a sense of hostility and fear, and so I thought I was afraid of the dark.  Then I moved to my new apartment.

My new apartment is pleasant and friendly, and wants to be lived in, and seems to particularly like me.  Like our personalities are a good fit together.  And that’s how I realized I wasn’t afraid of the dark.  I was turning off as many lights as possible at night to save on electricity bills, which are not subsidized here anymore.  So I was standing in the dark and realized I had no urge to run or turn a light on. In fact, in here with the light off I don’t just feel unafraid, I feel protected and safe. Like the darkness wraps around me and helps me somehow.  I have no explanation but it makes me happy.

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