The darkness can be a good thing, you know?

It is only in knowing the darkness, experiencing the darkness, that we are more able to appreciate the light.

When we experience grief and sorrow, joy becomes all the sweeter.

It’s a hard thing, though, to not fight the darkness in some of its forms: grief, sadness, those tough parts of yourself that you don’t want to deal with but choose to anyway because that is the only way healing will come.

Walking through grief, letting yourself experience all of the things that go with it, is key to the healing process.

Even sitting with your depression for a little while can be quite helpful.

And feeling the sadness…

We like to focus on the good things, the positive feelings.  Minimize the negative stuff.  Don’t talk about it.  Don’t think about it.  Don’t go there.  It’ll make it go away.

But it doesn’t.  It makes it worse.

It’s just like those leftovers that got shoved to the back of the fridge.  Other stuff got in the way, those new groceries and newer leftovers.  Out of sight, out of mind, and you forget about it.

Until the day that you pull out the jar of pickles that’s in the back of the fridge on the bottom shelf.

There’s that bowl.  It’s been a couple of weeks, so it’s going to be moldy.

You don’t want to mess with it right now, don’t have time, really.  You’ll take care of it this weekend.

But you don’t get to cleaning out the fridge for another three months.  By that time, you don’t even want to crack open the lid.  Good thing it’s in one of those cheap, disposable containers.

In the trash it goes.

But you can’t throw the bad feelings away.  You can push them down, shove them back.  But they will eventually come out one way or another.

How exactly do you want them to come out?

I’m not saying that you just let the storm of emotions carry you wherever it may.  That’s also unhealthy.

Take the time to figure out what emotions you are feeling and why–especially the sad ones.  Those ones seem harder to identify and deal with.  We don’t like hard, sad stuff.

You’ve just moved to a new area and you just realized that you’re feeling sad.  But there’s no reason why, really.  After all, this is a good move.  You’re going to be getting a pay raise.  You’ll be living in a house now instead of an apartment.  And there’s a park across the street with miles of walking trails.

You’re probably feeling grief.  After all, you had to say good-bye to the girls you do yoga with every Wednesday.  You are going to miss the dude that sits in the cubicle next to you.  He knows how to tell the best stories.  You neighbor, Miss Martha, cried when you hugged her good-bye.  She loved to chat with you on long summer evenings.

And you know what?  It’s okay to feel grief.  So let yourself feel it.  Acknowledge it.  Embrace it as part of the process of being human and experiencing change.

Maybe you’re depressed because it’s winter.  That is okay.  Do what you can to alleviate the worst of the symptoms.  Find things that bring you joy.  Take care of yourself.

But don’t be afraid to acknowledge that you are depressed.

As they say, admission is the first step to recovery.

This feeling of emotions, especially the negative ones, can help you learn more about yourself.  Are you just tired for a long month of overtime?  Are you a parent with a newborn?  That could explain it right there.  Sleep deprivation is a beast!

If a new mother doesn’t take the time to analyze her feelings, she won’t know if she’s just sleep deprived, experiencing SAD (seasonal affective disorder), or if she’s dealing with postpartum depression.  Each of the above require a different type of “treatment”: sleep, Vitamin D, light therapy, or something more serious.

Taking the time to figure out why you’re feeling what you’re feeling is a step on the way to being an emotionally healthy person.

Learning about yourself–why you do what you do, your bad habits, your secret motivations, those thoughts that tend to plague you, the anxiety spirals, the tendency to manipulate to get what you want–helps you grow.

You can’t just water and fertilize a garden and hope that only the vegetables grow.  You have to weed and prune, too.

It’s the same with your inner self.

Why do you tend to manipulate people to get your way?  Where did that come from?

Why do you get anxious?  Where did that come from?

Why do you get depressed all the time?  When did that start?

Ask yourself the hard questions.  Do the hard work to grow.  You probably won’t like the answers.  But things will click.  That’s why you do that!

Usually, it helps to have some other people along with you to help you or keep you company.  You might want to find a really good counselor.  Maybe you remembered some abuse or trauma when you were in elementary school.  So find someone who specializes in childhood trauma.

Maybe you have lots of anxiety and you find that meeting with a group of others who have anxiety is very helpful.  Or maybe it just makes you more anxious.

But you won’t know until you sit with the feelings and do the work to get to know yourself.

One day, though, after doing the work, you’ll wake up and realize that you are a very different person than you were a few days ago.  But not in a bad way.

You’re more you than you’ve ever been.

Because you chose to sit with the darkness.

You chose to get to know yourself.

Getting to know yourself is how the light gets in.

And the light makes you grow.

Grow.

Grow and be a more beautiful you than you can even imagine.