There is a story we love to tell.
The fall.
The suffering.
The rock bottom.
The triumphant rise.
From darkness to light.
From rags to riches.
From broken to healed.
It’s dramatic.
It’s satisfying.
It sells.
But it isn’t the whole truth.
And lately, I find myself irritated by the idea that the deeper you go into darkness, the more light you automatically earn.
No.
Darkness does not entitle you to light.
Suffering is not a currency.
Yes, darkness can be a teacher. A fierce one.
Yes, refusing to suppress grief, rage, jealousy, exhaustion — that is powerful.
Yes, pretending everything is “love and light” is spiritual bypassing in a pretty dress.
But here is where I draw the line:
Pain is not a prerequisite for joy.
Trauma is not a spiritual badge.
You do not have to descend into hell to deserve spring.
That narrative feels linear. Heroic. Ascending.
It feels shaped by a patriarchal imagination of time — progress as a straight line, success as upward motion, worth as something to conquer.
But the feminine does not rise in straight lines.
She spirals.
She bleeds.
She rests.
She returns.
And life — real life — follows her rhythm.
It is cyclical.
It unfolds.
It breathes.
It mirrors the rhythm of the Moon.
It mirrors the seasons.
It mirrors the story of Persephone — who descends, yes… but also returns. And descends again. And returns again.
Not once.
Not as a final victory.
But as a rhythm.
That is the part we forget.
We don’t go from darkness to light and stay there forever.
We expand our capacity for both.
The spiral widens.
Which means:
The more light you allow, the more shadow you are capable of holding.
The more shadow you integrate, the more light you can embody.
Not because you earned it.
But because your nervous system, your body, your psyche stretched.
This is not a heroic climb.
This is capacity work.
And here is my truth:
I know darkness.
Not in a poetic way.
Not in a dramatic Instagram-caption way.
I know the heaviness that sits in the chest.
The fear that narrows the future.
The exhaustion that whispers what’s the point.
I have been overtaken by it before.
And I have learned something essential:
Darkness moves.
When I stop fighting it.
When I stop dramatizing it.
When I stop building identity around it.
It passes through my human body.
Just like joy does.
Just like desire does.
Just like love does.
I do not anchor myself in darkness.
I do not reject it either.
I let it teach me.
And then I choose.
That’s the part that matters to me now.
Choice.
I do not wait to have suffered enough to allow myself happiness.
I do not wait to “heal completely” before I claim joy.
I do not negotiate with misery as if it holds the keys to my expansion.
Most days, I am preparing for more light.
Not the blinding, performative kind.
The simple kind.
The kind that says:
It gets to be easier.
It gets to be softer.
It gets to be joyful.
And yes — if darkness comes again, we will dance.
But I refuse to build my mythology around descent alone.
I am not a rags-to-riches story.
I am a spiral.
And if you are a woman — maybe one who has been told she is too much — perhaps you were never meant to measure your worth by upward motion alone.
Perhaps your power was never in rising above, but in expanding within.
Expanding your capacity to sit with unsuppressed emotions without worshipping them,
without romanticising trauma, mistaking it for depth, or using it as a reason not to grow,
to open to joy without earning it,
to move between shadow and light without turning either into your identity.
That is power.
That is maturity.
That is sovereignty.
And if that path calls you — the path of cyclical becoming, of conscious descent and chosen return — then perhaps it’s time we speak.
Not because you are broken.
Not because you need fixing.
But because you are ready to hold more.
More light.
More depth.
More of yourself.
So much for today.
Until next time,
Isaya