2018: Be the light. 💡 #LetThereBeLight

— Iyana Moore (@WatMooreCanISay) January 30, 2018

I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions but at the beginning of the year, this mantra dawned on me. And then it continued to manifest itself in different ways, so I started a thread on Twitter to keep up with everything.

But then I spent the next several months feeling anything but light, and it seemed that ‘let there be light’ was maybe more of a begging prayer than a truth. And that prayer began to sit on my whole body like a heavy weight. It made it hard for me to breathe. It made it hard for me to sleep, despite being exhausted. It made it hard for me to remember to eat. To work. To hang out with friends. To want to live.

How could I be the light when I felt so…dark?

So, I spent the first half of the year curled up in bed, not wanting to talk to anyone. Not wanting my dark to touch anyone, drown anyone the way it was drowning me. If you remember in the previous post, I mentioned ‘having out of the ordinary experiences with the feeling of being alone’; and so that’s where it began. I pushed people away. I cut people off. I replied to texts when I could, if at all. I cried…a lot. I wanted the feeling of being alone that I felt on the inside to match the outside because I thought that would help me make sense of what I was feeling. Something I had felt before.

Darkness is the absence of light. The same way black isn’t actually a color, it’s just it’s absence. It isn’t actually a thing on its own. It’s the result of the complete absorption of any visible light. All consuming. (Consider the light at the end of the tunnel never reaches the inside of the tunnel. No matter how bright the light or how short the tunnel.) So, how do you outrun something that doesn’t even exist without the thing you’re chasing?

I haven’t been able to fully figure that out yet. It’s been years of the same cycle but still being caught off guard by the spiral every time. But I still saw manifestations of this mantra everywhere, kept adding to the thread when I could. It feel like they were making an effort to be seen by me. And for a while, this little catalog of tweets was all I could handle.

So, I went slow and tried to show myself a kindness I didn’t feel I deserved: I gave myself a damn break. I worked on what I could, when I could, and told myself if I was still here tomorrow, I could do more tomorrow. And tomorrow’s continued to come and I continued to chase after the light, and myself, and this future that I wanted but couldn’t see.

And so, for now, I’m still going. I’m still adding to the thread. I’m creating again: working, writing, designing, running a business. Posting myself on Instagram. Loving hard on my people, hoping they love hard back on me. Being lit.