Naked In the Dark

Naked in the Dark

Where the Body Hurts and the Soul Speaks

Early on in my illness, it was always the same stretch of time that undid me.

Somewhere between midnight and sunrise, when the house was quiet and the world was dark, I would lie awake with my pain and my fears and the questions I could not outrun.

There was no one to call.
No lifelines.
No gentle voice to talk me down.

Just me and the body I no longer trusted.
Me and the ache that would not ease.
Me and the dark that asked too many questions.

What if I never get better.
What if I get worse.
What if this becomes all I am.
What if I disappear into it.
What if my identity shrinks down to nothing but a diagnosis.

Would anyone recognize me beneath it.
What is to become of me.

In the daytime, I could pretend.

I could answer texts with simple emojis and careful calm.
I could make soup, fold towels, smile just enough to pass.

But at three twenty-two in the morning, all of that slipped away.

The brave face.
The reasonable voice.
The part of me that said, you can handle this.

Sometimes I could not.

And that is the part no one talks about.

Not every night — but enough nights — I felt like the only person in the world awake and afraid.

On the worst nights, fear came quietly.
Not panic.
Not hysteria.

A slow, steady sense that I was slipping into something I could not climb out of.

That this might be my life now.
That I might be alone with it.

I would lie there and wonder:

What if this is the best I will ever feel again.
What if no one really understands what this costs me, night after night.
What if I lose everything I used to be and never find a way back.

The future used to feel wide and open.
Even when it was uncertain, there was hope built into it.

Chronic illness rewrites that.
It does not ask permission.
It shrinks the horizon.

Eventually you are lying awake in the dark, staring into a future you cannot imagine, because nothing looks the way it used to.

Still the clock ticks.
Still the questions circle.

How do I plan a life I do not recognize.
What does strength even look like now.
Am I still strong if I am afraid.

I did not need encouragement.
I was searching for certainty — for something solid to stand on.

But none came.

What I needed was validation.
What I wanted was clarity.

Is this as good as it gets.

I asked it in the dark again and again.
And the answer never came.

Sometimes the scariest part is not the pain itself.

It is realizing no one can tell you how long it will last.
No one can promise it will get better.

You are left to live inside that not-knowing.

So I kept breathing.
Not because I was brave.
Not because I chose to.

Breath was all that remained.
And it was mine.

The avalanche started quietly.

A shift deep in my chest.
A tremor in my gut.
A question I should not have asked.
A truth I was not ready to face.

Suddenly the little ground I had crumbled beneath me.

This is what people never understand:

It is not only the pain that undoes you.
It is the collapse.

The mental freefall that begins when you finally admit that this might not get better.
That this might be your life.

It is not drama.
It is not self-pity.

It is a reckoning.
A scream without sound.
A gut punch without witness.

No one is coming to check on you at three forty-five in the morning.

And if they did, what would you say.

I think I have just realized I cannot outrun this.
I think I am starting to believe this is forever.
I do not know how to want a life like this.

I lay still, crushed by the weight of everything I could no longer carry.

Listening to the echo of my own mind cracking open.

But after the avalanche — after the panic — after the world collapses and I have fallen through every floor I thought would hold me — something else arrives.

Not peace.
Not yet.

Something quieter.

Surrender.

Not the soft kind people romanticize.
Not graceful acceptance or gentle letting go.

This surrender is sharp.
It feels like failure.
It feels like laying down in the wreckage because I have no strength left to crawl.

It is not a choice.
It is what remains when there are no choices left.

I do not know what tomorrow looks like.
I do not know how to want it.

But I know this:

I cannot keep fighting my life and living it at the same time.

So maybe surrender is what is left.
Not because I am weak.
But because resistance has become its own kind of illness.

Maybe there is a different kind of strength in that.

Not the strength to rise.
Not the strength to overcome.

The strength to stay.
To keep breathing inside the wreckage.

To whisper:

I am still here.

And for today, that is enough

This story lives in Compass Point 1 — What Happened?