Naked in the Dark

Where the Body Hurts and the Soul Speaks
By Mary Monoky

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’d lie awake with my pain — and my fears — and the questions I couldn’t outrun.

There was no one to call.
No lifelines.
No gentle voice to talk me down, no presence on the other end of the line.

Just me and the body I no longer trusted.
Me and the ache that wouldn’t 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’s to become of me?

In the daytime, I could pretend.
I could answer texts with emojis and “I’m hanging in there.”
I could make soup. I could fold towels. I could smile just enough to pass.

But at 3:22 a.m., all of that slipped off.
The brave face.
The reasonable voice.
The part of me that said, “You’ve got this.”

Because sometimes I didn’t.
And that’s what 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 — like smoke under a door.
Not panic. Not hysteria.
Just a slow, steady sense that I was slipping into something I couldn’t get out of.

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

The future used to feel wide. Open.
Even when it was uncertain, there was hope baked into it.

But chronic illness rewrites that.
It doesn’t ask for permission.
It shrinks the horizon.

Until eventually, you’re lying awake in the dark, staring into a future you can’t imagine — because nothing looks like it used to.

And still, the clock ticks.
Still, the questions keep coming.

What does strength even look like now?
Am I still strong if I’m afraid?

I wasn’t looking for encouragement.
I was looking for solid ground beneath all that quicksand.

But none came.

What I needed was validation.
What I craved was certainty.

Is this as good as it gets?

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

Because sometimes the scariest part isn’t the pain itself.
It’s realizing no one can tell you how long it will last.
No one can promise it will ever get better.
And you’re left to live inside that not-knowing.

So I kept breathing.

Not because I was brave.
Not because I chose to.

Everything else was gone.
Breath was all that remained — and it was mine.

The avalanche starts not with a bang, but with a shift — a crack deep in my chest, a tremor in my gut, a truth I wasn’t ready to face.

And suddenly the ground — the little ground I had — crumbles beneath my feet.

This is what people don’t understand:

It’s not just the pain that undoes you.
It’s the collapse.
The mental freefall that begins when you let yourself fully know — this might not get better.
This might be your life.

It’s not drama.
It’s not self-pity.
It’s a reckoning.
A scream without sound.
A gut punch without witness.

No one’s coming to check on you at 3:45 a.m.
And if they did, what would you say?

“I think I’ve just realized I can’t outrun this.”
“I think I’m starting to believe this is forever.”
“I don’t 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 crumbles and I’ve fallen through every floor I thought would hold me — there is something else.

Not peace. Not yet.
Something quieter.
Something I didn’t expect.

Surrender.

Not the kind people romanticize — the brave letting-go, the graceful acceptance.

This isn’t soft.
It isn’t beautiful.

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

It’s not a choice.
It’s what happens when there are no choices left.

I don’t know what tomorrow looks like.
I don’t know how to want it.

But I do know this:

I can’t keep fighting my life and living it at the same time.

So maybe surrender is what remains.
Not because I am weak, but because resistance has become a second illness.

And maybe — just maybe — there’s a different kind of strength in that.

Not the strength to rise or overcome.
But the strength to stay.
To keep breathing inside the wreckage.
To whisper, “I’m still here.”

And for today,
that is enough.