There was a time when I thought the goal of life was to seek light — to banish the dark, to bury pain, to rise above every shadow. I chased positivity like it was a finish line. But the older I got, the more I realised: my light doesn’t exist in spite of my darkness. It exists because of it.
Goethe once said, “Where there is much light, the shadow is deep.” The more I’ve grown, the more I understand this: our personal development isn’t linear, nor purely upward. Like trees, we grow and decay. Leaves fall so that new shoots can emerge. Roots deepen into the dark, moist soil before branches can reach for the sun. Without decay, there is no renewal.
Lately, I’ve found myself deep in that soil. An old wheelchair cushion has caused a pressure area — minor, but persistent. My income has vanished since the end of 2024 due to cancelled contracts. Disability support funding, once a given, is now stuck in limbo, with no clear answers in sight. It’s been months of uncertainty, silence, and slow healing — not just physical, but emotional and financial too.
And yet, in this mess — this ‘decay’ — I’m learning more than I ever did in the stable times. At a Proteus Initiative workshop in February 2014, I came to a realisation: there’s more diversity in decay than in growth. More ways to break, more shades of failure, more shapes of grief. Growth, by contrast, requires certainty — sunlight, water, stillness — and when it comes, it often looks predictable, uniform, even safe.
The shadows I once feared — grief, addiction, self-doubt, fear of failure — are the very spaces from which I’ve gained depth and compassion. They’ve grounded me, humbled me, and made my light less performative, more honest.
So now, I honour the full spectrum of my being. I welcome my darkness, not as a flaw to fix, but as fertile ground from which growth and radiance emerge. Light without shadow is flat and blinding. But when we embrace both, we become textured, whole, and profoundly human.
