I’m having one of those nights where – against all logic – I find myself feeling small. Not a good small, like “Aren’t you adorable? I want to put you in my pocket” but that insignificant, unimportant sort of small. The kind that makes you feel like you’re just dust that could spin out into space, or that the night is so dark that you’ll never be found or remembered. The kind that makes every personal failing magnified to the point it’s physically painful. I don’t know where these nights come from but I suspect they come to us all…making us doubt that we exist, that we matter, that we will ever get our shit together.
Maybe some people don’t have nights like these. Maybe I just say to myself that it’s normal because if it’s not then that niggling sense of failure and fear that floods over me is based on reality. I know it’s not. Logically, I know it, but logic doesn’t work well on nights like this. I go through my mind and count the facts and try to discount the fear and panic. I fail. I am small. But I also succeed sometimes too. I am important. I am insignificant. I am a speck of dust. I am necessary. They’re all true.
But on nights like these I push back in the dark and tell myself that tomorrow the sun will shine and this night will be past. I will have beaten the darkness that seeps into my heart when things shift and rifts appear. I will have beaten it simply by existing long enough to find the sun again.
I am small. But if that’s true then so, too, are my fears and doubts. They seem so large, but they live in me so they can’t be bigger than I am. I will win. By sheer volume. And I’ll keep repeating that to myself until I finally believe it, or until the morning comes. Whichever comes first.