Dark Night

Year Four

I want to start with a writing I recently found that touched me.

The Dark Soul of the Night

In a dark night,

With anxious love inflamed,

O, happy lot!

Forth unobserved I went,

My house being now at rest.

-

In darkness and in safety,

By the secret ladder, disguised,

O, happy lot!

In darkness and concealment,

My house being now at rest.

-

In that happy night,

In secret, seen of none,

Seeing nought myself,

Without other light or guide

Save that which in my heart was burning.

-

That light guided me

More surely than the noonday sun

To the place where He was waiting for me,

Whom I knew well,

And where none appeared.

-

O, guiding night;

O, night more lovely than the dawn;

O, night that hast united

The lover with His beloved,

And changed her into her love.

-

On my flowery bosom,

Kept whole for Him alone,

There He reposed and slept;

And I cherished Him, and the waving

Of the cedars fanned Him.

-

As His hair floated in the breeze

That from the turret blew,

He struck me on the neck

With His gentle hand,

And all sensation left me.

-

I continued in oblivion lost,

My head was resting on my love;

Lost to all things and myself,

And, amid the lilies forgotten,

Threw all my cares away.

St John of the Cross. He was a 16th-century Spanish mystic and poet.

This is my fourth year of being sick.

Fourth year of my life narrowing instead of expanding.

Fourth year of learning how quiet it gets when the world moves on without you.

People like to imagine illness as a valley you pass through. You get sick, you struggle, you emerge wiser on the other side. That story sells hope. It also lies.

The truth is messier.

Being chronically ill — especially when you’re alone — is isolating in a way that’s hard to explain unless you’ve lived it. It’s not just the pain or the exhaustion. It’s the way your world shrinks. The way your phone stops lighting up. The way people disappear slowly, politely, because they don’t know how to stay when there’s nothing to fix.

If you’ve been wondering how to help me right now, this is it. My GoFundMe supports basic stability while I recover — housing, food, and medical continuity — so my body doesn’t have to absorb crisis on top of illness. Even reading and sharing matters more than you might think:

***GoFundMe:

Some leave because they’re scared.

Some because they’re impatient.

Some because your life no longer reflects back the version of themselves they want to see.

You don’t get a goodbye for most of it. Just absence.

There have been long stretches where my entire universe was one room. Where leaving felt dangerous. Where even opening mail could send my body into a spiral. Where I had to learn how to live without certainty, without independence, without the outside world I used to move through so easily.

And here’s the part people don’t say out loud:

being sick long enough changes you.

It strips away the identity you had.

It humbles you in ways that aren’t romantic.

It forces you to confront how disposable people become once they’re no longer productive.

There were nights — many — where this felt like the dark night of the soul in the truest sense. Not sadness exactly. Something deeper. A quiet, grinding loneliness. The sense that the old life was gone and the new one hadn’t arrived.

And now, just as something begins to shift — just as help finally starts to show up, just as the tide in my own life begins to turn — the country itself feels like it’s breaking.

Institutions cracking.

Rights under threat.

Fear everywhere, loud and constant.

It’s a strange thing to finally feel personal movement while the world feels like it’s unraveling.

But here’s what I know, and why I’m writing this now:

I am not doing this alone anymore.

Help is coming — not in some cinematic way, not with fireworks or certainty — but quietly. Slowly. System by system. Person by person. After years of carrying everything myself.

And that matters.

I don’t know what the next chapter looks like yet. I’m not pretending everything is okay. I’m still afraid. Still limited. Still grieving what I lost.

But for the first time in a long time, I can feel something shifting underneath the fear.

The cavalry doesn’t always arrive on horseback.

Sometimes it arrives as support.

As people who stay.

As the long-delayed recognition that you were never meant to survive this alone.

This isn’t the end of the story.

It’s the part where the night starts to thin — even if dawn is still far off.

And for now, that’s enough