What 2020 Taught Me About Darkness and Light

The urban forest across the street from my house has been a lifeline during Covid. Every time I go for a run through there, I seem to leave with not only a surge of endorphins, but a new perspective or message.  

On my last run of 2020, my lesson came in the form of the long, skinny shadows of poplar trees zig-zagging across the snowy path. For every sliver of dark, a ray of sunlight snuggled next to it. They criss-crossed each other for as far as I could see, separate but conjoined.

As I ran further down the snowy trail, I started seeing the emotions and events of 2020 in the sunshine knitted together with the shadows—the joy and the tragedy, the beauty and the loss, the wonder and the disillusionment.

This past year was anything but neutral. At the start of the year, I experienced the most exciting unplanned event of my life: witnessing my nephew’s emergency at-home birth. I was able to hold him in his first waking moments in January—but when the pandemic hit in March, I couldn’t even be in the same room as him. Talk about emotional whiplash.

2020 was a rollercoaster for all of us, revealing the best and worst of humanity—our light and our dark—all tangled together. 

People shifted the way they showed their love by sacrificing time together to stop the spread of the virus. While many of us stayed safely at home to protect our families and communities, frontline workers worked relentlessly in the face of danger, facing enormous stress and pressure in order to care for patients, bag our groceries, and teach our children. 

Light still found a way to stream through the pandemic. We saw the most heartwarming acts of kindness: the eight-year-old girl from Ottawa baking cupcakes to raise funds for her local emergency coronavirus response, the Winnipeggers delivering care packages and hot meals to frontline workers in care homes and hospitals, the Brooklyn landlord who cancelled rent for hundreds of tenants to help out those who were stressed or out of work.

Yet we’ve also seen plenty of darkness. Emergency calls on domestic violence helplines rose during lockdowns. Nearly two million people around the world have died from the virus. Meanwhile, droves of people have protested wearing masks in the name of freedom and human rights. There have even been acts of aggression, assault, and abuse against retail and food services workers by people refusing to adhere to COVID-19 restrictions. 

We’ve all been impacted by the pandemic, but it cast an even darker shadow for some. The economic toll hit women hard, driving them into unemployment and poverty. BIPOC communities have also been disproportionately impacted, and are reporting increased rates of racial tension and violence since the start of the pandemic.

To be sure, there were bright spots in the encouraging surge in support for the antiracism movement this year. Millions of people showing up at rallies demanding justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. In Portland, a Wall of Moms formed as a human shield to protect people of colour during demonstrations against police brutality. Books by Ibram X. Kendi and Ijeoma Oluo flew off store shelves and #BlackLivesMatter flooded social media.

But even peaceful protests against racial violence and police brutality were met with violence and police brutality. Well-intentioned acts of advocacy still fell short in failing to put people of colour at the centre, pointing out the disservice and harm of performative allyship. All of this drew our attention to how far we still have to go in dismantling systemic racism. 

For every stream of light, there is a shadow. 
For every moment of progress, a setback.
For every joy, a loss.

Holding space for it all

Duality is hard to grasp. Binaries are far more digestible, so we often compartmentalize the good and the bad to try to make sense of the world, to help us feel less overwhelmed and more in control. 

My own human tendency in trying to manage opposing forces is to focus only the good and ignore the bad (which is far more comfortable because it bypasses difficult emotions). Or, I dwell on only the bad and forget about all the good (which can almost feel noble, as if I’m doing the world a great service by absorbing its burdens).

Yet if there’s anything that 2020 taught me, it was the possibility of a third option: to hold space for it all. To sit with the ways that light is woven together with the darkness. And in order to reckon with the darkness of the world, I need to reckon with the darkness inside of me. 

Just as the world is filled with contradicting events and experiences and emotions, so am I. So are we. We are all vessels of kindness and intolerance, humility and ego, beauty and brokenness. And our thoughts, feelings, wellbeing, and relationships are all reflections of the labyrinth of light and darkness inside us.

Holding space for it all might sound easy enough, but many of us weren’t taught how to cope with our darkness. Even those of us who were taught are still figuring out how exactly to do that in a culture that prefers what’s polished and pleasing over what’s uncomfortable and raw. 

In my own journey, I internalized the message that I should only bring forward my “positive” emotions—my light—to my consciousness, work, and relationships. I thought my job was to present the best version of myself to others and to feel shame for anything that felt short of that projection.

Trying to make space for only the good feels like the more comfortable option—until it’s not. The more of myself I stifled, the more miserable I became—to the point of burnout and depression.

Why does burying what’s painful make things even more painful? As Brené Brown writes in The Gifts of Imperfection, “we cannot selectively numb emotions.” If we try to detach from our shadows, we also detach from our light. There is pain in the darkness, but there is also pain in running from our darkness.  

Pain doesn’t go away by ignoring  it. 
Loneliness doesn’t go away by neglecting it.
Shame doesn’t go away by masking it.
Trauma doesn’t heal by numbing it.

This year, I started trying out a new practice: turning toward my shadows, instead of away from them. When I sit non-judgmentally in the muck with my darkness, I discover what needs to be healed, what needs to be shifted, what needs to be excavated, what needs to be loved. 

Doing this work isn’t an act of self-punishment, it’s an act of love. I reconcile and heal my relationship with my shadow not by berating myself for having it, but by getting to know it, wrapping my arms around it, and showing myself the same compassion and patience I would for a hurting friend. 

We are our shadows and our light.
We are complete and we are works-in-progress. 
We are broken and we are whole.

We know darkness because we know the light 

As I finished my final run of 2020, I’d noticed something else about the layers of light and shadow on the trail. Their contrast made each other more distinct—the darker the one, the brighter the other. They amplified each other in their co-existence. 

By sitting with my darkness, I’ve started to see how much it enhances the light. The two are inextricably connected. The sadness I’ve felt during the lockdowns is because I have marvellous people in my life who I deeply love and miss. The doubt and disillusionment I’ve felt in my activism is because of my capacity to care, my value of justice, my belief in the goodness and potential of people—that we can do better than this.

In other words, I know despair because I know hope. They are on the same continuum of human emotion, if only on opposing sides of it. 

I know what depression feels like because I know joy. 
I know loneliness because I know connection. 
I know peace because I know anxiety.
I know fear because I know courage.
I know grief because I know love.

It’s all braided together, like sunshine streaming through a forest and weaving itself into the shadows. 

Transforming the darkness

As we start a new year, we know we will be bringing shadows with us. Covid will still be with us. Racism will still be with us. There will be conflict, tension, and injustice layered alongside beauty and harmony and joy. This work of reconciling the good with the bad, the sacred with the profane, is never done.

Reconciling our darkness requires proximity to it. For scientists to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, they first have to get close enough to the virus and understand how it works. Staying at home may help to reduce the spread of the virus, but it doesn’t eradicate it. We need to understand the thing that is making us sick. 

Intolerance doesn’t go away by masking it.
Racism doesn’t go away just by hashtagging it. 
Collective trauma doesn’t go away by numbing from it.
Gender inequality doesn’t go away by avoiding it.
Poverty doesn’t go away by ignoring it.

As we begin 2021, we don’t have to fear our shadows any more.
We will get to know them better this year.
And we will transform them.