The Way In

I’ve carried this idea for years without acting on it. That’s its own kind of jungle — the things you mean to do, quietly growing over.

So this is a beginning, not a finished thing. It seemed worth saying that first.

The jungle

Everyone has one. A dense, overgrown interior holding the things you’d rather not look at directly: old fear, grief you’ve never quite named, the version of yourself you suspect might be the real one.

The instinct is to stay out. Keep to the clearing, keep busy, keep the edges trimmed. Most of us build entire lives around not going in.

But it doesn’t shrink while you avoid it. It just grows closer to the house.

Going in

I don’t think you clear a jungle. You don’t conquer it or cut it back into a lawn. What you can do is learn it — walk the same paths enough times that the dark stops being featureless, and find out that a good deal of what lives in there was never dangerous. Only unfamiliar.

That’s slower than what most of this genre promises. It’s also the only version I’ve watched actually hold.

If you’re in it right now

If you found this during a bad stretch — the kind where the way out isn’t visible from where you’re standing — I want to put this carefully, because you have almost certainly been handed enough cheap comfort already.

I can’t tell you it lifts on a schedule. I can tell you that the dark in there is not infinite, and it is not the truth about you. It’s the part you haven’t walked yet. That distinction is small and it matters enormously.

Stay long enough to find out.

What this becomes

I don’t entirely know yet. It should change as I do — more paths in, more ways through, things I haven’t thought of.

For now it’s one person writing honestly about going inward, on the chance that it’s useful to someone doing the same.

If that’s you: welcome. Take your time. There’s no pace you’re behind on.