The Dark Night of the Soul
9:29 pm Monday night.
I find myself in what I can only describe as the dark night of the soul.
Sometimes these moments arrive like tidal waves crashing violently against the shore of my mind. They come suddenly, overwhelming everything in their path. Other times they arrive quietly, subtly, almost unnoticed at first. They slip in through the cracks of an ordinary day and settle in the background until suddenly you realize they are there, pressing heavily on your chest.
Tonight feels like one of those quieter arrivals.
But quiet does not mean gentle.
Quiet can still carry weight.
As I sit here thinking back on the last twenty-four hours, I realize something strange. Somewhere in the back of my mind I almost expected this moment to arrive. It felt like there was a shadow circling the edges of the day, waiting patiently for the right moment to step forward.
And tonight it did.
Sometimes I think about these moments as if death itself is a visitor that knows how to knock softly. Not loudly. Not violently. Just enough to make its presence known.
He does not always come screaming.
Sometimes he arrives as a whisper.
A quiet thought.
A subtle feeling.
A heaviness that presses down on the mind and the heart until breathing feels like work.
The thoughts start small at first.
Almost harmless.
But they grow quickly.
What if the pain would stop if I wasn’t here?
What if the weight I carry would finally be lifted?
What if the shame, the guilt, the anger that sometimes feels welded to my bones would finally fall silent?
The mind can become a dangerous place when it begins entertaining those questions.
Because when pain lingers long enough, the imagination begins searching for exits.
Even if those exits are lies.
And deep down, somewhere beneath the noise, I know they are lies.
But knowing something is a lie does not always stop it from speaking.
That is the strange reality of the human mind.
Tonight those thoughts move through my head like shadows in a dimly lit room.
Not screaming.
Just present.
Persistent.
Heavy.
I think about the years that brought me here.
The surgeries.
Twenty-six times my body was cut open in operating rooms, placed under lights that feel cold even in memory. Recovery rooms, hospital beds, doctors explaining things in calm clinical voices while my body struggled to keep up with life.
Pain becomes familiar when you live with it long enough.
Not just physical pain.
The emotional kind too.
The kind that lingers quietly inside memories.
The kind that comes from relationships that never quite felt safe.
The kind that grows in environments where love sometimes came with conditions.
My father sits somewhere inside that story.
A man whose presence in my life often felt more transactional than nurturing. A narcissistic gravity that seemed to orbit around what he could gain, what he could control, what reflected well on him.
Children learn quickly when affection is conditional.
They learn to perform.
To adapt.
To try to earn the love that should have been freely given.
Those lessons leave marks that take years to understand.
Even longer to heal.
Add to that the toxic relationships that appeared later in life. The environments where loyalty was given but not returned. Places where I poured out energy, trust, and belief into people who were never capable of holding it responsibly.
At the time I believed those connections were real.
Now I see the fractures more clearly.
And sometimes that clarity hurts.
Tonight the memories move through my mind like fragments of an unfinished film.
Faces.
Moments.
Conversations that echo long after they ended.
Things I said.
Things I wish I had said.
Things I carried silently for years.
It is strange how the mind chooses its moments.
Why tonight?
Why now?
Why does the weight of the past sometimes gather itself all at once like a storm forming on the horizon?
There is a particular loneliness in these moments.
Not necessarily the loneliness of being physically alone.
But the loneliness of feeling like your inner world is heavy in ways that are difficult to explain to others.
From the outside life may look stable.
Work.
Relationships.
Plans for the future.
But inside there can still be rooms that feel dark.
Rooms where old pain sits quietly waiting for attention.
Tonight I feel like I am sitting in one of those rooms.
The thoughts about death are not dramatic tonight.
They are more like questions floating in the background.
Would things be quieter if I was gone?
Would the war inside my mind finally end?
Would the constant processing, the memories, the emotional weight finally dissolve into silence?
But even as those thoughts appear, another voice exists somewhere deeper.
A quieter voice.
A stubborn voice.
A voice that reminds me I have walked through darkness before and somehow found my way back to light.
Because this is not the first dark night of the soul I have experienced.
Life has given me plenty of reasons to understand despair.
Yet somehow I am still here.
Still breathing.
Still writing.
Still searching for meaning inside the chaos.
Maybe that is why I write tonight.
Not because I have neat answers.
Not because the weight has disappeared.
But because writing is one way of refusing to let the darkness speak alone.
If these thoughts are going to move through my mind tonight, then they are going to meet honesty on the page.
They are going to be exposed to the light of language rather than hiding silently in the corners of my head.
And maybe that is part of the process of surviving nights like this.
Naming the darkness.
Acknowledging it without surrendering to it.
Recognizing the lies even when they feel convincing.
The truth is that despair often tells a very simple story.
It tells us that pain is permanent.
It tells us that shame defines us.
It tells us that the future will only repeat the past.
But those stories are rarely accurate.
They are distortions born from exhaustion and accumulated wounds.
Tonight I am tired.
Tired of carrying certain memories.
Tired of wrestling with questions that have no easy answers.
Tired of the emotional echoes that sometimes rise unexpectedly from years I thought I had already processed.
But tired does not mean finished.
Even in the middle of this dark night of the soul, there is still a small thread of resistance inside me.
A refusal to disappear.
A refusal to allow the past to dictate the entire future.
I do not know exactly what tomorrow will feel like.
Right now tomorrow feels far away.
But I do know this much.
I am still here tonight.
Breathing.
Thinking.
Writing.
And sometimes survival looks exactly like that.
Not heroic.
Not dramatic.
Just the quiet decision to stay.
To sit with the darkness without letting it swallow the entire story.
Because even in the dark night of the soul, something inside the human spirit keeps searching for the morning.
About the Author
Dylan Verdun Sullivan is the founder of Refined by Fire Press and an Australian author indexed in the National Library. As a Level 7 Local Guide with over 1.2M views on Google Maps, he documents the intersection of faith, recovery, and the "light in the mundane."
- Read the Memoir: Kissed by Death on Amazon
- Explore the Journey: Follow Dylan on Google Maps
- Connect on Instagram: @porkysparadise
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