How To Find Lightness In The Dark

The first two weeks of September pass and you’re ready to darken your wardrobe. You want to wear all black ensembles, but it’s 85 degrees outside and you start sweating when you get in your car. You want to wear socks to bed and purchase supplies for your Halloween costume. You crave the cold.

You start watching Glee for the first time on Netflix and you slip into a Google spiral of Cory Monteith and the origin of Lea Michelle’s enchanting princess voice. It makes you want to sing. You play that “Electric Love” song by Børns on repeat in your car and belt loudly to the chorus. You are not currently in electric love with anyone, but it feels pretty good to sing about it. 

You read an article implying that even though Caitlyn Jenner is very brave, she might still be a little homophobic, which is hard for you to understand. There’s all this pop culture flying at you and now JK Rowling is saying we’ve been pronouncing Voldemort’s name wrong this whole time. You think, I don’t have time for this. 

But you do.

You watch some stand up comedy and it occurs to you that Louis CK would make a really scary clown. You also think he’s one of the funniest out there, but that he doesn’t seem very happy. His show on FX has a pretty melancholy tone and a lot of his jokes are rooted around his divorce and the annoyance of his daughters. You realize that oftentimes comedy comes from a dark place. 

You know that mixing humor and sadness might be a little taboo, with the phrase “too soon!” being thrown around to shun jokes. But sometimes you feel like humor and sadness actually go pretty well together. Sometimes you feel like a little bit of funny can make pain and misery a little bit more bearable.

So you joke about the cold, you joke about an earlier sunset and the claustrophobic feeling of running out of daylight. You laugh about being broke, about missing someone, about making the same mistakes twice. You cope with warm food, and happy songs, and curling up with a sit-com. 

You feel some happiness and some sadness too. You laugh and you cry and you cope. And you think that all of this actually goes pretty well together. After all, Dumbledore says that “happiness can be found in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light."