Lesson 4: Dark necessities are part of my design

Not long ago, we moved to a new house, and I found a notebook I hadn’t seen in years. I’m the kind of person who forgets what she ate in the morning or what she has to do in the evening, but when I held that notebook, I somehow remembered the moment we bought it.

I was around eight or nine when I started writing in it — poems, little stories, things I didn’t yet know how to say out loud. It was a hard-covered orange notebook with flowers on it, and the cat and panda stickers I used to decorate it were still there.

I opened it and read a few pages — not all of it. Because one poem stopped me. It was about the finiteness of life. It ended with a line that said, “Someday we will take our last walk in this world.” At that age, I hadn’t lost anyone close to me. It still surprises me that I was thinking about death and the limits of life so early.

I also remember the first time I read Amy Winehouse’s words: “Since I was sixteen, I’ve felt a black cloud hangs over me.” Back then I thought, How sad, how hard it must be to live like that. I didn’t realize I had my own small cloud too — just a quiet uneasiness that would one day grow into bigger storms. Not until I noticed that sometimes, that same cloud could move aside and let the sun through.

When I was taking my yoga teacher training, I had an intense schedule. Morning and evening practices were mandatory. For months, I stepped on the mat at the same hours every day.

One morning, at a time when I thought nothing was changing, I woke up feeling strangely light. I stayed in bed for a while, turned my face to the soft but glorious morning light coming through the window, and suddenly realized how peaceful I felt.

I wasn’t used to that feeling. I even tried to bring back my usual anxiety. I thought about things that normally stressed me out, but each time I said to myself, Okay, but right now, this won’t kill me.

For the first time, my body and my mind seemed to speak the same language. For the first time, I could breathe inside the cloud.

For many years, I hadn’t realized how my uneasiness, my pain, was trying to leave my body. Through my hair, my lips, my skin. I kept pulling, biting, scratching — as if there needed to be a hole for the weight to escape. A way to make the pain visible, even if I didn’t know that’s what I was doing.

I used to think pain disappeared when it became invisible. Now I know it doesn’t. It only hides, chewing its way inward — quiet but relentless.

The only way I knew to give shape to my pain was by hurting myself: pulling my hair, biting my lips, tearing my skin.

I’ve learned that control doesn’t come from silence, but from giving form. If pain wants a shape, I can shape it consciously. I can move the darkness from my chest to my fingertips and offer it a harmless place to live — anything but flesh.

I’ve learned to give shape to my dark necessities. Instead of suppressing them, I work with them. When they finally show themselves, when they take shape, they belong to me. Not as wounds, but as matter. Not as enemies, but as something I can hold and speak to.

Now, I give them shape by breathing, writing, drawing, building tiny structures out of Legos. The same hands, the same need — but this time, I am making something.

Because at the end of the day, I know that dark necessities are part of my design.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0oIoR9mLwc