The darkest hour…

… is the one before sunrise. But how do you know if it is the darkest hour yet?

If my life has taught me one thing it is that you never know if it is fully dark yet. You can only live your life forward, but you will only understand it looking back. And you will only know that you lived through your darkest hour, when the sun finally comes back.

I used to be awfully scared of the darkest hour. Both literally - as a child I was terrified of the dark - and figuratively. But the older I get the more I see that there is not one dark phase in your life, one rock bottom, one problem to overcome and then you’ll be fine. Life has ups and downs no matter how old you are. As a child I really thought that life would be so awesome and without problems when I am finally grown up and can decide things for myself and now my child thinks the same - won’t it be so cool if you can decide that you can have icecream for dinner instead of veggies?!

But what I only am able to see now is, that the darkest hour can actually hold an interesting beauty. If life strips you of all excuses, of all people who don’t fit into your life and of outer circumstances that do not match who you are - but maybe were more your fantasy self, your “I am too influenced by social media”-self or what your parents had in mind for you - it creates space to make life your own.

And this is what is happening to me right now. I turned 40 this year and that had felt quite significant in itself. Am I now in midlife? How much time do I have? Am I happy with what I created so far? Am I living true to myself? And then losing outer things and people that I had been clinging to terrified me. Losing my autistic stepdad brutally cracked me open and I did not know how to handle that.

But I arrived at an answer for myself. I do not know what the future holds for me. I do not know what the future holds for my child. I have been dreaming all my life. Sometimes working on my dreams - only to find out that some of them were never really “mine” - othertimes just dreaming, while living a life I hated.

And it is time now to combine trying to survive financially as a single mum, with creating something I have been dreaming of for years. It is time for a new dream. And this one is truly mine…