I have discovered three terrifying truths in the darkest nights of my soul.

Terrifying, because in our weakest, most vulnerable moments, these truths offer us the purest, most unbelievable bargain: power in exchange for surrender.

FIRST is the haunting recognition that nobody is coming to save you.

Nobody.

Others care, but their care is limited.

The very design of pain is to evoke rest and healing from the same body; when disease arrives, your own immune system must respond to eliminate imbalance and restore health. So when darkness comes strong upon you, wells up within you, it is you who must respond. This darkness came to you, and it requires you to act to dispel it.

It is you who must choose. It is you who must decide to allow love to drown out shame. It is you who must take a deep breath and surrender this temporary security of a convenient, self-serving lie – the lie that invited this darkness – to walk instead in freedom.

Nobody is coming to save you.

SECOND is the grievous reality that you can, in fact, save yourself… that you are capable of addressing the limiting lies and damaging denials that have created space for this darkness to rise.

In fact, there is no other single soul alive who is better suited or qualified than you to save yourself. You know yourself. Your history. Your secrets. Your pain. Your hopes. Your dreams. Your joys.

No one else can give you full credit for your pure motives, your spent effort, the fears you have already faced, and the doubts you have chosen to ignore; however useful or useless these inner realities may seem to others, they stand as worthy accomplishments, whose significance no one will ever see as clearly as you.

These private inner victories are the very rungs of the ladder you will use to climb from dark and cold places to the full warmth, light, and energy of your own soul’s sun. To serve as strong and firm rungs, you must recognize these inner victories, and give them the full credit they are due – they should not be weakened by the futility of self-doubt, or dismissed in the despair of anger turned inwards in response to pain. It is your experience and skill with self-love – the strength that self-love provides you in practice – that forms the parallel planks of this ladder.

Self-love consolidates your private inner victories to win the war on shame.

Others, however loving, will always fall short of honoring your private victories. You must allow yourself to experience your own love, to receive your own grace, to respect your own work. You must allow your own love for yourself to exceed the depth of your shame.

We lose confidence that we can save ourselves when we fail to understand the mechanics of darkness: how it works, whether we really deserve it, how to fix it, benefit from it, or excuse ourselves from it.

But darkness is rooted in a lie, so trying to figure it out is like trying to do math when all the operators are inconsistent and unpredictable: no matter how hard we try, things will never add up.

Because of this, the act of saving yourself must be both rational and irrational.

The decision to act is rational: refuse to tolerate darkness any longer, and begin to notice its seed in your soul.

The transformation itself is irrational: let go of the dark lies and emotions, without explanation, as a regular practice.

Feelings work beyond reason, thus reason cannot wholly deal with feelings, especially dark feelings rooted in lies, half-truths, and miscalculations of your true worth. Darkness rejected brings light; light accepted brings more light. So, make a practice of dismissing darkness and welcoming light.

To save yourself is to make a rational decision to search your soul for unproductive feelings, then simply release them, courageously and without argument. To surrender the darkness, the lie, without any effort to explain or justify it, is to exercise your sovereign power.

Your mind cannot change what your heart holds true. But your heart can release what your mind cannot comprehend.

You can save yourself.

THIRD, the demanding morality of survival insists that you must save yourself, and soon.

No truth is no more self-evident than your divine right to fight for your own survival. As a drowning person demands air, darkness in your soul demands a response from your spirit: fight! breathe! act! do not die here! not today!

But when darkness appears, it takes the shape of a vital organ, flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone. Then, the darkness lies to you: “See? I am part of you. You cannot live without me. We are inseparable.”

Instinctively, we know that darkness is worthy of death, so if we accept it’s claim on our identity, darker, unjust questions arise… “Is this the end? Am I worth saving? Am I even capable of love and light and joy?” We confuse the whiff of death that belongs to the darkness with doubts about our own worthiness.

But you are not the darkness; it has lied.

To save yourself is to step up onto the throne of your own heart again, and command the separation of darkness from light, not through the strength of your soul, but by your spirit’s divine moral right to survive.

The lie deserves to die, and you deserve to live in love.

This imperative to save yourself, and soon, is not only for you.

A single life form cannot create an environment that sustains life. Each of us, in saving ourselves, creates an environment, a community in which we can live in wholeness and health, in which darkness is the exception, not the rule.

If each of us is mired in darkness, none of us can contribute to that corporate life. If none of us acts on care or concern for others in our community, then no one in our community will care or concern for others. The responsibility to keep a life-sustaining environment lies with all the living there.

Just as you have a divine imperative to fight inner darkness, you have every right to insist on safety around you, or find safe places where you can thrive. And there, the greatest service you will ever do for those around you is to choose light over darkness, self-love over self-pity, generous grace over self-deception. You must save yourself so that those you love and care for can save themselves as well – in saving yourself, you make salvation accessible to others.

You must save yourself… and soon; this is your most courageous work.