"Waking": Part 2

So, now I come to the point where Matt has divulged the dangers of the silence.  I must admit I’ve never read anything that so acutely describes what I have always viewed as indescribable to those who have not experienced it.  However, perhaps it is still that way for anyone who has not experienced it, and the only reason I understand it is because I have.  Nevertheless, I appreciate his attempt to give words to something I have always avoided. 

Matt’s analogy of the dark room was particularly powerful for me.  The sentence, “and the world might reveal itself once again, only darker” was one I loved because, while choosing the word “darker” gives the analogy a pessimistic connotation, I do not believe that was the way Matt intended his readers to interpret it.  

When one’s world it turned on it’s head, and the future is one of the unknown, darkness is the perfect metaphor.  We all know the feeling of aimlessly grasping the dark, desperately looking for a way to find some source of light, so that we might be able to make our way again.  That’s exactly what Matt was trying to do with his life.  It would be naive to view his situation as anything other than a struggle.  He had to find a way to start over, and, at least at first, was not given the tools to do so.  But more so than any of these explanations, I believe Matt used this analogy to convey the importance of the fact that his life would never be the same.  No matter how he learned to deal with the darkness, the room would always be dark from the day of his accident onward, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.  Nor is it a good thing.  It is just they way things are for him.  His accident imprinted on him a new way of life, a new way of viewing the world, and there was no return to the light for him.  What I love is his decision to embrace the darkness rather than fight it. 

“If I wanted to work with the darkness rather than against it...what if the darkness (the silence) is a fundamental part of us, of our consciousness.  How do we overcome an essential aspect of what we are” (128).

Matt’s choice to work with the darkness forces me to think about two things.  First, we choose who we will be after trauma, and this choice is vital to our survival.  The question of identity is one that we as humans innately struggle with, but what happens when the identity we have spent so much time building is stripped from us?  We are left with deciding where will go from that moment on since, as much as we try to prove otherwise, there is no turning back to the person we were before.  Therefore, there are two options: denial of this fact (or a turn to silence) or an acceptance of the fact that this new future must merge with the remnants of our old self to create a new, whole individual. 

Second, for those that have not tapped into silence through trauma and therefore might not even be aware of its existence, how is it that we learn to positively tap into it.  But this is an answer for which I am still waiting.