Sometimes When You’re In A Dark Place You Think You’ve Been Buried, But You’ve Actually Been Planted.
There were long stretches of my life where I genuinely believed I was broken.
Not the dramatic kind of broken.
The quiet kind.
The kind where you still function, still show up, still smile — but something inside you feels heavy, numb, and tired in a way sleep can’t fix.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was living underground.
From a young age, I learned how to hold tension.
How to listen for danger.
How to stay alert.
How to survive.
By the time I was an adult, my body knew stress better than peace. My nervous system was always on. My mind was always searching for the next thing to fix, achieve, or outrun. On the outside I looked capable, disciplined, strong. On the inside, I was disconnected — from myself, from silence, from stillness.
And then life did what life does.
It stripped things away.
Relationships cracked.
Certainty collapsed.
The future I thought I was building suddenly felt wrong.
My body started whispering — pain, fatigue, heaviness — until it eventually started shouting.
I remember thinking: This is it. I’ve been buried alive.
Everyone else seemed to be moving forward while I was stuck in the dark, questioning everything. Who I was. What I was doing. Why I felt so empty even when life looked “successful.”
What I couldn’t see then — because darkness hides perspective — was that something in me was finally being forced to slow down.
To stop performing.
To stop running.
To stop living someone else’s version of a good life.
The darkness wasn’t punishment.
It was soil.
In that stillness, uncomfortable and unfamiliar, something began to shift. Not loudly. Not quickly. Quietly.
I started listening instead of pushing.
Feeling instead of numbing.
Asking different questions — not “What should I do next?” but “What is this pain trying to teach me?”
The answers didn’t come from books or plans or goals.
They came from the body.
From breath.
From the ocean.
From silence I’d been avoiding my whole life.
That’s when I realised something that changed everything:
I hadn’t been buried.
I had been planted.
Planted so my roots could grow deeper than my ego.
Planted so my strength could become grounded, not performative.
Planted so the life I was living could die — and something truer could take its place.
Seeds don’t grow in the light.
They grow in the dark, unseen, uncelebrated, misunderstood. And so do we.
If you’re in a dark place right now — feeling lost, behind, broken, or stuck — I want you to hear this clearly:
Nothing has gone wrong.
You are not failing.
You are not weak.
You are not late.
You are in the soil.
And if you stay present long enough…
If you stop fighting the darkness and start listening to it…
Something in you will begin to rise.
Not the old you.
Not the version that was surviving.
But the one that was always meant to grow.
What is the “dark soil” you’re currently in, and what might it be trying to help you grow or learn?
If this season of stillness could teach you one thing about your deeper truth, what might that be?
What is one small way you can start listening to your inner voice or body today — instead of pushing forward blindly?
