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The Prisoner Holding the Keys
Loving the Dark: Why Women Defend the Cages That Hold Them
When you grow up inside a house where the windows have soot caked over them or are painted over with dark paint, you don’t spend your childhood wondering what the sky looks like.
You learn to navigate in that dim, shadowy light. Your feet learn without even thinking which corner of the house is safe and where stepping down will make the floorboard creak. And then, if you are taught well enough from the time you are little, you gradually start to believe that light itself is a dangerous thing.
You learn to cherish the dark, because you start feeling that the dark is the only thing keeping you safe from making mistakes and from the judgment of the world.
“A woman just has to learn to bend.”
When a 70-year-old grandmother talks about her son’s wedding with a proud, fond smile, saying, “Back in our day, this is how things were…”
What’s really hidden behind those words are the silent chains an entire generation quietly accepted. Living inside this framework, how we made peace with the dark, and what it cost us over a lifetime to buy into those “safe” little cages, it’s something I’ve been turning…
