Le seul moyen d’affronter un monde sans liberté est de devenir si absolument libre qu’on fasse de sa propre existence un acte de révolte.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

~ Albert Camus

Let’s start with a little story. We’re at the close of the previous century, in a nondescript high school in a Western European country. I’m in my last year, freshly 18, being a living cliche of a teenager. So is my friend, with whom I am busy doing stupid teenage shit in the hallway. Enter the proverbial authority figure, playing his part of old white guy. The predictable and insignificant conflict takes place. We are told to not do what we were doing, because reasonable reasons. I don’t remember exactly what was said that lead up to the symbolic sentence that came out of my mouth, but I’m sure some defiance of his misplaced display of superiority was involved. The specifics of the situation and interaction aren’t very relevant to the story, only the grand finale is, which went something like this :

• Old angry white fart : If you keep behaving like this, you’re going to have a lot of problems in life!
• Young awkward misfit : Yes, with people like you!

This interaction came to me when trying to come up with a good way to explain why I chose to name my blog Walking The Wrong Way. The choice itself was a fairly easy one. When setting up this thing, the hosting website needed a name, and I know from my experience with naming songs or finding band names, that the name in itself is trivial. It’s the substance with which you bring it to life that is important.

As a little side note – the first thing that came to mind was Walking The Wrong Path. But since I want, by all means, to stay away from any woowoospeak – and because alliterations are cool – I went with Way. Way is way better because it conveys direction, whereas path implies a destination. Destinations are usually very evil.

So why the wrong way? Shouldn’t I be using a more positive frame? Why not Walk The Right Way? Or The Loving Way? Or The Shooting Magical Rainbows from your Peehole Way? First of all, there are already more than enough voices in the positivity camp, many of which are clearly on the run from the world’s and their own darkness. And there is no second point. Life is the living, moving dance of light and dark. And underestimating – or even worse, being oblivious to – the power of darkness that this world is governed by is a surefire way to not live your life. And die clueless and miserable.

My core intention for writing on this blog is built around this simple principle : finding your own way in life will inevitably come to mean that you’ll have to walk the wrong way. Truly living involves battle. The perennial battle between light and dark.

Light and dark. Like every overused term these have been dismembered and stripped of their powerful core meaning. I will try my best to convey what these two words mean to me.

Light is the name of the entirety of the wild flow of life force energy. Life force energy is the mathematical difference between a living cat and a dead cat. You can call it Soul, you can call it God. You can call it whatever the fuck you like, but until you feel it in your own body, this word will have no true significance. The light is what makes everything and anything beautiful, and until the first time you have tasted that experience for yourself, you’re just living on hearsay. Love, beauty and happiness will be things to be acquired, longed for and chased after – or even worse, analyzed and understood – until you can feel their source inside yourself, its light and love saturating your entire physical apparatus.

This experience is simple.

This experience is natural.

This experience is your birthright.

And the reason why this experience feels so fickle, fleeting, or even foreign, brings us to darkness.

(I told you, alliterations are cool.)

Darkness is the turning away. Darkness is the original sin – not one we’re born with but certainly one we’re born into. It is all around us, its dark, pestilent stench pervading all of human history. It is the fear, and resulting refusal, to be human. Darkness is what demands you behave. Or else. It is the blind rules and regulations, spoken or unspoken, written or unwritten, that are the fabric of human civilization. They keep shit tight. Or else.

Another little side note is necessary here – the battle between light and dark is in no way the battle between good and evil. Neither light nor dark are good nor evil. Good and evil sell books/movies/video games. They are out-dated and immature ideas. They have no place in this conversation.

Life is the living, moving dance of light and dark. You were not born pure light. Even your bodily conception took place inside this dance. You inherited darkness, even before you were born. That being said, human babies rarely come into this world with burnouts or depression. The human body is designed with the built-in potential to become a powerful force of light and love. But also with the potential for deep and foul darkness.

A human body is born into this world, in which the cloud of darkness is quick to seep inside all and every soft, cuddly, innocent baby. The obvious means of contamination is through parents/caregivers/teachers/screens/blablabla. How is less important here. What matters is the inevitability of it all. Darkness will come to live inside you because it can. By the time you’re not even a decade old, you’ll have been extremely well trained in denying and repressing your human nature, the life that wants to express itself through you. And by the time you’re a quarter of a century through this game (if you even make it that far) you will most likely have forgotten what it feels like to have pure life, love and joy run wild and free all through your system. Unless addiction, but that is a different conversation.

We’ve almost gone full circle. My hope is that it starts to become clear that the expression of your human nature – ranging from singing nonsense in the supermarket to become skilled at bringing your very individual form of beauty into this world in a tangible way – and honoring these deep urges will be met with resistance. When you’re sitting in your shopping cart and feel like singing nonsense at the top of your lungs, mommy’s gonna shush you. Transposing this to later life – if you want to bring your own intimate vision and desire into the physical realm and create something just for the sake of wanting to do so, other people will shush you. Call you crazy. Distrust you. Use emotional manipulation on you. Whatever it takes to keep you from – you guessed it – going The Wrong Way. (So clever. I know.)

But this is not the end point. This is the never ending starting point. Walking the wrong way doesn’t mean going against the outside world and its expectations and requirements of you. The reason why people will call you crazy, distrust you and will use emotional manipulation on you, is because it works. And the reason it works is because you believe this to be reality. Walking the wrong way is a very intimate and personal – even selfish – experience.

The illusion here is that you are the one who’s keeping you in line, who’s making you behave, who’s keeping you in darkness. You don’t need mommy/daddy/whatever anymore to keep yourself small, you can do it all on your own now. Or more accurately – it happens all on its own now. And going against this automatic programming has a very distinct and intimate feeling taste and texture to it. To put it very simply : it feels wrong. And scary.

Walking the wrong way is an invitation to follow this wrong and scary feeling, using it as the compass needle which will point you back home. The way to the light is through the dark, which in practical terms means becoming very familiar with the specific feeling of going towards, inside and through your own rigidity and resistance – using this feeling as a road sign, trusting that it is showing you the way back home.

If you’re reading this, the chances are high that you have forgotten who you are – the feeling of being you – and have become the ugly, disfigured amalgamation of everyone who has ever taught you how to not be you. Finding the way back home requires courage. To feel the fear of going places in yourself, that a lifetime of societal pressure has taught you are wrong, and then going there anyway, is probably the most courageous thing a human being can do.

No one will do it for you. You have to face this alone.

My only hope is that you hear the call back home a little clearer now.