or “coming back” can mean any number of things. It might mean getting back in the driver’s seat after experiencing a car accident. Or, interviewing for another job after being rejected by the last ten companies with whom you’ve interviewed. Or, falling in love again after you have been betrayed. To me, resilience is about not letting an adversity define you or your dreams.
Blooming in the Dark Is More than Being Resilient
Blooming in the dark includes the idea of resilience, but it’s about even more than that. When you bloom in the dark, you don’t just bounce back from a trauma or adapt to adversity—you become more as a result of that trauma or adversity. Let me use an example of a coil spring to help explain what I mean. When a spring gets pushed down, and then the pressure is released, what does it do? Your first answer might be, “It springs back into the shape it was before.” That picture or answer would be the essence of resilience. Coming back to one’s original state.
But there’s more to the picture than that. When you push down on a spring that is, for instance, resting on a table, you have to use a degree of force. It takes some energy to collapse those rings onto one another, and that energy has to go somewhere. When you release your finger, the energy inside the spring is released, and with a boing! the spring expands upward. If you watch carefully, you’ll see that the spring stretches out farther and becomes longer than it had been originally, before it was collapsed upon itself. Already the spring is becoming more as a result of having been under pressure.
The “moreness” doesn’t stop there. When you release the pressure of your finger from the spring, it doesn’t just bounce back to its original state. The spring actually lifts off the table it was resting on and is propelled upward and forward. The larger the spring and the greater the pressure put on it, the farther it will go. The spring will become more, permanently more, as a result of having been under pressure.
When we choose to bloom in the dark, we are allowing the pressure exerted upon our lives to infuse us with the energy we need to propel forward in our lives. We don’t become more despite the pressure; we become more as a result of the pressure. A spring can’t “spring” unless it collapses and momentarily doesn’t look like a spring at all. As Night Bloomers, we can’t “spring” forward into a more incredible version of ourselves without something collapsing in our lives either. Like the spring, when that trial or trauma comes, for a while we might not resemble the people we used to be. It looks and often feels like we’re smaller, weaker, and less than our previous selves.
But despite how it looks and feels, that’s not the truth of the situation. The truth is that while we’re in that down position, looking and feeling like less than we were, we are absorbing the energy we need to become even more glorious than we were before that trial came. We’re absorbing the nutrients to grow.
Do you see it? The weight of that pain has not been placed on you to destroy you. No, that weighty pain is there to give you what you need to grow and bloom.
People Who Bloom in the Dark Become More than They Were
Let’s return to the examples we used earlier to help define resilience: the driver driving again, the job seeker seeking again, the lover loving again. Now let’s take it a step further and see what it would look like if these people bloomed in the dark, allowing their adversity to propel them forward in life. The woman didn’t just drive her car again after the accident, she also became a more patient driver and a more patient person in general. Her character permanently changed, and this change significantly improved her relationship with her husband, children, and friends.
The man didn’t just continue to interview for jobs after experiencing a series of rejections. He took the time to do some difficult soul-searching with the help of a therapist and realized that deep down he didn’t believe he was worth hiring. He expected rejection, not just from potential employers, but from everyone in life. He worked through this negative self-belief and not only did he interview well and get the job, but he also started enjoying life in a brand new way. His whole outlook was more positive and engaging.
The woman who had been betrayed didn’t just fall in love again; this time she loved with her whole being. She fully engaged in her next relationship and experienced a level of intimacy that she didn’t even know existed. This second relationship was far more fulfilling than her first one. Through her experience of loss, she learned how to really love a man and how to receive his love.
In these examples, the individuals weren’t just resilient, meaning they didn’t just refuse to let an adversity define them or their dreams. These individuals bloomed in the dark. They allowed the force that collapsed something in their lives to be the very energy that caused them to become a better version of themselves.
You Must Get Your Hopes Up
How many times have you been told (or even said it yourself), “Don’t get your hopes up!” We’ve been conditioned to think that it will hurt more if we get our hopes up and then they don’t come true. We rationalize that if we set our sights lower, we won’t be as disappointed. In the medical field, I’ve heard my colleagues say things like, “I didn’t want to give my patient false hope, so I made sure they knew the chances were slim for … [a cure, a positive response to a new treatment, a speedy recovery, and so on].”
My heart always sinks when I hear things like this. Hope is a powerful force and critical ingredient for healing and transformation. We must get our hopes up if we want to bloom in the dark. In fact, it’s so important that we’ll return to the idea of feeding our hope in a few chapters.
For now, try thinking about getting your hopes up as setting an intention or an expectation for a future outcome. Why is this important? Because, in general, we get what we expect. I don’t mean this in the way of the Law of Attraction (although I do think there’s something to this idea energetically that we don’t fully understand). In the world of psychology, this principle is called the self-fulfilling prophecy. When we expect something, we act in ways that line up with our expectation. These actions help to bring about the thing we expect. For example, if we expect to have a fun evening with friends, we likely arrive in good spirits and eagerly engage in the conversation. Our positive attitude and engagement is felt by our friends and is reciprocated. We feel encouraged and pleased that we are being responded to well and this inspires more positive feelings and actions. Eventually, by the end of the night, we have created a fun evening for ourselves.
Conversely, if we expect to be miserable, we will likely arrive with a poor attitude and either withdraw from the conversation or contribute in negative and critical ways. This will not be received well by the people we are with, who will send subtle or not-so-subtle messages of their disappointment or disapproval. These messages will further confirm our expectation that this was going to be a miserable evening, and we will end the night having experienced exactly what we expected to experience.
Our Beliefs Are Powerful
The placebo effect is another example of the power of hope or expectations. A placebo is an inert substance that doesn’t have any healing properties in and of itself. However, people can experience benefits from an inactive substance, such as a sugar pill, just by expecting that it will help. When this happens, it’s called the placebo effect. Researchers at Harvard Medical School found that, remarkably, our bodies can adjust our experience of pain relief from a medication just by altering the information we’re given and (presumably*) the expectations we have as a result of this information28.
Throughout the study, each patient received true, false, or uncertain information about the pill they were taking to help reduce their
