Photo by Aida L on Unsplash

How To Find Your Light Or Die

What do you do when you’re ripped from your world and dropped into a time warp, where only darkness prevails?

Where you have to find your light or die…

Perhaps that was the question I asked myself when I began journalling after three weeks in immigration detention. Eight and a half months later, armed with twenty journals, I was released.

My detention ordeal plopped me into a dark world, an alternate reality where I was plucked from a modern world and thrown into an old world, a desperate world, a world filled with stories of fear. Sometimes stories of victory. Sometimes stories of lack of humanity or the lack of the value of human life.

It changed the way I view the world. It changed the way I think about things. In this, I eventually viewed it as I viewed myself. I realized that sometimes things aren’t as they seem, sometimes it’s about mirrors and smoke and underneath it all, there is an ugliness only I could transform. It’s about survival, it’s about faith and my belief in the goodness of humanity. An opportunity to change it all for the greatest good of all for me. This is a story of using what you have to get what you want within the confines of detention.

One day while lying on my stomach on my bunk, imagining I was lying on the beach, kicking my feet in the air. I was journalling in…