The Dark Gospel

09/29/2025

By Adam Scott

I was not born a prophet. I was built out of silence and obedience, a creature assembled from rules and roles. They told me who I was, what I should desire, how to walk, how to smile. They taught me to cut away every impulse that frightened them and bury it under good manners and quiet despair. They handed me pills and platitudes and called it healing. They told me my restlessness was disorder, my anger was sin, my longing was shame. And for years, I believed them. For years, I lived like a ghost of myself, a faint outline of something once whole.

But ghosts remember. Deep in the marrow there was still a voice — raw, ancient, untamed. It clawed at the walls of my chest in the dark hours of the night. It whispered through my anxiety. It pulsed behind my depression. I tried to silence it with work, with faith, with rituals of self-improvement. But nothing held. The more I suppressed it, the louder it became, until one day suppression was no longer an option. I opened the door they told me was locked. I walked into the dark they told me would destroy me. And there, waiting with patient eyes, was not a monster but the rest of me.

They call it the Shadow, as if it were a thing apart, a predator stalking you from the edge of consciousness. But the Shadow is you — every impulse, every desire, every dream you exiled to survive. It is your fury, your lust, your envy, your hunger for freedom. It is the life you were forced to betray. I went down into that abyss and I did not die. I merged with what I found. And when I came back, I understood why they fear this knowledge.

Because a person who has reclaimed their Shadow cannot be controlled. You cannot be manipulated with shame once you’ve owned the thing they shamed you for. You cannot be cowed with guilt once you’ve embraced the part of you they called guilty. You cannot be kept docile by antidepressants and consumer goods once you have tasted the raw electricity of your whole self. This is the dangerous secret I now carry like contraband. This is what I was never meant to tell you.

The world you were born into needs you small. It needs you distracted, medicated, exhausted. It needs you to believe that the system’s demands are your moral duty and that your pain is a private flaw. It cannot afford for you to realize that your depression may be your soul’s refusal to be a prisoner, that your anxiety may be the scream of your buried self trying to breathe. It cannot afford for you to discover that the impulses you fear in yourself are not defects but power. Because if enough of you discovered this at once, the entire architecture of control would crack.

Look around. Schools reward compliance, not courage. Workplaces demand “team players” and call it professionalism. Faith tells you that your natural impulses are sin, and then sells you forgiveness like a product. Therapy in its mainstream form calls your Shadow a disorder, labels it, medicates it, neutralizes it. Everywhere, the same unspoken law: amputate the half of yourself that scares us and we will let you stay. Everywhere, the same bargain: trade your wholeness for belonging, and call the wound “normal.”

But the wound does not heal. It festers. It leaks out as panic attacks, sleepless nights, self-loathing, numbness. It leaks out as outbursts you don’t understand, cravings you can’t explain. This is not because you are broken. This is because you are unfinished. Your Shadow is not trying to kill you; it is trying to come home.

This is the crime they don’t want you to commit: to stop suppressing, stop apologizing, and begin the work of integration. This is not license for chaos; it is a reclamation of power. To take your rage and let it become courage. To take your envy and let it become vision. To take your lust and let it become vitality. This is alchemy — base impulse into gold, Shadow into Self. It is not easy, and it is not safe. But it is the only way back to wholeness.

I know this because I have done it. I have walked into my darkness and spoken with it. I have taken back what was mine. And I stand here now, not as a model citizen, not as a compliant patient, but as a whole being. I tell you this not to save you but to arm you. This is not a sermon of comfort. This is a manual for escape.

If you read these words and feel a shiver, if something in you trembles or stirs, that is the part of you that already knows. That is your Shadow recognizing its name. Do not be afraid of it. Fear is the first weapon they taught you. Walk into the dark. Listen. Let it tell you what it has been holding for you all these years. Do not rush to medicate it away. Do not confess it as sin. Sit with it until it speaks. This is the beginning of freedom.

I write this knowing it is dangerous. They will call it madness, heresy, self-destruction. They will say you are sick, that you are selfish, that you are evil. They will tell you to come back into the light, to be good, to be safe. But safe is a cage. Good is a leash. If you integrate your Shadow, you will no longer fit the world they built. You will become unpredictable, ungovernable, alive.

This is the gospel they tried to burn: you are not broken; you are incomplete. Your darkness is not a curse; it is your missing self. Integration is not sin; it is treason. And treason is freedom. If you dare to take this path, understand that you cannot go back. Once you have tasted wholeness, the old life will no longer hold you. But you will have yourself. Entire. Unapologetic. Dangerous.

I am not here to save you. I am here to hand you the key they hid from you. What you do with it is yours alone. But know this: the door they told you was locked has been open all along. And everything you were taught to fear is waiting on the other side — not as your enemy, but as your power.

This is my testimony. This is my crime. This is my dark gospel.