I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn't embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days — those very days in which I was naming myself — I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.

I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild.

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. How shall I say what wood that was! I never saw so drear, so rank, so arduous a wilderness! Its very memory gives a shape to fear. Death could scarce be more bitter than that place! But since it came to good, I will recount all that I found revealed there by God’s grace. How I came to it I cannot rightly say, so drugged and loose with sleep had I become when I first wandered there from the True Way. But at the far end of that valley of evil whose maze had sapped my very heart with fear! I found myself before a little hill (15) and lifted up my eyes. Its shoulders glowed already with the sweet rays of that planet whose virtue leads men straight on every road, and the shining strengthened me against the fright whose agony had wracked the lake of my heart through all the terrors of that piteous night.

i kept running away
from my darkness
until i understood
that in it i would
find my freedom

I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.

For no reason I can think of, I've wandered far astray. And that is how I got to where I find myself today.

Lying there in the darkness, he knew he was an outcast. “ ’Cos I had some sense.

Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off from the straight path.

How hard it is to tell what it was like,
this wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn
(the thought of it brings back all my old fears),

a bitter place! Death could scarce be bitterer.
But if I would show the good that came of it
I must talk about things other than the good.” — Dante Alighieri

I found myself within a forest dark,

My thoughts were full of other things When I wandered off the path.

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently.

Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was.

I had heard that madmen have unnatural strength. And as I knew I was a madman, at times anyhow, I resolved to use my power.