I Didn’t Find the Dark… It Found Me

I used to think my interest in the paranormal was a choice.

A curiosity.

A fascination.

Something I leaned into.

But the more I go back… the more I realize that’s not true.

I didn’t walk toward the dark.

I was raised inside it.

When I start pulling at the thread of my life, it doesn’t unravel into neat memories. It comes apart in pain points. Deaths. Fear. Losses stacked so close together they don’t feel like separate events they feel like one long pressure wave that never really stopped.

People think trauma is one moment.

For me, it was an environment.

Growing up meant learning early that stability was temporary. That people could disappear. That love could sit right next to chaos. That safety wasn’t guaranteed not in a house, not in relationships, not even inside your own mind.

And when you grow up like that… your brain changes.

You don’t just see the world.

You scan it.

You feel shifts other people ignore.

You notice silences.

You track energy.

You sense when something is wrong before anyone says a word.

That’s not paranormal.

That’s survival.

But survival and the paranormal sit closer together than most people realize.

Death didn’t enter my life once.

It kept showing up.

Family. People I loved. People ripped away too early, too suddenly, too violently. Loss stopped being an event and started becoming a pattern. Grief wasn’t something I visited — it was somewhere I lived.

And every time it happened, something inside me changed.

Not just emotionally.

Energetically.

I started recognizing a feeling around death. A heaviness. A presence. A silence that didn’t feel empty — it felt occupied. Like something lingered after people were gone.

Most people push that feeling away.

I couldn’t.

Because it felt familiar.

There were moments I broke.

Moments I didn’t think I’d make it through.

Moments where the pain was loud enough to drown everything else out.

Moments where the darkness wasn’t external it was inside me, pressing in, convincing me there was no point in continuing.

And I survived those too.

Not cleanly.

Not gracefully.

But I did.

And surviving something like that does something permanent to you. It strips away the illusion that life is predictable. It teaches you how thin the line is between being here… and not.

Once you see that line, you can’t unsee it.

And once you feel it, you start noticing it everywhere.

In places.

In people.

In rooms that feel wrong.

In houses where the air feels heavy for no reason.

In the dark.

Looking back now, I don’t think I became interested in hauntings because I wanted to chase ghosts.

I think I was trying to understand a world that had already shown me how fragile life is… and how something always seems to remain after it’s gone.

Grief leaves echoes.

Trauma leaves imprints.

Pain stains places.

And the paranormal lives in those spaces.

Not in the theatrics.

Not in the jump scares.

In the residue.

The leftover energy of what people went through.

That’s what I recognize.

Because I carry my own.

Every investigation I’ve ever done… every place I’ve stepped into… every moment I’ve felt that familiar heaviness…

It doesn’t feel foreign.

It feels like recognition.

Like my life tuned me to a frequency most people never have to hear.

A frequency made of loss, survival, fear, resilience, and questions that never got answers.

Why did they die?

Why did I stay?

What happens to people when they’re gone?

Where does all that pain go?

Those questions don’t leave you.

They shape you.

They pull you.

People think the paranormal is about chasing what’s out there.

But for me… it’s always been about understanding what’s already happened.

Every death.

Every trauma.

Every moment I felt alone.

Every time life turned dark without warning.

It built something in me.

Not fascination.

Awareness.

And that awareness keeps leading me back to the same places the quiet houses, the heavy rooms, the spaces where something feels unfinished.

Because I know what unfinished feels like.

I’ve lived inside it.

If I’m honest… I don’t think I ever had a normal relationship with the dark.

I didn’t fear it the way other people did.

I recognized it.

Like it recognized me back.

And maybe that’s why I keep going toward it now.

Not because I’m brave.

Not because I’m reckless.

Because somewhere along the way, my life taught me how to stand in it… and keep breathing.

And now I need to understand it.

Not the ghosts.

Not the stories.

The force that sits underneath all of it.

The thing that shows up when pain, death, and memory collide.

The thing I’ve been brushing against my entire life without having a name for it.

This path didn’t start with an investigation.

It started with survival.

And the more I look back… the more I see it clearly:

The trauma didn’t break me.

It tuned me.

It opened something in me that notices what lingers.

What hides.

What stays behind.

And whether I wanted it or not…

That’s what led me here.

I didn’t find the paranormal.

It was already waiting for me inside the life I survived.