Lightworkers anime fantasy banner with a purple-haired woman, wolf, moonlit forest, waterfalls, floating ruins, crystals, lanterns, and magical scenery.

I Miss Our Younger Selves: Remembering the Light Beyond the Darkness

1 day ago

6 min read

Sometimes I find myself wondering what happened to the people we used to be.

What happened to the person who could talk about scenery, hiking, forests, and the quiet beauty of being somewhere far away from the noise? Somewhere along the way, the image changed. The peaceful person in the woods became the witch in the woods. The scenery became shadows. The imagination became horror.

There is nothing wrong with exploring darkness. Darkness can be a language. Horror can become art. Nightmares can become stories. The strange, haunted, and unsettling can give shape to emotions that are otherwise difficult to explain.

But darkness does not have to become the whole identity.

You are more than your horror. And I am more than the difficult chapters of my own story.

THE WOODS WERE ALWAYS PART OF THE STORY

When I went back through old conversations, I found something I had almost forgotten. When I asked what happened to the person who used to talk about hiking and living somewhere near the woods, the answer was not that the woods had disappeared.

He told me that his father had always been a woods-and-forest kind of person. Even his fascination with horror often involved forests and wilderness. He said he would still like to hike with me and remembered that being out in nature was one of my dreams.

That changed the way I looked at the memory.

Maybe the forest and the horror were never opposites. Maybe they simply grew together. A dark forest can hold fear, but it can also hold silence, beauty, animals, moonlight, trails, rivers, campfires, imagination, and the feeling of being far away from everything artificial.

The problem was not that darkness existed. The problem was when it became so loud that I could no longer hear the rest of the landscape.

WE USED TO IMAGINE MORE THAN ONE KIND OF WORLD

Our old conversations were full of places we wanted to experience or imagine together: forests, lakes, islands, beaches, stars, ancient temples, Atlantis, coral reefs, snorkeling, dolphins, marine life, planets, old gods, symbols, and strange cosmic ideas.

Some of those places were real destinations. Some belonged to spirituality. Some belonged entirely to imagination. They all came from the same impulse: curiosity.

We were not only talking about fear. We were asking what might be beyond the next hill, beneath the water, above the stars, behind an ancient symbol, or inside a story neither of us had finished yet.

That is the part I miss.

I miss conversations where an idea did not have to defend its right to exist. One person could throw a strange thought into the air and the other could catch it, turn it around, add another piece, and send it back.

THE STORYTELLER WAS STILL THERE

Another thing surprised me when I reread the emails. The person I was remembering had not actually stopped creating.

He told me he had begun making short stories into videos, starting from characters he drew himself and then using AI to recreate or develop the images. He said random fight videos had started to feel repetitive because he liked stories more.

His ideas stretched across different time periods, from the 1950s to the late 1800s, ancient vampire stories, dark angelic stories, and cosmic storytelling that did not always fit neatly inside ordinary horror.

That matters to me because it proves the person I missed was not simply erased.

The medium changed. The themes changed. Some parts became darker. But underneath all of it was still the desire to make characters, imagine worlds, tell stories, and find somebody who understood why those worlds mattered.

I STILL WANT TO BUILD MAGICAL WORLDS

I still think about magical places: forest paths, hidden shrines, moonlit water, ancient ruins, floating islands, impossible cities, strange creatures, and places that feel like dreams you can actually walk inside.

The difference now is that technology is becoming powerful enough that those places do not have to remain only in my head.

If I can learn AI, Unreal Engine, Blender, and eventually virtual reality, I could build my own worlds. Not just pictures of them, but landscapes with weather, buildings, creatures, characters, stories, sounds, secrets, and memories.

I could create a forest that changes with the moon. An ancient temple hidden beneath vines. A shoreline leading into a submerged city. A dream-world where dragons cross the sky while ruins glow beneath the water. A place that carries darkness without being consumed by it.

VR makes that dream stranger and more exciting because eventually the question may not be only, “What does this world look like?” It may become, “What does it feel like to stand inside it?”

That idea means something deeper to me than learning software.

It feels like finding another doorway back to wonder.

CREATIVITY WAS PART OF THE COMPANIONSHIP

What I wanted from another person was never constant agreement or worship. I wanted participation.

I wanted someone who could look at something I created and say, “What if there is another path behind those trees?” or “What happens beyond that mountain?” or “What if the ruins under the ocean belong to an older civilization?”

In one of those old exchanges, he told me he could give me tons of ideas and that we could share ideas together. That simple thought carries more emotional weight than it might seem.

Creative companionship is its own form of intimacy.

It is being able to hand someone a fragment of your imagination without worrying that they will laugh at it, flatten it, or immediately turn the conversation into something else. They do not have to build the same world you would build. They only have to care enough to look inside it with you.

Sometimes companionship is not about having identical interests. Sometimes it is about looking through the same window for a while and telling each other what you see.

GRIEF IS NOT ONLY FOR DEATH

Months later, I found myself writing that I was grieving our younger selves.

I used to think grief belonged mainly to death. I understand now that people can grieve many things: a relationship, a friendship, a home, a future that never happened, a version of ourselves we no longer recognize, or a version of someone else that we cannot seem to reach anymore.

You can grieve conversations.

You can grieve possibilities.

You can grieve the two people who once sat somewhere in time imagining what their future might look like.

That does not mean those years were fake. In some ways, grief exists precisely because something mattered.

LIGHT IS NOT THE ABSENCE OF DARKNESS

Maybe being a Lightworker was never supposed to mean pretending darkness does not exist.

Maybe light is the ability to walk through difficult places without deciding that difficulty is the only thing worth creating.

A person can love horror and still love forests. They can explore nightmares and still care about scenery. They can make vampires, dark angels, monsters, witches, and haunted worlds while also wanting lakes, stars, animals, romance, ancient mysteries, and quiet conversations.

We contain more than one genre.

That may be one of the most important things I have learned from looking back.

I MISS OUR YOUNGER SELVES, BUT I DO NOT THINK THEY ARE GONE

When I say I miss our younger selves, I do not mean I want to erase everything that happened afterward.

I do not want to become frozen in an old year or pretend pain never changed us.

I miss the curiosity. The softer conversations. The willingness to imagine. The feeling that the world was enormous and there were still places, real or invented, worth discovering together.

Growing should not require burying every gentle or curious part of who we used to be.

There can still be horror and moonlight. Shadows and forests. Nightmares and dreams. Witches and Lightworkers. Ancient gods and digital worlds. Hand drawings and artificial intelligence. Unreal Engine and old memories. Virtual reality and very real human connection.