A LIGHT IN THE DARK

Author: Stephanie Dixon

“Is all that we see or seem, but a dream within a dream?” - Edgar Allan Poe

Growing up during the late 90s and early 2000s in rural Minnesota, just outside the reach of the Twin Cities, had a culture of its own. As a child, I grew up learning the same stigma that many others did about weed. Weed was bad for you. Weed was the devil’s lettuce. Weed was a gateway drug. Weed was nothing but bad news and would ruin everyone’s life.

I believed all of that for a lot longer than I’d care to admit. Even by the time I got to high school, I still believed it all.

My older brother would sit in the garage after he was done working and light up. I always hated it because I knew what he was doing, and I was completely against it at the time because of the false perceptions that had been engraved into my mind. Weed wasn’t the only thing I turned my nose up at, though. I was against all vices—alcohol, tobacco, drugs, sex. Sure, I was a good kid, and I am sure my parents were glad I didn’t end up with a record or pregnant before I graduated.

As graduation came and went, the summer before I left for college, something dawned on me. I had spent four of the absolute core years of my life being too good. I realized that it was never even a matter of being a good kid or a bad kid. It was only a matter of being judgmental and having a very closed mind about things I never even tried to understand.

That summer, before my best friend and I were going to ship off to college together, we found ourselves at her family’s cabin one weekend. We were with her brother, her dad, her step-mom, and her step-brother, enjoying one of the last weekends before our entire world would shift. Going into that trip, we were ready to lean into the unknown and experience things that we had never allowed ourselves to do up until that point.

It started with one simple decision. We were going to buy a pack of Wood-Tipped Swisher Sweets and go smoke one down by the dock after it was dark out. At the time, we felt so incredibly rebellious and as if we were doing something wrong. The truth was, we were already eighteen. We were about to go to college and get our first taste of real life outside the comfort of a small rural town where everyone knew everyone else. As we smoked that first taste of what we thought was rebellion, I felt something inside of me finally let go of the idea that I had to always be perfect and listen to everything I was always told. I guess, in a way, that spark of that black Bic lighter in the dark really did ignite something rebellious in me. What I would come to realize would be that being rebellious did not equal being a degenerate or a failure. It meant going against the grain, taking a risk, and experiencing something outside of conformity.

After that weekend, my mind was cracked wide open. A week or so before we would leave for university, I remember lying in my bed, staring out the window at the night sky and deciding that it was time to start living, to stop judging, and to start experiencing.

That was over fourteen years ago now, and my outlook has fully changed. I try not to be hard on my younger, naive, sheltered self, but damn if I don’t feel regret for keeping a closed mind for as long as I did. Within my first weekend of college, I tried weed for the first time, and while that’s a story for another time, it absolutely changed my mind and made me question all of the things I had been told about it my entire life.

Over the years, I've learned to lean into that curiosity. I am fully comfortable admitting that I lived in a narrow headspace for too long, too afraid of what others told me was right or wrong to see the full picture.

But that memory of the dock, the dark, and that tiny spark of a lighter—that was the moment that changed the entire trajectory of my life. That realization is what would eventually lead to this project, The Undergrowth.

This is a place where I hope others can shift their perspective the same way that I was able to all those years ago. Here, we leave the old dogmas behind, clear away the stigma, and keep our minds wide open.

Thank you for reading this far. I look forward to sharing more stories, more perspectives, and more unfiltered honesty with you all.