Back in May, when I was in London, I accompanied my friend Nicole (The Olivetti Girl) . . .

. . . to a pub where our friend Bex was playing a little show that night. She and I had accidentally ended up in the same train car when taking the tube there. We walked from the station to the pub and felt very good just then. Once inside, both of us dressed in black and wearing dark sunglasses, we got a drink and sat down. Of all the things I could have brought up, I asked her if there were a Dark Nicole somewhere inside her, as I knew there was a Dark Ryan inside me. I had been ruminating upon this part of myself a lot around that time.

When I say Dark I don’t necessarily mean some sinister form of one’s self, though maybe there is the faintest hint of this. For instance, I don’t think I possess a single molecule of true evil in my brain, and I am confident Nicole does not either. As I (poorly) explained to her then, Dark Nicole, if she did exist, would just be the version of herself who had to bend reality to get things done . . . to briefly occupy a moral grey area, to do something reckless with your mind and body, to light up your skeleton and run on high-octane jet fuel well past the limits of your normal self.

But in fact there is no Dark Nicole at all. Bless her, upon my asking this dumb question, she seemed confused and pondered it in earnest, finally arriving at “No”. Nicole is as blameless as the day she was born all those years ago in Italy. There is only the one Nicole, the one who is pure in heart, and we’re all very happy to know her.

As for me, I know I am governed by Three Ryans, one of whom is Dark Ryan. A long time ago now a friend of mine wrote an email to our mutual friend about this, although at the time she only sensed two of me. (In retrospect, the third came later . . . it broke off from Dark Ryan and became its own thing.) Tonight for whatever reason I thought about that email again and was able to find it. I remembered this part in particular:

. . . Add to this the peculiar circumstance of his dichotomous nature; one darker, cynical half which charms, intimidates and inspires caricatures; and the other half, which is—well, you very well know—infinitely melancholic, gentle and insecure.

I realize I am putting this in cartoonish terms, but here it is: there is a certain kind of confidence (power??) I derive from Dark Ryan that gets me into as much trouble as it gets me out of. It’s almost like wielding a cursed sword that is supernaturally strong but saps your life upon relying on its power. You can’t overdo it or else you run the risk of veering into the territory of permanent irreversible damage.

Sometimes I think I overdo it is what I’m getting at. I rely too much on that third of myself when I should lean more on the other two. And to be clear, I’m not talking split personalities for God’s sake. I just mean I contain multitudes as any of us do, but mine I can easily delineate. I can tell when one side of me is more dominant than the others. It changes multiple times a day . . . sometimes I possess stripes of each.

And what are the other two? Anyone could tell you, as my friend did above, that I have an “infinitely melancholic” side. There is about thirteen years of evidence on this very website, don’t you know. To me, melancholy is a particular kind of sadness. It is understated and wistful. I can more or less function in this way. Truthfully this is the person I am more often than not, and on any given day, especially when I am by myself. I am this person right now, much as I always am at four in the morning. I feel, as my friend rightly pointed out long ago, melancholic, sensitive, and insecure.

The problem is that this side of me is prone to being embarrassing and overly sentimental and ridiculous to the point of bordering on self-parody. Countless times in my life I have eclipsed myself. You just can’t be that way all the time . . . it’s like being made of glass. Everything that comes out of me is utterly sincere, but that also means I am vulnerable to dropping the castle bridge over the moat and letting the whole world inside to destroy me. I can be far too trusting. And when that happens, as it often does, I am wholly reliant on the other two sides of me to fix everything. In the best circumstances, the brave side of me shoulders the entire burden. That version of me is good and honest and strong, and came about later in my life simply because I committed the sin of having lived too long. I have been broken so many times that I created out of necessity a goodly knight to rescue me (us?) from my (our?) own stupidity. He is a product of surviving Death and continuing that survival . . . why, I could not tell you.

(I am stopping to wonder now if Court Jester Ryan is the fourth quadrant. Or does that fall under . . .)

Then there is Dark Ryan. And when the strong and virtuous side of me is overburdened or out to lunch, only arriving in the most dire of circumstances to yank me out of the morass, Dark Ryan, also strong, assumes the throne to repair all the damage to the castle wall that Melancholic Ryan has done.

Let’s just call the thing what it is for once: Being Dark Ryan is fun . . . I become completely fearless, like I’m a hundred feet tall and resplendent in unbreakable armor. I can do anything! It feels like conjuring dark magic. But this is not energy which is infinite nor freely expended without consequence. As I have said, it is a cursed sword. And as long as I wield it, it will slowly drain me. It’s seductive! and yet it can be dangerous. If I’m not careful, it can get me into an even worse kind of trouble. It could even get me killed.

I bring this up because every now and then I feel like I ought to destroy that part of me . . . almost like an exorcism. I’ve seen the light and I’ve heard the word . . . do I really need this guy anymore? Perhaps this sounds silly or overly naive to you, but I think everyone should strive to be virtuous. This is a task which never ends. I am going to spend the rest of my life endeavoring to be more virtuous than I had been before. But if you have some Dark side of you which you rely upon to save you (or worse, let out of the attic as if releasing an avenging spirit), can it really be said that you truly possess a virtuous soul? I wonder.

For now I will let it be. I don’t even know if you can ever truly be rid of something like that. Perhaps Dark Ryan is just as much a part of me as the other two Ryans, and if plucked out like a barb, would render me obsolete . . . or outright kill me. And anyway, I’m not entirely thankless. I’m definitely still here and alive because that part of my brain rescued me from myself, or else from a world that would have otherwise pulverized me into sawdust. Melancholic Ryan cannot exist alone! Love him though I do, it’s just the truth. I need him most of all because he is the real me, which is why he needs protecting.

And now of course I feel compelled to quote one of my favorite passages from MOBY-DICK. It is more fitting than ever. I could sit here for a trillion years and never come up with a better way of summing up everything I have just said:

But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain” (i.e. even while living) “in the congregation of the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.