The Beauty in the Dark

Listening to Dax Riggs. Living with depression. Creating something from the wreckage.

I’ve been immersing myself in Dax Riggs’ latest album, 7 Songs for Spiders. His music is sludgy, sexy, and unapologetically dark. It’s not just heavy—it’s beautifully heavy. Like molasses running through rusted wires. Like grief that’s learned how to dance.

I keep coming back to it not just because it sounds good, but because it feels like something I’ve been trying to say for a long time.

A lot of my art—my writing, my posts, the books I’ve bled into the world—is about that same thing:
Finding beauty in the dark.

And here’s the part no one talks about when it comes to depression:
You do feel joy.
Sometimes, you even feel blinding joy.
You laugh so hard you forget the weight for a moment. You love someone so much it spills out of you like gold. You hold a memory and it burns, but it burns sweet.

Sometimes, I shine.
Sometimes… I don’t.

And that’s okay. That’s part of it.
I’ve stopped trying to edit that truth out of myself.

There’s this pressure—especially when you live with depression—to either “get better” or be some tragic figure people can pity from a distance. But that binary doesn’t hold. Most days, I’m both. I’m the person who can see the beauty in the dying leaves, the quiet hour before sunrise, the sound of someone saying “I’m still here.”

That’s what Dax Riggs captures for me.
He’s not singing to be saved.
He’s singing because sometimes, the song is the salvation.

That’s what I’m trying to do, too.

My writing may not always be bright. But it’s real. And that, to me, is its own kind of light.
Not a spotlight. Not a sunrise.
More like a cigarette in the dark. A whisper. A glint in the broken glass.

And I think that’s enough.

7 Songs For Spiders by Dax Riggs