We are taught from birth to fear the dark and crave the light. We treat enlightenment as the goal and obscurity as the enemy. But after six months at the South Pole, living through a night that lasts half a year, I realized we have the metaphor backwards. Light doesn’t just show us the world; it also hides us from ourselves.

I thought my first days at the South Pole would be monumental. I had imagined stepping onto the ice with some sense of arrival, of accomplishment, of having crossed into something profound. I expected something meaningful, something that felt commensurate with the extremity of where I had just landed.