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Something that isn’t named cannot be conquered. That sentiment has meant a lot to me in my life. It’s something that I knew but didn’t grasp until I read Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. If you haven’t read it, you’ve done yourself a disservice. Few books have managed to achieve a perfect synthesis of horror, love, faith, doubt, loss, and triumph.

He set out to write the modern Dracula, but King gave us a classic on human psychology instead. The main character, Matt Burke, is a cynic, believing in nothing beyond himself. But when confronted with the horrors of vampires taking over Jerusalem’s Lot, he was forced to admit the truth: that something horrible had come to town, and he had to face it head-on in order to defeat it. “If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered,” he said as he prepared to face down the demonic force of Kurt Barlow, the vampiric menace stealing all life and vitality from this tiny, tragic town.

While King’s line is good, it doesn’t go far enough. It’s not just our fears that must be named; it’s anything and everything we keep locked away in our minds. We think we’ve taken our tragic and painful thoughts captive, when really, it is we who remain captive to their insidious influence. You may have unnamed and unconfronted fears of which you are a captive. For some of you, it isn’t fear that holds you captive; it’s self-hatred. It’s the belief that you aren’t good enough, that you don’t have value, that your life doesn’t matter, and that you have nothing to offer a world that is constantly passing you by.

For some of you, life has been lived under the thumb of someone who has made you feel like less than nothing. The voice of your oppressor still rattles around in your head, behind the scenes, whispering into your subconscious that you are, in fact, less than nothing. For some of you, it’s an addiction that you haven’t been strong enough or sober enough to name as a profound source of pain and destruction in your life and the lives of your families. Still others have other voices, other echoes, and other songs of sadness or suffering that hold you back from becoming all you could be.

Any good therapist will tell you what I’m about to share. I should know because all my therapists over the years have said the same thing. To evolve and grow, you must confront what holds you back. You need to be vulnerable and root out the seeds of insecurity, self-hatred, despair, or whatever else might grow and keep you stuck in a land of shadow, unable to walk in the sunshine of the spirit.
It’s scary to be vulnerable and admit one’s shortcomings or areas of internal struggle. We don’t live in a world that celebrates honesty, vulnerability, and empathetic growth. It’s tough out there. Yet, we owe it to ourselves to grow. We deserve to be the best version of ourselves. We deserve to walk in the sunshine of the spirit, and I refuse to let something buried deep within keep me from being my whole self.

Something that isn’t named cannot be conquered. What do you need to name? What do you need to conquer? What is holding you back from being your whole self, fully alive and present in this beautiful and horrible world? You owe it to yourself to answer those questions because you deserve to be fully alive.

Chris Adams is the Rector at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Washington.