55. Join Me Here In This Darkness (And Fight On Anyway)
(Epistemic status: Yet another post that I hope dearly that you only dimly comprehend, but if you understand it all to well, this is for you. In particular, for LW.)
There is a place beyond sadness, beyond grief, beyond despair. In the lightless depths of that place, there is no meaning, no joy, and precious little sensation. Food turns to ash in the mouth, and the body feels wooden and alien, and living each day feels like an unbearable burden. If you find yourself there, know that I sometimes find myself there, too.
One thing to internalize: you must lose hope, and endure all the same. To those who come again and again to that abyss, to hope is to stare into the sun and be blinded by it; to desire is to hold fast to thorns and bleed. So don't do that, not for now, not until you drift back up or claw your way out. Just be stable and keep space for that day on which you can live again. Gather your energy; scrape it together and stopper it tightly inside yourself against the corrosive void. Join me in this darkness; accept it for what it is, and persist.
Too, you must not let yourself lay languid, days passed in self-pity, watching the world whiz by while your wits wash away. To go forth and act feels like nothing more than going through the motions, I know. But I claim that you must curl your hands into the right shapes and begin all the same. It is not hope to know that if you don't waste away, there will come a day on which you will look back, and you either will have set yourself up for later joy, or you won't have done that. If nothing you do brings you delight, but just an endless expanse of dirty gray drear, then do it all the same. Lay for yourself the foundations of later utility and pleasure, even if to build such a tower seems laughably impossible. Do it anyway, even if you don't feel the point. You won't feel much of a point to anything else; might as well do something with any chance of benefit later on instead.
There is a kind of nobility in doing a doomed thing well. There is a sort of tragic sweetness in fighting to the last. To grapple with your despair, it has been said, is to fight an untiring enemy, whose forces swell to twice their size the moment you look away; each further instant in which you draw breath is another defiant blow struck in an unending campaign. Fight on anyway.
Perhaps you've found yourself returning to this dark realm over and over again; perhaps you've spent yourself down climbing repeatedly out of the pit, only to awake one day to find yourself at its nadir once again; perhaps all the several tacks you've taken have ended up leading you back here. Perhaps the scattered shards of your desire have each flared and faded, have staked their credibility on hopeful possibilities and sure-seeming outcomes, only to be dashed against the rocks. Take notice of those fragments of yourself, the ones that advocated for promising plans, and nourish them as best you can on your own blood. Give them another try, an honest one.
Of this dull dusty domain, you will never be free. Do not hope for that, for you will find that hope thwarted. The most you can do is figure out tricks and side-paths and back-ways that let you escape it more quickly the next time. It never gets easier; you just get stronger, cleverer. You learn by feel alone what a brittle rung or a loose root feel like; your sight will not avail you in this blackness, and sound is muffled, too. But each night gives way to dawn. Join me in this darkness, then, and fight on anyway.
There is a place beyond sadness, beyond grief, beyond despair. In the lightless depths of that place, there is no meaning, no joy, and precious little sensation. Food turns to ash in the mouth, and the body feels wooden and alien, and living each day feels like an unbearable burden. If you find yourself there, know that I sometimes find myself there, too.
One thing to internalize: you must lose hope, and endure all the same. To those who come again and again to that abyss, to hope is to stare into the sun and be blinded by it; to desire is to hold fast to thorns and bleed. So don't do that, not for now, not until you drift back up or claw your way out. Just be stable and keep space for that day on which you can live again. Gather your energy; scrape it together and stopper it tightly inside yourself against the corrosive void. Join me in this darkness; accept it for what it is, and persist.
Too, you must not let yourself lay languid, days passed in self-pity, watching the world whiz by while your wits wash away. To go forth and act feels like nothing more than going through the motions, I know. But I claim that you must curl your hands into the right shapes and begin all the same. It is not hope to know that if you don't waste away, there will come a day on which you will look back, and you either will have set yourself up for later joy, or you won't have done that. If nothing you do brings you delight, but just an endless expanse of dirty gray drear, then do it all the same. Lay for yourself the foundations of later utility and pleasure, even if to build such a tower seems laughably impossible. Do it anyway, even if you don't feel the point. You won't feel much of a point to anything else; might as well do something with any chance of benefit later on instead.
There is a kind of nobility in doing a doomed thing well. There is a sort of tragic sweetness in fighting to the last. To grapple with your despair, it has been said, is to fight an untiring enemy, whose forces swell to twice their size the moment you look away; each further instant in which you draw breath is another defiant blow struck in an unending campaign. Fight on anyway.
Perhaps you've found yourself returning to this dark realm over and over again; perhaps you've spent yourself down climbing repeatedly out of the pit, only to awake one day to find yourself at its nadir once again; perhaps all the several tacks you've taken have ended up leading you back here. Perhaps the scattered shards of your desire have each flared and faded, have staked their credibility on hopeful possibilities and sure-seeming outcomes, only to be dashed against the rocks. Take notice of those fragments of yourself, the ones that advocated for promising plans, and nourish them as best you can on your own blood. Give them another try, an honest one.
Of this dull dusty domain, you will never be free. Do not hope for that, for you will find that hope thwarted. The most you can do is figure out tricks and side-paths and back-ways that let you escape it more quickly the next time. It never gets easier; you just get stronger, cleverer. You learn by feel alone what a brittle rung or a loose root feel like; your sight will not avail you in this blackness, and sound is muffled, too. But each night gives way to dawn. Join me in this darkness, then, and fight on anyway.
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