The Abyss

“I have grown tired of waiting to die so I guess I'll just live now.”

These are the words I wrote in my journal on the first day of June, 2021.

After many consecutive nights—over two years!—of going to sleep hoping I would not awaken the next day, I finally hit the very bottom of my depression.

Gob-smacked, bleeding, face down in the dirt of my own debauched soul, I pushed my spiritual self into a sitting position at the base of the Abyss and looked up for the first time in my life.

I stared into this Abyss for many years before I tried to leap it.

I did not think it too wide, but I fell.

It was close. I felt my hands grasp the lip of the other side before the sheer cliff smashed my face.

When consciousness returned, I was falling.

Falling, but I thought in my dazed revery, my self-induced transcendental psychosis, that I was flying, that I found the secret, that I made the leap.

So long was the fall that I went on in my delusion, blissfully ignorant.

Until I realized I could not arrest my own momentum. I could not go back.

I came to understand what occurred.

But that made it worse.

Caught, falling in a void, trapped between the anxious anticipation of smacking the dirt and the horrifying possibility that there is no bottom, I realized why so many remain deluded, and continue to dissociate in the face of truth.

I came to long for the earth. For the pain, or, better yet, an end to the pain.

I got the pain.

I finally looked up. I saw nothing.

So far down where the light cannot reach.

I saw nothing.

But I felt the faintest breath of wind laden with the tantalizing scent of a single rose, and I knew this was the bottom, and the only way forward was up the way I came.

I sat for what seemed like a long time in that timeless void, and cherished my despair, my anguish, my agony, my loneliness, my absolute lack of any desire to proceed.

I cherished it because I thought this could be the end, the sweet release, the final moment when I could just wither away and die.

But the pain receded.

I healed… but I didn’t mend quite right, like a broken bone that fuses crooked because no one took the time to set it. But it was good enough for me to stand, to walk, to explore the depths.

I groped around in the dark for a long time before I found the sheer cliff wall that battered me into unconsciousness.

There was little purchase, but my hands found places. I couldn’t climb yet, but that was the moment when I said to myself:

I have grown tired of waiting to die so I guess I'll just live now.

It didn’t take a self-help guru, a priest, a therapist, a psychiatrist, a prescription, compassion, empathy, generosity, charity, philanthropy, or any of the things I spent years being put upon to believe would save me.

Love you folks for it, I really do, but none of it made a bit of difference, and the incredible amount of fakery involved in the whole process is what pushed me over the edge in the first place.

I could not keep up with the demands that “self” help put on my time. When I needed someone to listen to me and not just diagnose my symptoms, literally no one was there but my self.

Nope. In the end, I had to self-immolate until I became my own sun and climb hand over hand from the Abyss leaving smoldering marks in my wake.

Every aspirant that dares the leap and fails will now find a guide in a certain place, luminescent markings set eternally in stone, firmer handholds than nature would ever provide. If you are lucky enough to fall nearby.

Otherwise, I cannot say what other surprises might wait below. The Abyss is vast… but not empty.

Blessings! Love! Light!

Fare thee well!

***** * *****

Afterword

I want to go out of my way here to say that there is no shame in seeking help.

One might say the above is a performative piece. An attempt to describe a unique subjective experience through the hyperbolic lens of descriptive language and a vague archetypical analogy.

Those who believe as such are welcome to do so, and I encourage it! I had a very real internal experience but it did not bear on or change my responsibilities in the real world, to other people who I know are having internal experiences of their own which may be difficult to share in so many words.

The important thing is not what handholds you use to climb out of the abyss, but that you got to steppin', as my dearly departed father sometimes liked to say.

Whoever you are, I hope your journey ends well, that the clearing at the end of your path is bright and beautiful, and that time heals those wounds which fate inflicted with so much care.

***** * *****

For another look at difficult paths through the lens of popular story, check out this article at Horror to Culture: