Freefall (Down the Rabbit Hole)

I’ve talked before about that dark abyss that is depression, but I don’t think people realize just how deep it goes.

Sometimes, it can feel like falling down a rabbit hole with no apparent way out. The feeling of free-falling down a rabbit hole; to be perfectly honest, the weightlessness is incredible. It can feel like you’re floating, and you almost forget you’re falling.

It’s almost comforting, the exhilarating rush as you descend further and further. Your heart speeds up, adrenaline kicks in, and you feel like you can take on the world.

You fail to realize how far you’ve fallen until it’s too late.

You suddenly realize that the exhilarating weightlessness comes from being lightheaded, which happens because you started hyperventilating. What felt like a weightless flight was actually a dangerous descent away from reality.

Your body is begging you to just take a breath, to focus on anything but the pounding of blood in your ears.

Deep. Breaths.

The fear has kicked in.

Your fight or flight has activated.

At the bottom of the pit, you realize there is no running from your own mind.

You find that, unlike Alice, this rabbit hole doesn’t have fantastical talking creatures, a good natured mad hatter, or even a Cheshire cat. Here, there’s only one character.

At the bottom of the abyss, she waits: my Red Queen.

Waiting all this time, preparing for my return with the knowledge that I couldn’t possibly stay away forever.

She’s me.

My fears, my doubts, my anxieties, my hatred, my anger, my regrets, my pain. Everything that holds me back from having full, unadulterated happiness.

She’s everything I hate about myself. The broken image that stares back at me in the mirror.

Red from the battles fought within my mind, somehow emerging victorious, feeling anything but.

There she stands with a smug smile on her lips as she welcomes me home.

Her confidence an act, like everything else about her. Like everything about me.

Hiding behind her army of the lies she whispers in my ear as she circles me, excited and giddy because she thinks this is finally it.

This time, she says, you’ll never leave.

She’s wrong of course.

The very fact that I’m writing this now proves that. But it doesn’t mean the fight is easy, and it doesn’t mean the fight is over either.

Imagine the dark depths of your mind, every character a piece of you.

Good or bad, wrong or right, real or not.

They’re waiting and watching; they want to know how this battle will end.

Who will win this time?

Will I emerge, battleworn and broken, but breathing and heart-beating? Or will she slowly glide away with what remains of my consciousness, grinning in victory as I slump in defeat and accept my fate of remaining in the abyss forever?

Who wins?

That’s the eternal question that will continue to be asked until the day I die.

The question that will never be answered until I take my last breath.

You see, the freefall feels weightless. It feels harmless.