I just, in the past year, came out of a deep, dark, black hole where I found myself literally at the bottom with only two choices: stay there or climb out. The quote that helped me start climbing was “you don’t know how strong you really are until you have no choice but to be strong.”
The most scary thing is, I didn’t even know I was at the bottom, for a long while. It reminds me very much of the scene in the movie “What Dreams May Come” where Robin William’s character goes down into ‘Hell’ and sees his wife—she doesn’t even know she’s in hell or that anything’s wrong with her. It was exactly like that (without a “Robin”), except I wouldn’t call it depressed, just totally, absolutely empty.
One day, someone from my far, far past showed up and we spent a few hours at the mall catching up… all he did was make me laugh and that night, I looked around and realized I no longer cared for anything—all my passions (and I’m a born Crusader…) had fallen away, all my beloved hobbies had disappeared, I had lost contact with all my close friends and family, had become scared to go anywhere alone, and more. Lingua was gone, and this squirrelly, scared stranger had taken over…
I had to go through a phase of, all at once, being overwhelmed and lost, shocked, even more depressed and unsurmountably, unbelievably furious with myself, but there was a tiny, little spark in me that refused to just “die” and I simply started doing serious self-work.
The thing is, I didn’t hit rock bottom because of addiction or anything like that—I had been in a covertly passive-aggressive abusive marriage and, this might sound so dramatic… but, what was at risk was my soul and will to live, similar to an addict’s experience. I had to consciously choose to no longer be an enabler and ‘recover’ from that.
One analogy I can think of to describe the climb out is the hardening of steel. It was extremely painful and very lonely at times, but I didn’t find the alternative of staying in the hole acceptable, so I kept going. The “emerging” unfortunately isn’t pretty, nice and clean like in “What Dreams May Come,” but happens in bits and pieces, here and there… like a whack a mole without the whacking!
Believe it or not, joining Fluther was one rung that helped my climb out… :D Still climbin’!
and like Real said… gotta bounce!