Power Underneath Despair

This post is my entry for September’s IndieWeb Carnival being hosted by Matthew.

Matthew frames this month’s writing theme (which ties to September being Suicide Prevention Month) as:

In your darkest hour, what saved you? What helped you find the strength to carry on?

This has been a tough one to write about, which I don’t think is surprising. It’s difficult to write publicly about such things for most people. It exposes a side that our normal fascade is purpose built to protect. A writer is often attempting to transcribe an inner voice to written form. This month’s theme is asking that inner writer’s voice to have a conversation with its evil twin that attempted to eat it in the womb and help the poor sap at the keyboard bleed it out all over the page. Sometimes hard things are supposed to be hard.

My personal experience hasn’t been that I have a darkest time. What I’ve had I’d classify as dark times and they have been at various points throughout my life. They represent a vast spectrum of causes, but I can bucket them into two categories. What I’ve come to realize after lots of thought and introspection is that in an earlier phase of my life I was trying to convince the world of who I was. It’s unclear to me when the shift occurred, but in my current phase of life I am trying to convince myself who I am. I haven’t read anything on the topic, but I imagine I’m not unique in this regard. I also have a hunch that for many people, the order of these two phases I describe may be reversed.

What I can say after thinking about this month’s theme is that my darkest times certainly come from the phase I am in now. Anything I thought was dark or difficult when I was trying to convince the world of who I was pales in comparison to the audience of one that is myself. What got me through those dark times was just projecting confidence. Confidence I thought I had. Confidence and actions that built confidence in me within others. It worked really well, for a long time. Then I began to not care what anyone thought. Not just the facade of not caring. Legitimately not giving a shit. You’d think at that point it would just be sailing the seas of joy and prosperity.

What I’ve come to realize is that in the process of growing past caring what others think about me, it opened the door to becoming my own worst critic. Mind you, from the outside, I’m sure it just looked like I’d gained enough confidence in myself to not sweat the opinions of others. To some degree, that is correct, however, anytime life got hard (or gets hard) I find myself sinking to the depths of self-loathing in a way I don’t ever remember under the old regime. It sucks.

So what gets me through? Matthew’s theme is framed in hope, which is important. Things that have helped me so far include (in no particular order or gravity):

• Giving up social media; full delete of accounts.
• Regularly reading The Manual by Epictetus.
• The love of my children.
• The love of my wife.
• The love of my family as a whole.
• Embracing a mantra.

That mantra goes something like this:

Life is a journey. There will be hardships and dark times. Those times condition you for growth and allow you to measure the good times and feelings. Everyone else is on their own journey. Paths will run both parallel to yours and at intersections with no stop signs. Get home safely. Be intentional. The journey ends when it is over.

If you’re struggling, please seek help. Give yourself grace. Balance is an important function of the world. The dark gives the light purpose.