I was lying in my bed, alone again. A deep ache was radiating through my body. I heard the hum of the fan above me and I swore I heard the air whisper something in my ear. The walls were staring me down, daring me to talk back to it. There was a heaviness, a thick blackness resting in the room with me that I was very familiar with. This same blackness often visited me as a child in my tiny corner bedroom at the end of the hall. It would sit with me and watch me, and I would try to trick it and pretend I was asleep all the while panicking inside. Earlier still, when I was a young toddler it would invade my dreams and carry me down my dark hallways as I tried to protest, powerless to resist its hold over me. Now years later it had found me again, but this time I wasn’t afraid of it. I was intrigued. What was it waiting for? Why had it hovered over me all of my life? What had it been trying to tell me?
In my many years of learning maturity I had also learned how to embrace fear, though not without some protest. I was still learning, although my fears looked very different now. I used to be afraid of the dark shadow in the corner of my room but now I realize I was just afraid of what I couldn’t see clearly, what I didn’t know. Now that fear resembled an empty bed, a silent house, a disappointing glare from someone who used to love me. It represented a future I wasn’t sure could ever exist. I was no longer afraid of what I couldn’t see, only what I could. And what I could see was worse than anything my most terrifying childhood nightmares held. What I could see was… nothing. Emptiness. Silence. I was absolutely, completely, and utterly alone. I was sinking into a dark void that, if I had to guess, felt a lot like what death feels like. A cold chill ran through my body and I was frozen in the nothingness. How had I ended up here? How had I allowed myself to wander into this desolate black? How could I ever manage to escape?
That’s the moment when it all fell into place.
There was absolutely no one here to save me, no one to run to for comfort, no one to reach out to for help. If I was going to make it out of the black hole, it was going to have to be at my own hand. I was the only one capable of helping me because I was the only one here.
He was right all along. He had once told me I had fallen into a pit, and he wasn’t going to help me out. He would show me where the ladder was but he would never help me climb it. Now I believed him, for the first time truly. What he left out from his admonishment was the obvious truth: he had pushed me into the pit and turned his back. I was in this alone, and I finally knew what needed to be done.
I needed to climb out of the pit without him and walk away from it all. Otherwise I would die, fully. I was already dead spiritually. I needed to figure out how to climb to life again.
And so, I started my painful journey upwards through the shadowy pit.
Terrah Holly Writes 