Reflection: The Night I Gave Up

I’m sure many of us have been in that dark place, trying to think of someone who would find it worth the time and effort to pull us out of it. Failing to find anyone in our minds who would think us worthy of saving because we ourselves did not find ourselves worthy of saving. People have better things to do, more important tasks to worry about, they had themselves to care for, why would they ever care for us when we were like this? Why would they ever take on a burden that wasn’t their own. 

My deepest spelunking trip into that darkness came when I was approximately twenty six or so. I was living in Virginia, a place I never want to return to for so many reasons, but I was teaching at a middle school. It was beating me down. The kids were awful to me, I had no administrative support, and I hadn’t made any friends or even acquaintances since moving down there. It had been about ten months of spending nearly twelve hours a day at a job I hated, where I felt like an outsider, then going home to my cat, Rory, my empty apartment, and the panic attacks that waited for me there. 

I had some friends back home who helped, but hadn’t yet connected with the group I now call my family. My blood family supported me, but we were all living our lives and I didn’t feel right trying to put the weight of all that on them every single day. Friday Night Magic and a couple D&D sessions of that newly released fifth edition were keeping me barely sane, but in the end… 

I was driving home one day, going about eighty with the flow of traffic, and I looked at the guard rails going past and thought to myself, “If I turn the wheel really hard right now, I don’t have to go to work tomorrow.” 

There was no concern with whether I would live or die, there was no thought to the people that may be hurt by my actions as well, just the sweet, sweet feeling of not having to go back into that place ever again. 

I immediately called my mom and asked her if I could come back home to New York. She said yes, and I drove home, pet my cat, and began to pack. I quit my job the next week, sorted out everything for the move, and just… left. I left behind the place that had brought me the lowest I’d ever been in my life. 

After returning home, not everything was fixed. I ended up in an eleven month relationship that was not good for me. I threw myself so deeply into my coping mechanisms that I built and lost relationships with friends based entirely around them, and avoided doing the work that would actually heal me in lieu of building friendships that now sustain me. I lived a half life that didn’t go anywhere because I was too scared to take the next step in growing it. 

And I’m still doing that, in all fairness. Oh, I’ve gotten better, been going to therapy, been working on myself, been trying to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life… still working on that, to be fair. At one point in time, I dreamed that I’d be able to support myself as an author, though now I feel that would be a better side gig or hobby (an expensive hobby, don’t get me wrong, but it wouldn’t be my first expensive hobby). 

Am I still in that mental state today? Well, I wouldn’t have made it another decade if I were, so no, I’m doing a lot better, though still working on healing completely. In fairness, trying to heal in the storm of razor blades our world has become is a feat in it of itself, but I can openly say that I am in a much better place than I had been. 

The problem is, that our world is still filled with people like Sorrow-of-Ages, people who are so bitter and broken that they would like nothing more than to drag the rest of us down with them. Have us succumb to the entropy of the world and expect that just because everything dies and decays, that it isn’t worth enjoying while it exists. We love getting flowers even though we know one day they’ll die. We love reading books or watching good stories, knowing full well that one day they’ll end. We form bonds and seek love, knowing that it will one day be lost to us, either by choice or time. We birth children and take in animals, knowing that one day they will be taken from us. And we do this not because we think that the time with them will be eternal, but because the time with them is precious. 

So often we are told that the nature of people is to be selfish, to look out for only themselves, and that no one will come and save us. Yet, all I need to do is spend a little time on the subreddit r/humansbeingbros, and I see so many videos of people helping people, people helping animals, and all because they have the ability to do so. They go out of their way, risk themselves, all to do the right thing for someone or something else, without any expectation of a reward. This is the true nature of humans, but we so often see the worst because that’s what gets the most views, the most clicks, the most engagement, and worst of all, the most validation for our own feelings of desperation in a world forcing us to struggle to survive when plenty is locked behind iron gates, hoarded by the few to make the masses suffer. 

Entropy is indeed inevitable. 

But so is rebirth. 

Life finds a way, and thus, you can too.