From Paul

Dear You

I know the very place you are at; I have been to this exact same place, and sat where you are now. Looked out and only felt a total all-encompassing stark void, where I thought I had previously existed. I have lived there on-and-off for periods of my life – sometimes weeks, sometimes months. It knows me, I know it. There is, and can only be, one place so bleak and so empty. Only one place that could be so absolutely and unequivocally.... nothing. And when I am there (where you are now) everything is so very 'clear' to me: that life is completely pointless, I am a total failure, Love is always fake or fatally flawed, that we are all just distracted fools bound for dust. The Love I feel for my fellow humans, my beautiful children, my friends and family, a god, or anything of previous beauty and unquestionable meaning; all lost power over me now. The life I have worked so hard to build feels without merit and of no significance whatsoever.

Yet, how strange it was, I could still feel my beating heart, and a living body. But it didn't respond in defence at this all-out assault on the very core of its existence. It only sat there in idle function, passive and disconnected, barely alive it seemed. When I ask desperately of myself if this was a real place with no way out, I always heard unequivocally, “Yes,...this is so”. When I was asked by someone “How do you feel?”, it was a silly question without an answer from where I was-- you would need  feeling to give an answer. To ask such a question of us means they don't even know where we are. This place, so real and ghastly to us, is cruelly invisible to others.

Then, just when I thought I cannot take this anymore, I saw no hope, no salvation. That, if it was actually humanly possible to die of hopelessness alone, it will be this way now. Unexpectedly, one day, a moment, I could see something for what it was. My heart and hands reached out. The act of being able to actually feel something felt like the most incredible wave of relief. So I lifted myself up and reached out. It was like bursting the surface of a bottom-less ocean, gasping for breath and feeling alive again, from when I was previously absolutely sure I had long since been crushed and drowned. The hope, the life, the Love, which I believed had totally gone, I can now see in my mind's eye; I felt a fool for not being able to feel anything before.

The bizarre thing is, horrific as it is when you are there, I actually pity those who haven't experienced where you are now. No one can appreciate or know the true meaning of Love and life more than those who have experienced actually losing and then regaining it again. You will too.

Paul