The Cruel Tyranny of the Mind

Despair is more than an absence of hope – it’s a mental labyrinth of self-sabotage and futility. Is there a way out, or are we destined to sink deeper?

Despair and desperation; a beckoning whirlpool void of emptiness that entertains no hope, no redemption, and certainly no mercy. Allow yourself to slide down that funnel and life leaves you even as you go on living a nightmarish nothingness. To find the motivation, mood or momentum to escape the despondency requires a Herculean effort to punch through your own chest and jolt the heart out of its defeated dimming. It’s almost impossible.

Even if it were possible, the act of clambering out of that hole would still find you staring abjectly without hope at happier horizons, destined to forever remain far out of reach. Knowing this for certain drains any desire to fight the sensation of sinking further into the pit of nihility.

The mind is a cruel best servant, one that will do your bidding even when knowing full well it will lead to yours, and indeed to its own, complete destruction. It’ll play a game of delusion with itself… yourself, dangling carrots of hope, leading the physical form to flee from the metaphorical stick, all the while handicapping itself with self-doubt, admonition and outright stupidity.

It’s as ready to tell you that you are capable of manifesting it all with the power of… well, itself, as it is equally able to tell you that, frankly, you suck balls big time. It’ll eagerly confirm that you’re a failure that has screwed up everything, and singularly too; there will be no lifelines to imagined or real excuses that you might attempt to cling on to.

The hardest battles one fights is with the infernal internal. The toughest challenger is the naysayer staring back at you through the looking glass. Your greatest critic of all is indeed… you – an honest, unforgiving and brutal you.

As the journey of life commences, mistakes are a given, encouraged and expected even, ultimately forgiven. As the mid-life marker approaches you struggle to abandon the juvenile and evolve into the mature. When you’re over the other side, there’s no point looking for the grown-up in the room anymore, because that’s you. And if you fall short, then you’ve learned nothing, either through deliberate self-deceit or incompetent bloody-mindedness.

Too late you’ll learn that the stubborn don’t survive, that knowing the answers doesn’t mean you’ll use them, and that it’s possible to look like your flying, while simultaneously losing control and crashing. But that crash will be the most inconsequential impact ever, claiming a victim tally of only one – you.

So, the black hole beckons, it’s pulling and luring you into the easy abyss where nothing ends yet everything does. Above Hercules awaits. Can you attempt absolution and muster the muscle to extricate yourself? The champion of brawn watches patiently, even as he knows the strength you must find is not physical but emotional. And there’s the problem; while mind over matter may be a thing, ephemeral emotions are insubstantial. The mind might be our slave (one that plays tricks nonetheless), but we are undoubtedly hopeless slaves to our hearts. Can we escape it? Not, perhaps, when it is damaged.

Yet, even within this eternal night, there’s a flicker. It’s faint, fragile, and fleeting, but it’s there – waiting in expectation. It’s trying to tell you something: the answer may not lie in wrestling the mind or overpowering the heart, for they are both stubborn – the former confounded by its own complexities, the latter deaf to reason. The solution lies in something subtler, a quiet rebellion of acceptance.

Acceptance of the disasters, the missteps, the flaws – not as signs of failure, but as the scars of survival. Each wound proof that, despite it all, you’re still here, still breathing, still with the ability to go on. That you can continue to fight for yourself, and to emerge from… nay actually, to co-exist with the void, making peace with the darkness, and in doing so, with yourself.

It’s in such moments of futility that the spirit might spark once again, that courage is created, that stamina is restored, forcing you to begin taking those small steps forward; taking a minute, an hour, a day at a time, believing once more in a future, a future of any kind. The mighty watcher waits not for you to pull yourself out of the hole, but to witness the quiet, relentless power of your own endurance. He knows the strength is already within you. But seeking it out – that’s the hardest part, and only you, and you alone, are capable of that.

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