The Beauty in Brokenness: How Despair Can Illuminate the Path to Healing
What exactly is despair? A state of mind entered into not on account of a person’s own will and volition, and not one that they feel pulled into by a strength greater than their own. Despair is more akin to the person who slumps down defeated after a long struggle. It comes to them when they feel they are at the limit of their capacities, when it feels as if they have reached the final step on the staircase of existence and there is nothing new for them to strive for or experience.
Thankfully, despair, while being quite convincing in this regard, is nothing more than an illusion. Not in the sense that a person doesn’t actually experience the dark and heavy thoughts and feelings that accompany it. Those are as real as it gets. What is not real is the conclusions that are drawn from this experience. Despair is not a final stop or an end to happiness. Despair is a crucible in which everyone, once there, has the opportunity to reach down even further within themselves and discover new strength that they did not know they had. And with the discovery of new strength comes the discovery of new possibilities.
Much of what people discover and attain in the way of progress can only be gained through difficult circumstances. Anyone capable of examining their own life can agree with this sentiment. The path towards being whoever and whatever it is one wants to be contains both difficult and easy moments, but it is the difficult moments that are most impactful and remembered most vividly.
Imagine for a moment, a person named Johnnie who has complained for months about her dislike of doing hard things, and really that word doesn’t describe it–hatred is the most appropriate word to capture her feelings. Week after week she complains about her life and the things she would rather not face, using every method of avoidance she can conjure up in her mind. And the harder she tries to avoid; the more difficult things become for her until eventually there is nothing else she can do to avoid the challenges in her life. As dogged as she has been, she is finally all out of tricks, and with this ending comes the beginning of her own personal encounter with despair.
Despair is not the final stop or the end of happiness. Despair is a crucible in which everyone, once there, has the opportunity to reach down even further within themselves and discover new strength that they did not know they had.
She has been sick–sad, blue, depressed, ill, any and all of those things, but none of them, no matter how terrible, has been enough to make her give up trying to push away her problems. It is only in realizing that one is surrounded and without any more exits that they have the opportunity to be brought into a new psychological state. The transition is difficult. It is a type of pain that has not been experienced before. It is blunt and direct, and aching.
Despite all this discomfort, the therapist must insist that someone like Johnnie turn her attention towards the things she desperately does not want to look at, and the must do so without being abrasive and damaging. They must accept the fact that the best they may be able to manage is to get someone to look at the details of their life for a few minutes at a time, and sometimes even less than that. They must be persistent in their encouragement that a person keep coming back to their situation and try to see it with clarity.
The wish for life to be easy is difficult to give up, and it is equally difficult to be in the position of having to push someone to relinquish it, but it is necessary. The best form of help one person can provide to another is getting them to realize the fact that life is never really easy for anybody, and the only thing left for a person to do once they know this is to embrace the struggle and take the hard road. It’s no easy feat because treading an unfamiliar path inevitably means embarking on a journey without a map in search of somewhere you’ve never been with nothing but the hope within to carry you forward. But, if someone can make the difficult start and keep moving through the treacherous middle, they find that eventually the journey does become less difficult and even though they don’t know exactly where they’re going or what they’re doing, they start to trust that they’ll know when they get there.
…life is never really easy for anybody. And, the only thing left to do once you know this is to embrace the struggle and take the hard road.
Despair can unlock new depths of experience within. I called it a crucible, but it’s just as appropriate to compare it to being locked inside of a mental gymnasium where strengthening your mind is the only way to break free. Anyone who continually expects ease and comfort in life will be perpetually disappointed. They’ll sit on the floor lamenting life’s unfairness while wasting away. This is the falsehood that a misunderstanding of despair leads to, and this is why it is important to realize that even in despair, and in a certain sense, only through despair can a person transform their life.
The person who undergoes this transformation does so by choosing to become stronger, not by waiting for the burdens of their life to become easier.