Despair. hopelessness. suicide.
Iceland
It is a short journey from darkness to the belief that suicide is the only answer. I have heard of four people this week alone that ended their lives due to total despair. There are others I know of who are in absolute darkness wondering what the future holds.
The solution of suicide is a lie, yet believed by so many. The devastation it leaves in it's wake is incomprehensible.I cannot help but reflect on a day years ago when I, too, lost all hope. I believed that there were no answers to the pain I felt. The torment in my soul seemed unbearable. Yet, in those days, I persevered, I moved onward. I'm so thankful for the people who stayed with me through the long talks and the encouragement even on the days I pushed them away.
Truth discovered through a "Lie Journal" I eventually found my way through that darkness. I learned to replace the lies I believed with the truth. It set me free. I realized I could only do that one thought at at time. I took a journal, that I called "My Lie Journal", drew a line down the center of a page, wrote "Lies" at the top of one column and "Truth" on the other. I learned to identify each thought as a lie or as a truth. I wrote my lies and then wrote the truth next to it. So often I fully believed both, but acted on the lie. I prayed that God would help me learn to believe the truth. As I began to believe that suicide was the only answer, I decided to share some of those pages with a few close friends and asked them to help me by affirming the truth and to pray for me that I would learn to believe the truth.
One thought at a time, I found my way to hope and healing. It's been years since I've had to sort out my thoughts in such a way. It became a natural way of thinking where I was able to identify the lies in my head and replace them with the truth.I'm so thankful that the darkness is no longer a part of my life and I ache for those who do not have that hope. When despair is overwhelming, there is help available.Recently, I found a piece of writing I had written in a journal called "The Monster Within". It expresses the hopelessness I felt during those days.
The Monster Within
If only for a moment, the sun shone so brightly.
Were you prepared to forget and throw away the beauty
of that moment in your relentless drive for perfection?
Perfection.
You will never find.
I, if any, have been enslaved to becoming all that I felt lay beneath the definition of perfection.
The more I strive to become the perfect being, never created,
the farther I am from ever becoming that which I know I’m intended to be.
Love – a word that holds so much meaning – has become so empty and dry.
I once felt I love you.
Now, I know not what I feel.
There is sadness, joy and hatred –
yet, beneath all that, I see the person you revealed to me.
The person you stripped of all that you now hold so tightly to.
Where are you now?
Where is your beauty and tenderness?
Is it lost because I gave way to the monster within –
often my only true reliable companion?
That monster has become my lover, my strength.
The sadness lies in the fact that it is my true destroyer.
How true to life, that which I hold so tightly to –
seeks to destroy and kill me.It isn’t love I search for in my quest for thinness.
I search to kill the desire to be loved,
which so often has shown itself to be the invitation for another knife within.
How lost I am. I search for a reason to find my way home.
I see none.
So, I journey onward with my only love.
I crave for a love that loves me enough,
so I no longer need to hold on to the enemy within.
Once – your love promised me all that.
Until I knew it was a conditional love that only loved me if I were perfect.
I’m going in the wrong direction.
I’m paying a heavy price to go in this way.
Why can’t I turn?
I know not.
I only know I see no reason to.
You once were so meaningful to me.
You are a beautiful person, when you lay alone – without a world to please.
Where did you go?
*Note: It was in the writing of this piece, that I realized I was using anorexia as a means to suicide. I rediscovered hope and truth. I learned that "the truth will set you free". I experience great joy in knowing that I'm beautifully made, that people love me and that I can give back to others.