MENTAL ILLNESS- A DARK PLACE

I’ve been thinking about mental health or mental illness for some time now, and like most people, I’ve been there. I call it the dark place.
I remember when I was going through a dark time, I felt lost. It was as if I didn’t belong anywhere. I felt alone. Almost as if no one saw my struggle and my pain, or even if they did, they couldn’t understand it.
When I look back now, I see myself in that place, a dark hole, an endless dark pit, the darkness tangible, I could almost taste it.
It doesn’t leave you. There are times even in your healed state when you find yourself sliding back into the embrace of that familiar darkness.
When I say darkness, I don’t mean not being able to see in front of you which is also very much the case. The darkness I am talking about is a heaviness, a hollow heaviness. It tortures you day after day after day until it eventually chokes the life out of you.
I was alone, lost, and being slowly killed by an enemy I couldn’t see.
My faith saved me.
It saves me still.
Once you’ve been in that dark place and made it out, every single day after that is a battle not to go back there.
I’ve learned that this battle is no longer mine.
You wake up every day, knowing you’re fighting today to stay alive, to not fall back into that dark despair.
It is not something you get over. It’s something you have to work on every single day.
Can you imagine the emotional turmoil, the mental anguish, and the raw desperation someone must be feeling or experiencing to come to a place to want to take their own life and then the bottomless and overwhelming hopelessness to go through with it?
Just take a second and think about it.
Finding yourself at a place where you have absolutely no hope, no escape, and no place to turn except to death.

So just a bit of food for thought; next time you engage with someone just be kind. We don’t know what battles people are fighting within their minds. Your kindness could be what saves someone from taking their own life.