Let's Talk About Being in Hell For a Moment

Most of us will live in hell for some portion of our lives. It’s worth talking about it for a second.

When you’re in hell, the way back will sometimes not look like your concept of what healing is, or what you’re “supposed” to do to feel better. 

Sure, sometimes it looks like you’d expect; you go to therapy. You start eating well, you start exercising, you start meditating, you trust trustworthy people with small intimacies again, you make friends, you connect with nature, you have hard conversations– all that “typical” stuff. 

But sometimes, hell is too deep, and you can’t reach even one of those things from where you’re standing. I mean, that description above is just a description of “wellness.” Wellness is hard to reach from hell; that’s why it’s hell. 

Sometimes, all you can do is be honest about where you are and start there. Sometimes the most you can reach is a muddy foot ledge inside your hole that’s slightly less muddy than the one you’re standing on. Sometimes you can’t even tell what’s muddier than what, or where the light is coming from, or which direction is up, and you just have to take your best shot, again and again. Sometimes, “being honest with where you are” means admitting you’re too afraid to acknowledge where you are, that you’re spending most of your time distracting and avoiding and you’re not sure how to do anything else.

I know someone who had to play video games for eight years while gently doing therapy along the way, until he literally just got so sick of video games that there was room for something else. It took almost a decade, but that something else just ended up being better than video games. He had no guarantees along the way that anything would change; just the slim hope that kept him showing up and doing his best, both in his coaching and in his life.

If you’re in hell, people can absolutely support you. But nobody else can tell you for sure how to get out– and if you already knew what to do, you’d be doing it. That means this whole thing is going to involve some amount of “making it up as you go along;” so if you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, it doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. Hell often means that even your meta processes for healing are themselves wounded; so the way through isn’t linear. Hell can mean that “being gentle with myself while I’m suffering” is itself cracked right now and hard to reach.

Being in hell is hard. It’s weird. It’s uniquely shaped. And if you’re really in hell, it’ll be a long journey back. 

Faith is required. Faith, even in the face of despair, depression, nihilism. The good news is, you probably already possess some small amount of faith or hope buried deep inside or you wouldn’t still be here. You wouldn’t even be bothering to read this blog post. So hang in there, because something inside of you is still alive. Nothing lasts forever; nothing. I’ll say it again; nothing. It’s just not the nature of the universe, and you (fortunately) are not so special as to be the exception to that. Stuff will keep changing around you and within you, even if you’re not doing it on purpose.

The other good news is, relatedly, that your nature is recovery. It doesn’t require you to be especially virtuous or good or lovable or beautiful; it’s just what you are. The human capacity for repair and resilience is astounding. True, astounding doesn’t always mean as fast as we’d like; and it doesn’t always mean we can even do it on purpose for parts of the journey. But trust whatever process you’re on, because it’s in your blood to heal. Think about what your body does when you get a cut; your mind, your spirit— they work the same way. Anyway, whatever process you’re on right now is frankly kind of all you’ve got.

And lastly, it’s okay to be suffering. It doesn’t mean you won’t get through it. It doesn’t mean anything about you. It’s even okay if you’re beating yourself up about it, if you’re panicking about it, if you’re angry about it, if you’re confused, scared, in despair, ashamed, something else I didn’t name, something unnameable, something too bad, something too wrong, something you’re sure isn’t supposed to be part of life. If that’s where you are, that’s where you are. You’ll figure out each step one muddy foot ledge at a time. You can’t see where you’re going, or it wouldn’t be hell; so just deal with what’s right in front of you.

I’m sending love to all who are deeply suffering right now. I’ve been somewhere like where you are; you’re not the only human who has ever felt this, whatever it is you’re feeling. I’m sorry it feels like this right now. This is part of what it means to be in the human story. We’re all right here in the same story, however alone you might feel.