the darkest darkness

I remember falling. I fell for a very long time. Days and weeks and months. And no one caught me. They all let me fall. It was the loneliest most terrifying thing I have ever encountered in my life.

I remember landing. And the place I landed was so dark. I could not recognize my own hand before my face. I was a stranger to myself there. I could see and hear nothing good. I scampered around for a few months. And the darkness only grew darker. The Darkest Darkness.

And then one day. A tiny flicker of light. Only a short distance away. I moved my aching soul toward it. Crawled like a bomb victim, more like. It was just above me, barely out of reach. I was drawn toward it. It drew me to start climbing.

I began to climb. Because the bottom was a place so vile, so dark, so foul, so lonely. This place was the only reason I was frightened and horrified enough to climb. To escape. To retreat.

This is what it means when people talk about Rock Bottom. They throw this term around like it is a place we all know well. But many who carelessly toss these words out have never actually been there. They do not know what this place really is and why it is so terribly great to go there.

Because this Bottom is below the nets of hands reaching out, trying to save you and protect you. It is below the net of friends and family, hands desperately outstretched to catch you. The full-time job of not letting you ever go there, because, what a frightful idea. To let someone you love plummet to an uncertain fate.

But in 2005, they pulled their hands away from me. All of them. They all let me fall.

And, though it may have not been meant this way by all of them, it was the most love any of them had ever given me.

The man I loved was one of the pairs of hands that moved away. One of the ones that let me fall. I tumbled down down down. To that Bottom Place. The place of Darkest Darkness.

That was fifteen years ago now.

In the last fifteen years, I have climbed and climbed. I have made it to a very nice place, up and out of the pit after about five years, then beyond ground level, now partially up the mountain. It is a place that feels very near the top most days, and like a rocky mid-region some others. But it is a very nice place. Bright, lots of sun. Lots of happiness. Only dark at nighttime, the kind of darkness that is predictable and manageable. Never the kind that consumes you. Not like the darkness I saw that first year, when I was still moving around that Bottom Place. Not like the slightly brighter darkness of the following few years, before I had yet crested the top of the pit. This is true sunlight. A brightness I had never before even dreamed of.

This man I loved, the one who let me fall, I sat on his second wife’s sofa the other day. We are friends. Not fake friends who pretend to like one another, but true friends. I like her very much. She may be too good for him. But not because he is not a good man. Because he is a broken one. The goodness is just buried underneath too much grief and too much disappointment. I do not blame him. I know what being broken is. I will never forget.

But as I sat on her sofa and we chatted, as she lamented the equivalent of, what do I do? Is there any hope? Will he ever change? Will he ever find his way out of the dark dark place he is in? Alcoholism. Depression. Family abandonment. All the same patterns I know all too well, from my brief four-year marriage to a much younger version of this same man as a young pink-cheeked girl. We were just kids.

He is even darker now. Even more broken.

And before my mind had even worked it out, my mouth had said it. I’m not sure he will, because they will never let him fall.

Every time he gets close to falling to where I fell, close to going to the Darkest Darkness, of loss and total abandonment, loving hands shoot out safety nets, pull him back home, nestle him safely in, and start cleaning up the mess.

And yet, the amazing gift they had all given me, quite by accident, when they

Let

Me

Fall

An enabler is a set of hands that stops the descent. It is a well-meaning set of loving hands that do not know they are actually robbing their loved one of that which I know intimately. The Darkest Darkness of The Bottom.

The only stimulus that makes a person

decide

to start

to climb

back up.

Though they sought to hate me, though they sought to reject me, though they stepped away, pulled their hands back, watched me tumble down down down. And though they pulled him in close, as they retreated to the warm safety of nice homey homes and loving family circles… After all of their attempts to shove me away and protect him fiercely… I was the one that was given the gift, and he was the one who was robbed of it. I was the one who was placed squarely in the position to receive freedom and he was one who was entombed into the dead end of enabling safety nets.

In the end, I was the one who ended up learning how to climb. Who built the kind of strength that only comes from years of bloody-fingered grip on inch after inch of rocky edges. The one who dug deeply into the sides of that mountain as I climbed and unearthed the secrets of healing. The one whose heart cemented to the heart of her creator, a bond more solid than any comfort could have created. From those years of sole dependence. From the fact that every single inch of my movement was actually the art of learning to follow.

They dropped me. And they cradled him. And here we are. Thirteen years later. It is clear to see which one was the truly necessary love. It is clear to see which one gave more of a gift.

To love sometimes means to see beyond the immediate primal urge to protect in the moment. My parents dropped me too, you see. I did not understand at the time, though I was too busy being utterly destroyed to much notice, to be honest.

Because that primal urge to protect gets mixed up with our foolish human understanding and it causes us to actually stop the course of cause and effect that has the potential to bring true healing to the mind of a broken soul.

What we end up doing in our frantic desire to save, is condemn. Condemn our loved one to a life of sitting cradled comfortably in the net of semi-darkness, never to know the Darkest Darkness that their choices could and should actually lead them to.

The Darkness that would scare them enough to begin that climb. The darkness that would consume their old self and make the birth of a new self possible. 

Almost no one who is broken will choose to climb out of a comfortable net in semi-darkness. The stimulus is not nearly great enough.

Their brokenness is being bandaged carefully by someone nearby who is making sure their life does not fall completely apart. They are making sure the children do not lose a parent. They are making sure they do not lose a spouse or a child. They are making sure others do not see how bad things really are because that would be humiliating. They are carefully trying to hold together a broken vase with their hands, shards digging into their flesh day after day, desperately trying to keep the shards away from the wounded person, for they are already fragile, aren’t they? They cannot handle any more, can they? If we let go and let them fall, we would suffer too, right? The kids would suffer. We would be embarrassed and everyone would see.

And perhaps worst of all, that person we love would fall.

Down.

Down.

Down.

To the Darkest Darkness.

And there is no guarantee they will ever return.

So we hold tight. We sweep up every mess. We put the net out and we exhaust ourselves and run ourselves ragged trying to catch them over and over and over again. Trying to hold the family together. Trying to make sure they are kept in the Safe Place. The comfortable net of semi-darkness. Where you will both remain in this dance for the rest of your lives. What a terrible fate. Worse than the alternative, when it is truly considered, in my opinion.

The true love, dear reader, if you are the net right now to someone who is falling, who should be falling much farther than you are letting them, is to let them find that darkness. Let them become frightened enough of what their choices could actually create. Let them find that terror of The Bottom Place. This is their only hope. They will never learn to climb from the net.

But there is a light in that place. Only one. And he is called Rescuer. He is called Healing. He is called Peace. He is called The Light. He is called Savior. He is not a net. He is not trying to cushion and comfort. He is going to lead. He is going to challenge that broken man or woman to begin climbing. To learn to listen. To learn to follow. To learn a bond and a satisfaction and a nurturing and a healing like nothing they have ever seen or felt before. He is there to show them that there is only one hope, one light in the dark place. And the terror of the darkness will create in the stark contrast and the horrific desperation, a desire to find and know and follow this light.

And they will climb. And the climb will be so hard and so painful that they will slowly abandon their fundamental weakness in exchange for hard earned muscle and grit.

I know this climb. I know it like I know my very bones, for it is inside of me, the framework of the new creation I became. It has been my journey. It is my story.

And I cannot thank enough those who let me fall.

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