What do you do when you turn out the lights and you’re left alone with your thoughts and NONE of them are good. When you find yourself in a dark place where your life seems to have no meaning… no hope and all you see ahead of you is more pain, more headaches and more heartaches?

Everyone has periods in their life where they feel down, sad, hopeless… helpless even. But what happens when that becomes your every day? Day in and Day out. Year in and Year out. When you feel that it’s inescapable and never ending. When you can’t see any positives in your future any more… when you start to feel the crushing weight of a life so decidedly unlike the one you wanted, pressing so heavily and inevitably on your chest, that you don’t feel like you can breathe any more?

What happens then? How do you pick yourself up and keep on going when you know the things that are making you so desperately unhappy are beyond your control. External factors that you wish you could change, that you really want to change but which simply won’t yield not matter how much energy you expend.

I have pain… constant, pervasive, exhausting, gut wrenching, soul destroying pain. Pain so bad and persistent I think about ending it all the time. It has turned me into a sad, unhappy, miserable and negative person. I know this because the people who know me the best, who live with me and who supposedly love me the most, have told me so. I am hard to live with because I feel like I have little to live for. I have spent years flailing about trying to find things that will make me happy… but ultimately, it’s so desperately difficult to damn near impossible, to be happy, upbeat or positive when your entire body is wracked by sensations of pain that no amount of analgesics seems to touch. What happens then?

You get to a point where you think ‘I can’t take it any more’ and the only thing that helps you carry on are the people you love. They become your raison d’etre… your whole reason to exist ends up being external to yourself and who you are and becomes anchored in the people around you. I’m not here because I want to be. I’m not here because I love who I am. I’m not here because I love my life. I’m only here because copping out would hurt all the people I love… and I can’t do that to them. I am only here these last four years, because of them.

But then, what happens when the people you love reach the self same conclusions that you reached years ago? And they too decide that you’re miserable and unhappy and unbearable to be around? And then they want to get away from that which you desperately want to escape too? I can’t escape me… but they can. What happens when your strength, your support, your raisons d’etre also decide you’re a useless, hopeless, miserable, sad, helpless human being and they don’t want to be near you any more? What happens when the external factors keeping you going, start to disappear? Your beautiful child grows up to live their own lives and don’t need you. Your husband decides he can’t take any more strain and sadness and decides to leave you. Your support network starts to crumble around you, leaving you flailing in the dark wondering what happened to ‘for the rest of our lives’. What happens then?

How do you change things you can’t change to make others happy?

How do you change yourself when everything about you is broken?

How do you pull it together when everything is beyond your control?