The Beauty of Despair

What exactly is despair? A state of mind entered into not on account of a person’s own will and volition, and not one that they feel pulled into by a strength greater than their own. Despair is more akin to the person who slumps down defeated after a long struggle. It comes to them when they feel they are at the limit of their capacities, when it feels as if they have reached the final step on the staircase of existence and there is nothing new for them to strive for or experience. 

Thankfully, despair, while being quite convincing in this regard, is nothing more than an illusion. Not in the sense that a person doesn’t actually experience the dark and heavy thoughts and feelings that accompany it. Those are as real as it gets. What is not real is the conclusions that are drawn from this experience. Despair is not a final stop or an end to happiness. Despair is a crucible in which everyone, once there, has the opportunity to reach down even further within themselves and discover new strength that they did not know they had. And with the discovery of new strength comes the discovery of new possibilities.  

Much of what we discover and attain in the way of progress can only be gained through difficult circumstances. Anyone capable of examining their own life can agree with this sentiment. The path towards being whoever and whatever it is one wants to be contains both difficult and easy moments, but it is the difficult moments that are remembered most vividly and looked at most fondly. 

A client that we’ll call Johnnie, complained to me for months and months about her dislike of doing hard things, and really that word doesn’t even capture it–hatred is the most appropriate word to describe her feelings. Week after week she would sit and talk about her life and the things she was trying her hardest not to face, using every method of avoidance she could conjure up in her mind. And the harder she tried to avoid; the more difficult things became for her until there was nothing else she could do to avoid the challenges in her life. As dogged as she had been, she was finally all out of tricks, and with this end came the beginning of her own personal encounter with despair. 

Despair is not the final stop or the end of happiness. Despair is a crucible in which everyone, once there, has the opportunity to reach down even further within themselves and discover new strength that they did not know they had.

She had been sick–sad, blue, depressed, ill, any and all of those things, but none of them, no matter how long they lasted, had been enough to make her give up trying to push away her problems. Realizing that she was surrounded so to speak, with no more exits (she had caught on to the fact that her attempts to flee caused more problems than they solved), she was brought into a new psychological state. It was pain in a way she hadn’t experienced pain before. It was blunt and direct, and ached slowly. It felt like it was not only surrounding her, but coming from inside of her, which it was because she was not only facing the things she had avoided, but the failure of no longer being able to avoid them. What was happening to her is exactly what was previously described, she was slumping down into a dark place in which she felt helpless. No longer capable of keeping at bay the problems in her life, and hopeless about her chances of ever overcoming them. 

I’m partly to blame for Johnnie’s situation. As a therapist I insisted that she turn her attention towards the things she desperately did not want to look at. I wasn’t abrasive. Sometimes I could only manage to get her to look at the details of her life for a few minutes at a time, and sometimes less than that. But I was persistent in my encouragement that she keep coming back to her situation and try to see it with clarity. 

The wish for things to be easy is difficult to give up, and it was just as difficult to push Johnnie to relinquish it, but the only way to help her was to convince her to let go of it. The best help I could provide was getting her to come to terms with the fact that life is never really easy for anybody. And, the only thing left for a person to do once they know this is to embrace the struggle and take the hard road. It is a difficult road because to walk an unfamiliar path is to embark on a journey without a map in search of somewhere you’ve never been and are not quite sure even exists, with nothing but the hope you have within yourself to carry you forward. But, if you can make the difficult start and keep moving through the treacherous middle, you find that eventually the journey does become less difficult and even though you don’t know exactly where you’re going or what you’re doing, you start to trust that you’ll know when you get there. 

I didn’t know how the journey would go for Johnnie or where it would lead, but I knew enough about the beauty of despair, the psychological challenges and benefits of it, to trust that if helped through it, she would emerge stronger in the end, and a gradual shift did start to happen as she showed more tolerance for her experience. Though still not easy, the development was positive for her. She doesn’t feel like she has to please everybody anymore, whereas before she could barely stand the thought of not doing so. Now she thinks about what she has tolerated and what she has allowed other people to do to her, and whether or not this ever did or ever could satisfy her longings for happiness. She feels anger, and joy, and guilt, and sadness, and fear, and relief, deeply and genuinely, whereas before she was only capable of being “happy” in the most plastic and inauthentic way.  She started to get angry about all the things she wanted and needed and had gone a very long time without, because she did think she deserved to give them to herself or get them from anyone else, not unless she earned them. 

…life is never really easy for anybody. And, the only thing left to do once you know this is to embrace the struggle and take the hard road.

Despair is what unlocked this depth of experience within Johnnie. It was previously described as being in a crucible, but it’s just as appropriate to compare it to being locked inside of a mental gymnasium and strengthening your mind is the only way to break free. Anyone who continually expects ease and comfort in life will be perpetually disappointed. They’ll sit on the floor lamenting the unfairness of life while wasting away. This is the false conclusion that a misunderstanding of despair leads to, and this is why it is important to realize that even in despair, and in a certain sense, only through despair can a person transform their life.

The person who undergoes this transformation does so by choosing to become stronger, not by waiting for the burdens of their life to become easier.