The Descent V

It’s hard to explain how all of this, everything I’ve written about, feels like it’s behind me now as if it never even happened. Not that I forgot it, I remember all of it, but the idea that it had anything to do with what I am has mostly fallen away. About the only thing that remained untouched was my love for my children. That stayed. Everything else started to feel less certain, less fixed, like it had been something learned rather than something true.

The world itself started to feel strange. Even calling it a “world” or a “place” didn’t seem as solid as it once did. Where are we, really? What is this that we’re in? Why do people live the way they do, moving from one confused moment to the next as if it’s normal? Is this how it was meant to be, or did it just become this way over time?

I started noticing something about people. Once life feels stable enough, they stop questioning it. Whatever patterns they learned early on, whatever ways of thinking and reacting took hold, those just continue. They don’t get examined, they get reinforced. Over time, they stop looking like patterns at all and start looking like reality itself.

That made me look back at my own life differently.

It didn’t feel like a series of separate events anymore. It felt like something repeating. Not the exact same situations, but the same structure underneath them. The same kinds of feelings, the same reactions, the same conclusions forming again and again no matter where I went or what changed around me.

It didn’t feel random.

It felt like something that continued itself.

And that’s when the question changed.

Instead of asking what was wrong with everything around me, I started to wonder what was creating the pattern itself. What was holding it in place. Was it thought? Was it belief? Was it something in the body, some kind of tension that directed attention without me realizing it? Was it something passed along, something learned so early it never got questioned?

Or was it something even more basic than that?

I didn’t know.

But it didn’t feel like it was just me. The same kinds of patterns seemed to show up everywhere, in different people, in different situations, as if they were all being drawn from the same source.

That’s when something else started to form.

What if the problem wasn’t just what was happening…

What if it was the one it was happening to?

Not in the way I had blamed myself before, but in a completely different way. Not that I was doing something wrong, but that the “me” I had been trying to fix might be part of the structure itself. That it might be the thing keeping everything exactly as it was.

I didn’t have an answer.

But I couldn’t stop looking at it.

My life was about to take a new turn. Events that I never could have instigated or brought to life found me instead of me finding them. It was unheard of what happened next, but it did. I’m telling it exactly as I remember it.