The Descent VIII

I didn’t know how to do it.

I didn’t know where to begin or what I was even looking for, but something in me had already decided. Reading wasn’t doing it. Thinking wasn’t doing it. Listening to anyone else wasn’t doing it. Whatever this was, it wasn’t going to be handed to me from the outside.

So I started to write.

Not in any structured way. Not with any idea of what I was doing. Just writing whatever came up, without stopping, without filtering it, without trying to make it sound right or even make sense. It felt stupid at first, like I was just spilling thoughts onto a page for no reason.

But almost immediately I saw something.

The thoughts didn’t stop.

They looped. They repeated. They contradicted themselves. They attacked me, defended me, blamed me, justified everything, tore everything down again. The same themes kept coming back over and over no matter what direction I tried to take.

Failure. Fear. Not being enough. Trying to fix it. Failing again.

It was like watching something that had been running my entire life without me ever really seeing it.

And the more I wrote, the less it felt like I was the one doing it.

It was just happening.

Relentless. Aggressive. Sometimes completely unhinged, but also strangely precise. It didn’t care what I wanted to see. It didn’t care how I felt about it. It just kept exposing whatever was there.

There was no comfort in it. No relief. If anything, it made everything sharper.

But I couldn’t stop.

Because for the first time, it felt like I wasn’t avoiding anything. I was looking directly at it.

And once that started…

there was no going back.