Long days passed before I could write again. Despite all my brave talk about surrender, I was too deep in the void to find my way to the computer. The one grace I had was that I could still read. From the depths of her Journal of Solitude, poet May Sarton reached out to me:
“In my lifetime, I have seen one comforting myth after another taken apart as I, like everybody else, have tried to come to grips with hard truth … The marvel is that there are still so many people of courage who go on fighting in spite of all their reasons for despair.”
This was not the same void I had written about in my books in the past—the theoretical one in which redemption was possible.
This one was dark and endless, no way out, and now that I was in it, I was sure that I was the only one in the world who had ever felt this hopeless.
In the inky black, voices whispered to me: Belle still has her job. Why don’t I? If only I’d fought harder to get into that room on that cursed cracker pitch! And, of course, What will become of me?
While I strove to feel God’s love embracing me, I was vulnerable to imaginings of the darkest hues.
And the rat didn’t help.
Chapter 18 from The Year I Saved My (downsized) Soul by Carol Orsborn
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