#3. You can get out of hell, but you will never get hell out of you.
My grandfather used to say that with time, bad luck, and enough pain, we can all become bad apples.
He was right.
All three factors (time, bad luck, and a lot of pain) came together in a perfect storm that ended up descending me to hell.
I spent a long time there (from 18 to 33).
But I wasn’t aware of how screwed up I was until I started to get out of there and began to see some light.
Looking back on life, I see it wasn’t all loss. I’ve learned things that only people who have been through complicated lives can know.
Here are three of them that, indeed, if you have ever been an inhabitant of hell, you undoubtedly know well.
1. Silence can scream so loud it’s capable of deafening you.
“The blackness in which I woke up those nights was blind and impenetrable. Such blackness as would make your ears ache to hear.” — Cormac McCarthy, book: The Road.
Nothing is more terrible than the silence a human has to face when he suddenly knows he is defeated and alone.
It is a dagger that sticks in your stomach and twists.
It is a dog that stares at you, licking its lips before feeding on your sweet fear.
It is a poison that enters your nose, makes your ears burn, your heart beat a mile a minute, and your blood bubble, while it squeezes you like an orange until it leaves you without a drop of hope.
It is a creditor executing an eviction order. It’s a loan shark smiling with gold teeth after taking everything from you.
But that silence is like alcohol in the wound; it ends up healing you. That silence ends up shouting everything that you repressed with substance abuse and imperfect life.
Moral: After being your enemy, silence ends up becoming your best friend.
2. When someone offers you a forbidden apple, something inside you knows it.
“Listening to what the body says and feels is important for a person who believes in something. For the spirit or the mind in the end do not cease to be extensions of the body.” — Haruki Murakami, book: Novelist as a Vocation.
When you spend a good time in hell, you can detect events of no apparent importance that you know can change your life forever.
Nothing is coincidental.
I will give you a personal example.
A person gave me his phone number on a napkin written in carmine at a costume party in the style of Eyes White Shut.
As I grabbed that napkin, the world began to move in slow motion: the servers, the people on the dance floor, the groups of people smoking and laughing in the corners.
That instant seemed like an eternity. Inside me, I was thinking about what to do with that damned forbidden apple, with that napkin.
And I knew with every pore of my skin that for my life not to go to shit, I had to tear up that napkin.
I didn’t, and I lost my partner, my job, and my savings.
Moral: when a demon walks towards you, you can feel it — even if it has the face of an Angel.
3. You can get out of hell, but you will never get hell out of you.
“The more cheerful my life is, the more dismal are the stories I write.” — Anton Chekhov
In AA (alcoholics anonymous), people always introduce themselves in the same way. Hello, my name is [insert name], and I am an alcoholic. — Even when they have not been drinking for a decade.
And this, in my case, I have found applies to everything.
- Hi, my name is AG, and I’m a smoker (even if I haven’t smoked for years).
- Hi, my name is AG, and I’m an alcoholic (even if I haven’t had a drink in years).
- Hi, my name is AG, and I’m a carbohydrate addict (even though I’ve been on a diet for a couple of years).
- Hi, my name is AG, and I’m addicted to toxic love (even though I’ve been out of relationships for four years).
The point is that if I forget and smoke a cigarette, go out one night and have a scotch, or go to Vegas, I’m sure to wake up some demons that escaped from hell with me and live peacefully in my head.
On top of that, there’s a dark voice that occasionally wants me to wallow in the mud again. It’s a seductive voice. It’s a patient voice. It’s a voice that knows that the bumps in life are their allies.
It’s a voice that tells you, “Smoke a cigarette” after a shitty day.
A voice says, “Go out for drinks,” after your wife leaves you.
It is a voice that will take any opportunity to get you to fall into its clutches and go back to hell with her.
Moral: getting out of hell is not as difficult as people think; the hard part is not falling back in.
A virtual hug
AG