I'm in Hell and I can't get out

I'm in hell and I can't get out. And not the kind of hell that's other people or like how I'm my own worst enemy. I mean that my life is literally a living hell at this moment. It's like, on the surface, someone might say I'm being over dramatic. "Come on, It's not that bad" they might say, "You've got three meals, a cot, and the clothes on your back." "Surely you're not saying you're worse off than those poor folks out there on the street." Not at all, my point isn't that I am in a special kind of hell, no sir, in that sense you'd be quite right. We're all burning in hell together, and it's happening right here on Earth. If only we'd be lucky enough to be granted that sweet release of death, that would be much more preferable. But this? I don't know what to say or do about it, I'm not tired, sick, or feeling suffocated. I'm just sitting here in the middle of the fire. Cooking to a crisp. I can feel my blood boiling, the flesh burning off my skin, melting, dripping.

And all I can do is suffer. There's nothing else to be done. Anything I feel like doing brings me immense discomfort. Everything I've loved until now makes me sick to my core. I'm alone with no hope of companionship. I am broken without a chance for repair. I'm stuck, rotting, fermenting, and brewing in my own filth, and no one's coming to save me. My body is slowly deteriorating. No person has known hell until they start seeing their body slowly fall apart with nothing they can do about it. No one knows the absolute horror of trying your best, again and again, of never giving up and never giving in, and then failing again and again and again, and actually becoming worse than they were when they started; until they do.

Never mind success, imagine giving your 100% and actually digressing instead of moving forward. With no hope of victory, having only ever known defeat, what does it feel like to look ahead and see even worse pains than the wildest horrors you can imagine? If you are in a state where you feel like this, all I can say is welcome. Welcome to the club of endless horrors. You know what you did or why and how you've ended up here. Perhaps you just got unlucky, that's how most of us ended up here. No matter what brought you here, we're all stuck together now. I won't ask you to take solace in anything at all, this isn't the place for that. This is the home of the devil and the ones who've lost their ways. Every day people sell their souls for cheap thrills which puts them on the fast track to this shithole.

A new sucker's born every minute. I used to write here for so many reasons. At first, it was just to inculcate a writing habit, because all the greats had one. Presidents, authors, and directors, all the ones I admired seemed to have some redeeming ritual that they engaged in regularly. Reading nonfiction had been my saving grace, so perhaps writing things would be my redemption. Joke's on me I suppose, there's no redemption in hell. Nothing here but eternal damnation. I can't help but think of the Good Place, and how they talked about how hell can be the path to heaven. Of all the silly pop-corn television I had ever seen, I never expected to get something of such substance from a silly comedy show about good-looking people in imaginary heaven. 

But then again, that was just a silly show I suppose. Not that I'm trying to keep myself from getting hurt by staying down in the mud, I am well beyond trying at this point in time. By now I feel like I've come to accept my fate, passively, tacitly, and fully, albeit somewhat reluctantly. Every day, I'm haunted by my dreams. Now forever out of reach, they've become akin to the howls of a banshee, some kind of unending nightmare that mocks me into vile submission. I remember how at first, I started to write these like a diary. My thoughts lay bare unfiltered, day-to-day happenings, plans, hopes, and dreams, all jotted down on a computer screen, with melodic clicks of the keyboard. 

With time I became sick of talking about myself, making a foolish mockery of it at best, and a narcissistic pathology at worst. It felt so self-indulgent, so unnecessary. Then came the idea that I should practice writing about ideas and bigger things. Things that would be actually useful. And so I went on, no matter what I did, it never felt enough. No matter how many clicks were there on the keyboard, I never got anywhere. At last, I crossed the 100-article mark a few weeks ago, and it all came screeching to a halt. A month ago, I joined a new office. A marketing firm that makes me feel useless. Full of incompetent fools who nevertheless do much better than me in every regard conceivable. 

I entered the doors with a head full of grand ideas, now I leave the place feeling deflated, more and more so with each passing day. For the things I thought I knew, I had no idea how to execute, and what you can't see, you'll never get. With a whole month now behind me, what do I have to show for it? A severe lack of confidence, some horrible working habits, a head full of shit, and a heart clogged with grease. All for nothing but 25,000 rupees to show for it in a month. All of which ends up inside my belly, as poison coursing through my veins. I look around me and I see people who don't even try. I see them blessed with good looks, a close-knit family, and a circle of loved ones. I see them with their own businesses and multiple streams of income. 

Most of them have significant others. A few of them are set to get married and start families. And I'm out here learning my ABCs. I suppose everyone has seen some version of the image below. It works well as a cautionary tale when you're young and inexperienced. But what about when you're in the pit? Nobody talks about life in the pit. They all love to talk about avoiding it. "Watch out for sins, for they'll lead you straight to hell!" they say, with an almost enthusiastic zeal that seems borderline inappropriate. "It leads to firey torture and eternal damnation." and so on. But you won't hear many first-hand accounts of life from inside the pit. Why is that? Doesn't it make for a great story? We all love to admire mountain climbers as they get out of seemingly impossible tight spots like these.

Just look at that little guy! Such a commendable effort he's making. Surely the first man simply got lucky, the second one is the real hero if he can get out of that fucking shit hole. That's just it, though, it's quite literally a shit hole. It's a little cave that's been dug into the dirt, to drop a big old deuce into. A composting burrow to decompose some waste material. It's a place where worthless things go to die and get suffocated. Where even lesser creatures feast upon those remains in hopes of salvaging something even remotely worthwhile. It's ugly, dirty, it smells like shit, and if it comes in contact with a living being, it might infect them with deathly disease as well. Do you think anything can actually come out of that in one piece? Look at the second guy one more time. Does he really have even the smallest glimmer of hope on his own?

The reason why nobody talks about living in hell is because it's bleak and it fucking sucks beyond what words can express. It's a cursed life filled with unimaginable horrors where you get raped by demons and eaten by vultures all before noon. The reason they don't talk about it, is because if you're in hell, you're basically fucked. There's no hope, and getting out is so damn fucking hard, you honestly might as well quit. Looking at the path that lies ahead for the second guy, doesn't it make sense for him to just live down there where he belongs? Remeber, time's running out for both these fellas. Before they know it, both of them will be dead and under the ground anyway. Sinner or saint, they'll both end up dead no matter what they do. 

So what's the fucking point? Why roll with the punches when you can roll right into your grave? I'm not here to give you a fucking reason. I'm not even trying to convince myself. I'm just the second guy right now, sick and tired for fighting a losing battle. I'm just sitting down on that deep dark hole in the ground, trying to catch my breathe, being unable to breathe, because I'm fucking underground in a god forsaken shit hole. And while I struggle to catch my breathe, I find myself being forced to contemlate how I got here. If you feel the same, all I can say is welcome to the club. I don't have any words of comfort for you, I'd step on your face in a heart beat if it gives me even a single fresh breathe of oxygen. Which is why I'll say it's best steer clear of me, and why I don't blame anyone for avoiding the unbearably heavy anchor that is my existence. 

At least I am one of the few fortunate ones that knows exactly why I've ended up here. At least I can look back and see the exact moments I sold my own soul, for my own thrills. Obviously, it wasn't worth it, even though I knew very well in those moments that I'll have to pay a heavy price for my actions. Yet at least I know that I made the choice to be down here. There's a certain comfort in that, the comfort of knowing that you deserve all the horrible shit that's happening to you. Not many of the cursed souls down here can say the same. Most of them barely made a single choice in their entire lives. Either way, it's time for me to return to my slumber. I have a lifetime of dying alone every single day awaiting me when I wake up. I must repay for my sins with eternal damnation. At least there's some comfort in knowing that even though the world is a horrible and senseless place, a monster like me is being put to justice. 

Even if the world is senselessly cruel and randomly demonic, at least I'm exactly where I belong.