Despair Loves A Closed Room

Despair rewrites thought so every path ends the same. Name one new truth, and the mind begins to move again. That small shift is how freedom starts.

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Some nights
I just stare at the wall
like it might blink first.

The room is quiet,
but my head runs old footage.
Same failures.
Same conversations I never had.
Same endings where I lose.

I used to call it being realistic.
Planning for the worst.
Preparing my nervous system.

Truth is, I trained my own mind
to only screen horror films of my life.

No alternate scenes.
No different doors.

Despair set up camp
the moment I stopped letting myself imagine
any other ending.

“Despair grows when imagination forgets it has options.”

I remember a stretch of years where I wouldn’t let myself picture anything good. If a hopeful thought showed up, I shut it down before it finished its sentence. It felt safer that way. Growing up, whenever I imagined something better, reality swung back like a belt. You learn fast in that kind of house. You learn that imagination feels dangerous. So you start using it for one job only, predicting how things fall apart. That feels like control, but it slowly turns into a cage you build from the inside.

Despair rarely walks in out of nowhere. It usually creeps in after long seasons where your imagination works against you. You picture every outcome where you get left, lied to, exposed, embarrassed. The body hears those pictures as warnings. Heart rate shifts. Shoulders tense. Sleep thins out. The nervous system doesn’t care that these are scenarios instead of facts. It just registers threat and adjusts. Over time, it forgets how to stand still in front of something that might go well. Calm feels suspicious. Opportunity looks like bait.

I used to judge myself for this. I thought it meant I lacked faith or discipline. Now I see it as a survival response that stayed too long. When you’ve lived through enough chaos, your imagination becomes an early-warning system. It scans every face, every room, every text, and runs simulations. Who will get loud. Who will vanish. Where the hit might land. That pattern kept you alive once. It helped you read danger before you had language. The problem comes when life changes and the pattern doesn’t. Your body keeps bracing for storms that already passed.

There’s a quiet kind of work I do now. I notice when my mind starts writing the worst possible script. Then I pause and ask a simple question: “What are three other ways this could go?” This gives me options. Maybe they answer. Maybe they don’t. Maybe I set a boundary and the person respects it. Maybe the meeting goes neutral instead of catastrophic. The goal isn’t to force a positive spin. The goal is to remind my nervous system that reality branches. That there is more than one road out of a moment.

You don’t have to believe in best-case scenarios right away. That can feel fake when you’re used to impact. Your imagination is a workshop. You can place more than one outcome on the table. When you do that, despair loses a little ground. It has less proof. Your body gets a taste of something different. Possibility. Sometimes that’s enough to get you through the night without assuming every door leads back to the same room.

I’ve poured everything into this. Healing Thoughts II: 33 Poems and Meditations for Emotional Renewal is up for order now. These pages carry the deepest, sharpest work I’ve done, and I can’t wait for them to be in your hands.

Where has your imagination been rehearsing your downfall instead of practicing other outcomes?

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“The words are purposes. The words are maps.” — Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck (1973)