Tower: 8. Thoughts of Leaving

Five or six years before the BF broke up, I went thru my own dark night of the soul where it felt like my world was pulled out from under me. It felt like my soul was falling into blackness and there was no comfort anywhere. Looking back, I’m sure I exhibited all the signs of clinical depression. I had always been kind of a dark child. Happy but prone to episodes of extreme unhappiness for no apparent reason. I don’t think my seratonin levels were correct from birth because I could always flip very easily into being depressed. It didn’t really help that things like “chemical imbalances” were not acknowledged in the group as valid. It was just called “being in your mind” and there were no chemical situations in your body that God wasn’t stronger than, so you were just supposed to tough it out. I didn’t think anyone could relate to what I was going thru. I was told I was in my mind or indulging. But to be fair, I think that unless you suffer from that sort of imbalance, you can’t really understand what it’s like. I remember going thru such an incredibly dark time… personally, emotionally… and that I considered leaving the group to go be somewhere else. I don’t think I even had an idea about anywhere to go, I just wanted to go someplace and die. Not to kill myself. Just to go someplace and wait to die. But that didn’t have anything to do with the group. Even at that time, I knew that all the group had to offer me was what I brought to it myself. But I did start taking steps around that time. I dropped most of my services. Gradually, so it wouldn’t cause ripples. Like, if we moved into a new location for something, I would suddenly become unavailable to do the setup there that I had been doing. It was very deliberate. I had told Xena not to volunteer me for any more services because I was going to be dropping them as I was able to. At this time, I had been serving intensely for 12-13 years. And although I had benefitted from it somewhat, I was feeling like I just couldn’t cope with it then. There was such a pain, such a darkness, that I hit bottom. It felt like I had lost everything… my idea of god, my idea of love, my idea of me. It was all empty to me. And no one around me could understand what I was going thru. And at that time I considered leaving… but I didn’t. I’m not really sure why I didn’t. It was probably because of my friends. All but a couple of my friends were in the group and I knew if I went someplace else I’d be going thru the same emotional stuff anyway. So I decided to stay.

In the beginning, you feel like someone leaves because they can’t cut it. They must not have what it takes. They are choosing to follow their dreams and achieve something in a worldly way and that doesn’t really jive with what we’re doing… what we’re doing is much higher. As time went on and I went thru my own soul-searching, that changed. Each person that left was different, but each person was a unique soul that I had shared part of my life and love with. I was much more compassionate to people going thru stuff and if they chose to leave, I understood that they felt their path led in a differernt direction and it didn’t mean anything about “where they were at” spiritually.