If you’re unaware, SkepChick has a tradition called the Afternoon Inquisistion wherein every day one of the writers posts a question to the readers and opens a discussion. Sometimes these are serious and sometimes silly, but they pretty much always make you think and give an excuse to excercise your brain. Today, the question kind of resonated with me: “What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?” It is, of course, a highly personal question, and the answers vary greatly from person to person (as the comments clearly demonstrate). Obviously, I have my own ideas, but I won’t be sharing it just now, as it’s irrelevant to the point I’m about to make.
My point relates more directly to the answer given by TomDG (scroll down to comment #8): “The worst I can imagine would be a knowledge of absolute solitude caused by you. I can’t imagine the mix of grief, guilt and loneliness that would come from that.” I don’t know if it’s the worst, but I’m willing to bet he’s not far off of the mark. Self-imposed absolute solitude isn’t the worst, because you can generally end it when you tire of it, but I think he’s talking about your actions driving everyone away and having no one to blame but yourself. While it’s not absolute, I’m sure anyone reading this knows that recently I managed to alienate a rather sizeable swath of my friends. Many people I loved and cared about are gone from my life, most likely forever, and the fault lies entirely with me.
“Grief, guilt, and loneliness.” Yes, I think that sums it up quite well. And, unlike so many of life’s problems, there feeling of helplessness that goes with it is pretty well justified, since there’s nothing that can really be done about it now. It is simply too late to undo the damage. Time heals, moving on, blah, blah, blah… cold comfort all that. I suppose I could make it easier on myself by, well, not reading their writings and such, but quality information and conversations that actually make you think are a rare commodity in this world.
On a semi-related note, I had a conversation today about what to do with this site. Part of me wanted to just scrap it and be done with the whole thing, but something stopped me. The more I thought about it, the more reasons I saw to let it be. The Last Road will be staying, and I will continue to write here, both as a reminder to myself of my past mistakes, and so no one can ever accuse me of trying to cover up or hide the things I’ve done. I expect this will upset some people, but I can’t imagine that any of those people ren’t already upset, so I it’s unlikely to affect my decision at all.
