There’s something rather unsettling about finding your footing after a big fall. Do you twist your ankle on the way down and make a mess of your clothes in the mud? Your pristine, white tee, now covered in streaks of dirt and other unsavoury unknowns. Perhaps you have grazed your elbows and knees—and while your bones are okay, you have broken your glasses in the confusion.
When you’re alone in the wilderness, a fall is scary enough. It doesn’t matter whether the trail you walked was treacherous or mild. Time ceases to be linear, and you wonder how long has passed since you found yourself disoriented in a terribly foreign place. It takes just one fall to take away your confidence. So what happens when you have been subjected to the same little tumbles down the path you travel?
I guess you’ve always been a little clumsy, but your friend says you’ll be able to handle it—that you just need to take his hand and trust him. And for a little while, this journey is wonderful, chaotic, and so vastly rich. But when the rain comes, threatening to wash away your road ahead, it’s so easy to see the end and think it’ll be okay. The hand that once guided you suddenly feels… oddly distant and no longer willing to put in the work for the journey.
Remember, you are on your own in the wilderness.
The silence is enough to make you question why you are here in the first place, but you remember the words spoken to you at the very beginning. It’s… courageous to trust, right? But this should have been the time for you to speak up. Because this reticence has begun to carve out a space in your mind, leaving you to think about the worst possible scenarios. This feeling is wrong. You must be imagining things.
They’ve never given you a reason to doubt them… right?
It must have been the fall that’s got your knickers in a twist. It takes just one fall to doubt yourself. You still know up from down, and wrong from right. The path has become far more muddy and uncertain, but you still trust the one you’re following… the one who took his hand back and avoided your gaze. Perhaps, they’re just stressed out about getting us to safety.
You may have lost some perspective after losing your glasses.
There’s no reason to feel this unease and sudden confusion. Because if you doubt, you’re the crazy one for even thinking such a thing. There is no way you can get out of this on your own. The rain and the slippery slope down are nothing you have ever encountered out here. So is there any other choice but to believe in this man?
I just wish you had believed in yourself a little more.
This was the start of your insanity. A delirium brought about… by what exactly? You began to mix up your left and right, and truth slowly blended together to create this strange, grey room you found yourself in. Nothing is ever black and white. It was silly to believe that a small repeated encounter with another woman was more than just an innocent thing. You’re the insecure one. After all, they didn’t intend to hurt you, so it doesn’t count.
When you can no longer distinguish friend from foe, and no longer trust whoever was standing in front of you, I think it is safe to say there was something wrong with your arrangement… it’s not normal to believe you will be betrayed by the people you love. So, I hope you learn how to trust those around you once again. And figure out whether they are friend or foe.
But this grey room is like being trapped in a straitjacket of spiralling anxieties. Never really knowing how you’ll be hurt next… and whether it’s all in your head. For a long time, you lived in that muted haze, where every lie was just a “misunderstanding”, and every betrayal was just your insecurity. Don’t you think it’s time to put on that spare pair of glasses and see what it is that’s in front of you?
The world, once blurry for a time, has slowly come into sharp focus. You still have mud on your white tee. Your knees are still grazed, and the wilderness is still vast and quiet. But you are no longer that klutz. You stand up, not because a hand reached down to save you, but because your own legs remember how to carry your weight. You look at the changing horizon and realise that while you were “lost”, you can now see exactly where you are going.
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