Digging Out

A guide to finding yourself in a hole.

If you’ve ever fallen into a low, low place, you know the stages. 

• Falling.

• Fear. Panic. Pity. Despair. Anger.

• Looking up.

• Acceptance.

• Courage.

• Digging Out/Deeper.

Trying to understand where I am means dissecting the circumstances that brought me here, and how I might be able to escape. Currently, I’m Digging Out. or Deeper.  Hard to tell just yet.

Falling is hard to see in real time. It happens at a normal pace, but time seems to collapse around the fall. The principles of General Relativity apply, and months might go by without realizing you’re on the way down. It’s usually only after we find ourselves in a hole that we even realize we fell.  

During the fall, if we become aware, resistance is a reflex: reaching out, grabbing, gasping are all a natural consequence. Fear and Panic might even surface during the fall, but they are unlikely to fully manifest.  These are indications that we are falling.

If you survive, it may feel easier to breathe once you reach the bottom.

After impact, Looking Up inspires a multitude of questions about why, when, where and how. It’s a curious place that might come before, during, or after Fear, Panic, Anger, or even Pity.

Realizing we’ve fallen can be terrifying.  Fear and Panic are ever present.  We might self-soothe, assess damages, and even sink into Despair and Pity, although we’re most susceptible to these low-valence states after we’ve made futile attempts at escape.  

There’s Anger at the fall.  Anger at the hole.  Anger at ourselves for not seeing it, for not being able to get out quickly or at all. Feelings can oscillate between waves of Anger and Despair with blips of Pity. Fear stays mostly constant, but sometimes exacerbated by Looking Up, searching for certainty about where we are and what got us here.

Eventually, you become familiar with the place you’ve landed.  Possibly even resigned to your fate. This is Acceptance. Acceptance doesn’t have to preclude Digging Out, but it can if we stop short.  We’re taught to rage against the dying of the light, but never explicitly told that we must accept that the light is dying.  It seems intuitive, but Acceptance is likely to be overlooked. It’s subtle, unlike the Falling, or Anger or even the act of Digging. After we admit where we are, we can begin to measure the parameters of our predicament, but we must know that we are, in fact, in a fucking hole. 

If we don’t know we’ve fallen, there is no possibility for escape.  We can receive outside help, or accidentally bounce out of the situation, but we are likely to find ourselves in another hole sooner or later with any shred of self-awareness. Acceptance means admitting we fell, and that the hole probably wasn’t part of the plan.

The space between Acceptance and Digging requires Courage. Even if we can’t escape, Courage is required to live in the hole.  

It doesn’t seem particularly courageous to live in a hole or try to get out, but great displays of Courage are found near puddles of pain.  The deeper the hole, the more potential for pain, and the more difficulty in the escape. Ironically, the same amount of courage is required to live in the hole, as is to attempt escape. What is life except an eventual escape? A terminable circumstance. The most interesting moments of reflection are in this space. If you can’t decide if you should dig or just live, just live long enough and you might be surprised to find yourself out of the hole.

But most of us become restless with nowhere to go, consumed by the plans we had before the fall, so we will eventually try to dig out.  There is of course, the unfortunate circumstance of having dug a deeper hole. It’s hard to tell while you’re digging.  Whether you’re Digging Deeper or Digging Out is only evident at the end. Sometimes Deeper is Out, but we can look to external cues for evidence. Things feel different when you’re digging, so you can usually tell when you’re in this phase. It takes a while to know which way you’re headed, but time will tell. Yelling into the void might sound different if we’ve moved out of the original hole. Try it.

If you’ve made the decision to dig out, it may feel as though you have to dig and keep digging to accomplish the goal of Out. Resisting this temptation is harder than it seems. You don’t have to dig all at once. For those unaccustomed to life in a hole, this may be the hardest part.  No story of a prisoner can capture the absolute tedium of life spent chipping away at a cell. Diligence and mental fortitude are the tools. Acceptance is the path and Courage the force behind our movement.

If by your own fortitude or some stroke of luck, you find yourself out of the hole, keep in mind that the more ground you cover, the more likely you are to stumble into a hole. We can certainly avoid some, but falling is inevitable if you move through life. 

If you see me in a hole, throw me a shovel.

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images: Photo by Valentin Lacoste on Unsplash

Photo by Linus Sandvide on Unsplash

Photo by Linus Sandvide on Unsplash

Photo by Paolo Chiabrando on Unsplash