Reclaiming the Abyss

As I sit here typing away, fresh from the wounds of my first breakup, I realise the ground beneath me has swallowed me up. Within the silence lie memories of a time before. The comfort and dependability of conversation with someone you loved has been replaced by the still, quiet whirring of thoughts within your own head. 

There is a theological term I keep returning to: abyssos. It means the void, the underworld, beneath. I think it might be the only honest description for what this feels like. 

By entering a relationship, we do something profound. We orient ourselves, through love, towards potential. Not towards what is, but what could be. Your parent, sibling, spouse or colleague is not just who they are today, but who they might become, and what you might build together. This is the implicit wager every relationship makes - that something greater than the sum of its parts is possible, and that the path forward is to stake reality on that possibility.

There is great beauty in this. There is also a great risk, because the higher the potential, the further there is to fall. When love is ordered incorrectly, it does not simply fail to create. It actively unmakes. By pulling reality down into the abyssos, what is becomes what was - leaving behind an underworld of potential left to fester.

When I reflect honestly on how I loved in this relationship, I can see all too clearly the places where I did not love well. Where I substituted convenience for truth. Where I oriented myself towards my own needs instead of fully loving the other. My misdirected love did not just cause individual sadness, which now painfully exists, but an ontological rupture. A hole instead of a whole.

This is what I’m sitting with now. In trying to make sense of it, I keep returning to the nature of the thing itself.

We are, if fortunate, given many small abysses throughout our lives. Moments when we peer over the edge - a flatlining career, a dislocated friendship, a version of ourselves we need to leave behind. We get to choose whether to jump or step back. These are mercy abysses - ones you can approach on your own terms and in your own time. Staring into the abyss is genuinely useful. It reorders thought and clarifies what you actually think.

There are, however, other abysses - ones that arrive without warning and offer no mercy. By the time you’ve realised the rug has been pulled, you’re halfway into the abyss. How far you fall depends on how real and load-bearing the thing that broke was. A first breakup is one of these.

Falling into the abyss changes you in a way that staring at it does not. It doesn’t reorder thought: it reorders attention. Suddenly, you notice what you had failed to notice before. By suffering, you discover - with horrible clarity and raw emotion - the places where you were sleepwalking. 

There is a question that suffering poses. What are you actually made of? Not in the flimsy sense of worldly achievements, but in a deeper sense. Can you continue to choose love? Can you continue to orient yourself towards what is true, good and beautiful? Can you bring harmony from disunity?

I find myself wrestling with those questions today. I’m plucking up the courage to find a good answer.

What I know to be wrong, however, is to stay within the abyss - it is not a place to call home, but a place for transformation. The invitation of suffering is to take the broken and make it whole. 

We do not become better people by pretending it doesn’t hurt. 

We become better people by refusing to let suffering have the final word.

This is what I mean by jumping into the abyss. Not a denial of pain, but the promise of overcoming it. Jumping is the willingness to actively combat your own suffering and to forge it into something that is not easily consumed. It is a decision made in faith - you cannot see the landing - but you have the potential once again, to renew the broken and redeem it.

I’m still falling. I won’t pretend otherwise. What I thought was real has been shattered by the void. The next few days will involve mapping what remains - and what might still be built.

But I do know this: life is too important, and too short, to remain lost for very long. Do not stare into the abyss. Jump.

Take up your cross. Integrate your suffering. Trust that the landing, whenever it comes, will be solid ground. I am writing this for myself as much as anyone else; consider this a promise to jump.