I had a recent realisation - or perhaps a deeper realising - about the 'hamster wheel' of anxious cogitation. It can feel like a process of hunting for a solution, visiting every possibility, checking again that none of them work ...
The realisation, which can seem cruel, was that when I am in this state I am sometimes working harder at not looking at something than I am at solution-hunting. Often there is a perspective that I am not willing to consider, and it is this unwillingness that is feeding my anxious search. Before I go through the dark door, I must first just check that none of the others lead to anything worthwhile. Maybe there is something behind one of them (something apart from an empty room or a brick wall...) that I didn't see the first time around.
For me, the 'dark door' opens towards the possibility that some solution I need to work may not work. Some fantasy, some aspiration, some self-perception, may not be reliable.
There is a big difference between having a potential solution that you can't put in place (because of opportunity or resources), and having no solution at all. Or between feeling that something would be a solution ('if only ...') and discovering that it might, after all, not be.
The dark door, which looks like despair, may open on a dream relinquished, something that feels like a defeat, a final judgment...
How did it come to feel like this?
There are certainly doors we would not want to go through - bereavements, injuries, betrayals, losses - but not all of these carry censure. They come with pain, but not necessarily shame. There is shame behind the dark door. If I cannot have this, do this, be this, then I am worthless. I have been pretending. I have been deceiving myself and others. I have been vain and stupid. I have failed - not just to meet an objective, but to choose an appropriate objective in the first place.
The rat run of feverish checking, the internal OCD, can feel like security by comparison.
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