Imagine you have a secret. A big secret.
This secret has caused you a lot of pain in the past, so you’ve learned to hide it from people. You need to make sure that nobody knows about your secret; because if they found out about it, they would hurt you wouldn’t they?
You obsess over this. Every day you fear everyone around you is going to hurt you because of this secret. Over the years you’ve gotten so used to carrying that fear that you don’t even notice it anymore. But you are living in fear. Every conversation you have is dipped in fear. Every time you walk past a stranger on the street there is a tingling of subtle terror. You’ve become crippled. The weight of this internalised fear has left you a husk of a human being…
One day you are exposed to something big, bigger than you have ever experienced before. It makes you feel more than you have ever felt before. You feel limitlessness expand within you, it drowns out everything you are. Everything about you seems so small when contrasted against everything that is.
Then it happens, you realise that the secret that has crippled you for so many years is out, and there’s nowhere to run. The fear reacts, it thrashes and it burns. But it is drowned by the madding echo of infinity. Everything about you just seems so funny; your entire existence feels like one big joke. You spent years living in fear and for what? You laugh. You laugh harder than you have ever laughed in your life. Pure fire burns within you, it burns your fear to dust, but in the process it scorches all the structures that had been so readily nurtured by this fear for all those years. It’s violent and it doesn’t feel good. It takes a while, but eventually you put yourself back together again. You’re pretty sure you’re different now. That fear is gone now. It’s strange and it takes some getting used to. What’s going to replace this fear? Who do you want to be now? And most importantly, does it even really matter?