I\’m a white severely disabled bisexual cisman with chronic depression. I have trans friends and former lovers. Male friends, female friends, non-binary friends; Muslim friends, Christian friends, Pagan and atheist friends. Black friends. POC friends. Friends in every letter of the LGBTQ acronym. Loved ones who are survivors of rape and sexual assault, family members who are regularly in and out of psychiatric care.

And they all deserve to live rich, fulfilling lives free from fear and hate.

And yet I get tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of racism, feminism, ableism. Tired of hearing about Ferguson. Tired seeing of police brutality and corporate manipulation that would reduce us all to consumptive slaves toiling away for techtreats until we die.

Exhausted by the spells employed by the black-magicians-of-the-media that are piped into our brains, that shout at us from behind artfully arranged slogans and 140 character concentrations of emotion designed to alter our brain chemistry.

Wearied by the bilboards and the ads and the browser tracking and the mail-reading and the roar of the opressed the world over; each individual voice subsumed into the pain of a fallen child; it drills through my brain like the screams of a babe that doesn\’t understand that their parents are only just out of sight for a short span

I get fatigued by the blog and reblog, the endless cargo-cult of mimesis found in body and mind, form and shape and word. It makes my bones ache, my guts knot and roil in disgust. Wading through a torrent of shite, peppered with pieces of gold that gleam in the dark, only they are hardly ever seen because everyone walks with their nose in the air so that they only occasionally catch a whiff.

Sickened, poisoned by it. This engineered future that arises from the cogs of a great and terrible machine that built itself ad-hoc like a monster stitched together and welded with scorched fumes of lost hope. No vast conspiracy, just a blind, wormlike questing for sensation – an abandoned infant groping for its mother\’s teat in the dark.

And in that moment: I hate it here. I hate it now. I hate myself for existing.

My throat burns with bile, and I would do anything not to be locked within this synthetic laboratory, this crazed funhouse of mirrors, this prison of Black Iron presided over by bloated gaoler-archons that grow fat as ticks, filled with the blood of my very soul.

It aches and burns, this hollow chronic fatigue of overstretched, hyper-stimulated nerves; shellshock-echoes from the carpet-bombing of my senses.

Somewhere there\’s someone screaming, and I\’m never sure if it is or isn\’t me. I\’m being crushed, drowning in salt tears I  can never shed.

So very weary. It is as if I can no longer fight, as if I stand on a battlefield surrounded by the corpses of everyone I ever loved. Some, I mark, still seem to breathe and turn their heads, but they are no longer there; the spark has gone and they are mere mechanism alone!

And it would be so very easy to join them, to ease my aching bones, to rest at the bottom of this curved bone bowl. and fight no more. So very easy, to simply forget and slip into Lethean stupor.

I stagger, I fall. No longer can I support myself against the smoke and ash and stench of sweat and struggle. I am borne down by chains, into the nadir of it all.

And then, in the depths of that fogwrapped greyness, that aching nullity, I see – no, not see, but perceive, but know – a sudden, deep rich darkness.

Black as raven\’s feather, shining with the many and one colours of crow\’s wing in the rain, so the understanding comes. It comes upon me and I teeter as if on a precipice. Breath catches in my throat, and the knowing scratches its charm onto my bones; scrimshaw runes, bird-carved Mysteries.

This is not the End. This is only the door. Pass beyond the threshold and be refreshed.

And the weight on my back intensifies. Crushes me to dust. Makes me to scream in soundless horror. I am only meat for worms. They shall riddle my hide forever. I shiver in terror, subdued, unable to lift my head.

The world grinds me excedingly fine – what point is there in fighting? Was I not doomed to fail from the moment I was born; fated to eat, fuck, shit and die as billions of my kind have always done? Enslaved to heredity, to recapitulation of endless crimes against the Soul; a million petty slights against the infinite variety of existence; ten thousand dismissive ignorances of the kosmos.

A horse-head appears in the darkness, ribboned with flayed flesh, the regular thudding of the whip into flank as its drum beat. The knowing whispers without words, strokes my heart with razor fingers of mourning.

(And in this moment, this dark-shadow-time where flame fickers on the walls of a cave beneath the earth, I know Nietzsche as he throws his arms around the bloodied beast in Turin, weeping. And an antlered head, all heavy, lifts my chin with beast-fingers, eye to empty eye.

I see the shapes writhe from life, the stone walls suddenly revealed as crystal clear ocean. Undersea cities and forests peopled by Atlantean strangenesses that greet me with a knowing smile.)

And the be-ribboned hobby horse, the skeletal puckish thing all dressed in red and black, turns and leads the way.

This is not the End. This is only the door. Pass beyond the threshold and be refreshed.

And so I fall – the weight that crushes me now suddenly slaved to gravity; it is suddenly bound to something larger and vaster than the designs of the grinding machine that would have me shivering on a slaughterhouse floor, all amazed and blind.

We fall, the world and I, burning like a comet. We ignite and burn in flaming Luciferian light, until the asterism of our combined self impacts into the earth. Eden is consumed by wildfire, the endless green wrapped in flame so as to scatter its seeds and renew the soil. The buried iron of us melts and flows, refined, and meets the secret veins of metal within the dark and welcoming earth, hidden beneath the world-that-was.

We are quenched by deep, abyssal cisterns, filled as they are with subterranean Leviathan-light and armoured by its hide, feasting with the long dead on the food of the fair-folk. Then, after the third day, so we arise, gleaming like the sun, our bodies and blood suffused with solar light and lunar coolness.

You have to die before you die, so that you don\’t die when you die.

Understand my confession friends. Breathe its words, let them settle in your belly as fuel to the furnace of your own desire.

This is not the End. This is only the door. Pass beyond the threshold and be refreshed.

There is a part of you that survives, that burns and freezes, a kernel of light-in-darkness; a star in your heart, a lamp in your blood.

It will light your way forever, if you let it. It will guide you through the mire and muck, revealing the golden gleam all about you. When you are at the end of your tether, when the noose tightens, that is when you remember it.

You are not alone. You never have been.