"Hey, kid. Welcome to Prison." - An Excerpt

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IncolaVacui

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"You think you just woke up here one day, right? Think again. It was your whole life that brought you to this. Fact is, you were born to be here. Go ahead, look around. I’ll be here when you get back. 

Looks smaller than it is, don’t it? Sometimes, it doesn’t even feel all that bad. But still... You look through those bars, and you see all that you’re missing. Hopes. Dreams. What could-have-been. Here, put your palms up to the Black Iron, grab the bars, let me show you something.


Feel that? That’s all the books you’ve read. And that entire wall over there is your adolescence. Look up: It’s your CD collection. The floor you woke up on? Your parents. Like I said, you were born to be here. It’s your life, it’s the cold trap of your own existence. You painted yourself into a corner.

So, now you’re wondering why you feel trapped here, in your own life. Why now, why today, can you see the bars of a Black Iron Prison that you made for yourself? Because you stopped reacting, and took a couple of steps forward. You thought you could do what you wanted, you tried to be self reliant, and bang. You smacked your head against the wall.

What’s that? Yeah. That’s when the claustrophobia sets in. When you didn’t know you were trapped, everything was fine. But now that you know, you can see your entire, tired, monotonous life stretch out before you, trapped in these 4 walls, these 6 sides. Breathe, kid. It’s just abject panic that you’re feeling right now. Some even say that this is what death feels like: An unchanging life, immune and unfeeling to what you really want.

Look around you. Look at these cold, black bars. The colorless ceiling. The hard ground. That’s your universe. That’s the world you’re going to be living in for the rest of your life here in Prison. You’re going to live out your life in quiet desperation. Or, not so quiet if you decide to take the rife/bell tower route. Either way, long or short, it’ll feel the same. Dead, unchanging.
So, if you’re interested, I’d like to invite you to a jailbreak... Just turn around."

 - The Black Iron Prison, p. 1


I love this book. It's less than 100 pages in length, and in full availability online for free.
I was probably between 18 and 20 when I first found it. It's a conceptual piece. One that mostly tends to appeal to people that suffer depression.
Anyway, because that first page hit me like a ton of bricks, it's never totally gone away from me either.
In all actuality, as I got older, I drew inspiration from it a few times. It's part of what helped me get the perspective of having a fighting chance.
Anyway, it's a lovely short, little, odd book full of interesting and obscure things like this.
Here's the link: The Black Iron Prison

And yeah, that pretty much just sums it up.
 
"You think you just woke up here one day, right? Think again. It was your whole life that brought you to this. Fact is, you were born to be here."

I love that line and it reminds me of the struggle I have between deciding if my life is random or did I choose it.  My wife has an interesting twist on this - she claims that not only is life "fated", but even if you were to change the choices you've made, you'd still end up in the same place.  For example, she's from the midwest and I'm from back east.  I always kid her that if I hadn't gone west to go to school, married her and brought her east, she'd still be stuck out there.  She claims that we would have met some other way, at another time, in another place, and we'd still end up right where we are.  Or the time I had an accident on my way to work one morning.  "If I had brushed my teeth 30 seconds longer, I wouldn't have been in that accident," I said.  "No," she replied.  "You would have been 20 cars back and rear-ended when you stopped for the wreck in front of you."

Anyway, I think about that push-and-pull all the time.  Makes me wonder.

:cool:
 
Columbae said:
"You think you just woke up here one day, right? Think again. It was your whole life that brought you to this. Fact is, you were born to be here."

I love that line and it reminds me of the struggle I have between deciding if my life is random or did I choose it.  My wife has an interesting twist on this - she claims that not only is life "fated", but even if you were to change the choices you've made, you'd still end up in the same place.  For example, she's from the midwest and I'm from back east.  I always kid her that if I hadn't gone west to go to school, married her and brought her east, she'd still be stuck out there.  She claims that we would have met some other way, at another time, in another place, and we'd still end up right where we are.  Or the time I had an accident on my way to work one morning.  "If I had brushed my teeth 30 seconds longer, I wouldn't have been in that accident," I said.  "No," she replied.  "You would have been 20 cars back and rear-ended when you stopped for the wreck in front of you."

Anyway, I think about that push-and-pull all the time.  Makes me wonder.

:cool:

She's getting into what's considered Black Hole Theory.
That's...kind of an endless thing of its own; hence why it's called a Theory...
People that often have lots of regret in life, or that have lots of disdain in life resulting from traumas, typically come to those levels. It's an unfortunately very emotionally painful personal process.

It can however be fun to play with the mechanical and mathematical comprehensions of things like Time Dilation.
It wouldn't...really work how most people think it would, much to their dismay...however, the process of coming to that conclusion on your own is sort of a therapeutic thing in a way.

What she's saying about the accident and brushing her teeth? She's entirely right on that assumption...
The fact of the matter is though, that you can't change the past: You can only take influence from it in order to better prepare yourself in the present for a potential future shortcoming.

For that matter I'm from a countryside town and have only ever lived in cities for a few years at a time hither and dither, so I also probably largely have no idea wtf I'm talking about.

The Black Iron Prison as a book, was a largely influential source for me struggling through my depression. It helped me sort things out for myself and rationalize irrational feeling and correlate dissociated thoughts. It was a key ingredient in the glue that I used to kind of put myself back together as best I could. It was a long process, but it was very well worth it to me. :)
 

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