'Imagine you are in a dark room, able to see nothing at all. Before this, you saw the world at its best. The gentle, sparkling streams of waterfalls; the caressing, heart-warming rays of sunlight; the giddying, comfortable feeling of joy. You used to hear laughter - the good kind - and the sweet, melodious sound of birdsong. Now, it’s all just darkness and eternal silence.
Imagine you decide to walk around a little. There’s a light in the distance. You chase it for miles, going on and on and on. At days it seems so close, on others, so far away. Then you finally reach it. You smile, almost forgetting what this once-familiar expression feels like, and you lift your fingers to the orb of light.
Before your very eyes, it disappears.
This is the first checkpoint. Remember that. No matter what you do, the light never returns again. You’re tossed into this world of darkness where everything is always the same. The only hope you have is the images in your head of the world you once saw, but you’re quickly forgetting. It’s fading, just like your hope.
You still go on. You have to. Memories of the past, as weak as they are, fuels your motivation. While your mind struggles to remember, you repeat the phrase like a mantra over and over again. ‘There’s light at the end of the tunnel’. You treat this goal of escaping like an obsession, moving on and on even though all logic has already established that there is no point in doing so. Logic has failed to get you out of here, so why not let blind persistence take its turn? You’re at the next checkpoint.
Until one day, you can take it no more. Is there any point in going on? The darkness has won and you desperately need a light, a way out. It doesn’t come. You’ve stopped believing in it, ‘cause why believe in something that is so obviously a lie? Everything you’ve ever hoped for is gone.
That means you’ve reached it.
You’ve arrived at Hopelessness.’