There are regions in the human interior that most of us spend considerable energy avoiding. They are not comfortable places. They are the parts of us that feel chaotic, ungoverned, difficult to name — the places where our contradictions live, where our unresolved fears collect, where the distance between who we present ourselves to be and who we actually are becomes most apparent. Most people, most of the time, find ways not to go there. Life offers no shortage of distractions willing to assist in that avoidance.
The Wall does not offer that courtesy. It takes you there anyway.
I spent seven years in mine. I am not saying that to suggest seven years is the standard — it is not. The Wall does not run on a schedule, and the length of anyone's passage through it is not a measure of the severity of their damage or the depth of their faith. But seven years is what it was for me, and I want to write honestly about what that time did — not in spite of its difficulty, but because of it.
The ancient accounts of creation describe what existed before the spoken order of God as formless, empty, dark — chaos in its most elemental state. What follows is not the elimination of that raw material but its transformation: order and beauty and life spoken into existence out of what had been shapeless void. I have come to believe the Wall operates by something like the same logic. The chaos it surfaces in us is not an aberration to be corrected. It is the raw material of something being formed.
But you cannot know that from inside it. From inside it, the chaos simply feels like chaos. The cognitive dissonance is real — the sense that your thought processes are scattered, that the frameworks you once used to make sense of your life no longer hold, that you are operating without the usual landmarks. This is disorienting in ways that are difficult to describe to someone who has not been there. It can feel animalistic, in the least flattering sense of that word — driven by fear, reactivity, the most primitive instincts of self-preservation.
What the wilderness requires, and what nothing easier can produce, is the willingness to stop running from that interior chaos and instead turn toward it. Not to indulge it. Not to be governed by it. But to bring it into the open — to look at it honestly, to name what is actually there rather than what you wish were there — and to submit it, piece by piece, to a process of ordered deconstruction.
This is not a passive process. It is one of the more demanding things a person can undertake. It requires confronting the versions of yourself you have most carefully hidden — from others, and from yourself. It requires sitting with discomfort long enough to let it tell you what it is actually about, rather than medicating it into silence. It requires, in the deepest sense, a willingness to be remade rather than simply repaired.
What I found at the other end of seven years was not the person I was before the Wall, restored. It was someone I could not have become any other way. The chaos had been the birthplace of something — a depth of self-knowledge, a quality of presence, a capacity for compassion rooted in having genuinely needed it — that the comfortable seasons of my life had never produced and could not have. You cannot manufacture that in easier conditions. It requires the wilderness specifically.
If you are currently in the Wall and reading this, I want to say something directly: the chaos does not mean something has gone wrong. It means something is being made. The raw material is real. The process is real. The discomfort is not incidental to what is happening — it is part of the mechanism by which it happens.
We are, all of us, being formed out of chaos and into something we cannot yet fully see. The wilderness is not the interruption of that process. It is where the process does its most essential work.
Stay in it. What is being built in the dark could not be built anywhere else.