I went through a divorce when I was 28 years old. I filed for a divorce from my first boyfriend, first love, first everything, and father of my first two children. I understand that pain quite well, being dismembered from a marital union, piece by piece. Divorce is like the deconstruction and dismembering of one whole life, fused from two lives -- minus the anesthetics. I don't even think there would be an anesthetic with enough strength to numb the nerve endings made raw and exposed through divorce. My children are the greatest, dearest loves of my life, but not even their sweet little smiles and unconditional love made it bearable for me. However, after going through that divorce, I understood a little bit more about the generations before me, and why they endured what they endured for the sake of their passion. I always knew I was wrong for entering that marriage, and I had the passion to escape it. I was being lied to, cheated on and belittled as a human being. As much as that marriage meant to me, I also knew I had to rise above it, like many, many generations before me who sacrificed themselves for the sake of paving a road through the hell that was set before them -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was always one of my favorites. I think these hells that you describe are defining places in our lives where we choose to fail, succeed, or become great. People like Dr. King are faced with a hell, and not only do they decide to walk down that road towards the other side, but they decide to become more than Hansel with a trail of breadcrumbs for those who will walk down it long after he is finished with it. People like Dr. King decide that they will pave that road, brick by brick, with the mortar of blood, sweat, tears and passion, and they will not stop until they place the last brick, name it, and shine a light on it so that no one will ever again be lost again, at least down that one road. We find reasons why a great man should have a highway or an airport named after him, and rightly so, because there are people who pave the way for us so that none of us ever have to go it alone again.

The oddest thing about hell is that most of us think of it in terms of fire. No matter what religion any of us are, most of us conjure images of eternal fire and damnation in our minds when we think of this word, because our minds work in picture form, not in consonants and sentence structure. When we say the word "love" to someone, people don't see the letters L-O-V-E in their thoughts, they see their beloved grandmother, their deceased mother, their children, their spouse, or any other person or idea in their life that creates the meaning of love for them. Hell is no different. We each have our mental pictures of it that are as individual as our fingerprints. So I have always wondered why we picture a lake of fire, because fire creates light as much as it creates a threat of pain from the heat. Wouldn't it still guide us, after all? Like the earliest man who discovered fire, wouldn't it create a whole new world for us that did not revolve around day and night as well? It's a great irony, because a personal hell is what creates a feeling of being lost and thus demands an army of faith-filled thoughts, words and ideas. For me personally, after realizing this irony, I began to think of hell in different terms. Perhaps hell is not so much a lake of fire and blazing light as it is a black hole, swallowing everything that exudes light in one's life -- faith, hope, and mostly, love for oneself. Hell can be so consuming that you don't find your way out of the darkness once you are faced with it, and many people lose themselves in the pull of it all. We as human beings are not meant for darkness, whether in physical form or mental/spiritual form. We are meant to see with our eyes and hear with our ears. Hell is that place where it is so dark, nothing makes sense. But when we look long enough in ourselves, eventually we will find what you found, that the road maps have already been placed within us because we have already traveled dark roads before us. We are equipped with all that we need to survive, and we can and will orient ourselves through the darkness if we believe that deep enough in our souls.

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