Dealing With Anguish In An Astonishing Way

Abhishek Verma
4 min readNov 26, 2019
Photo by Jonny Caspari on Unsplash

Getting over loss whether of a person or an opportunity (such as not getting your dream college) hurts like hell. The thoughts which come to your mind are:

  • Why me?
  • Why always me?
  • Why couldn’t I do it?
  • How much more will I have to take it?
  • Why doesn’t this vicious cycle of pain end?

You are angry at the world, God and everybody around you. Your world has been shaken by the tragedy. Your heart feels crushed under the circumstances. It is extreme pain, the very limit of it, you are experiencing. And it doesn’t seem it will end until hell freezes over.

All of this coalesces to the emotion named:

How do you define anguish:

Extreme pain, distress or anxiety

Anguish is not a single emotion, it is a deadly combination of fear, distress, anxiety and panic.

They all come at once and that’s overwhelming, almost crippling. Its grip is so strong, we feel we’ll shatter yet somehow we are there. We hope to escape but there is no respite from it. The quote below says it best:

But whichever form it took it brought with it, in those moments of bitter anguish, such a desperate surge of hope that it was almost untouchable, and flitted away like a golden butterfly into the bright blue sky — beautiful, unreachable and completely transistent.

Anguish as an emotion lies on the very extreme in its effects. When faced with it, everybody feels powerless as if drained the second you started feeling it. And, the pain is unimaginable but it is just the start. The quote below justifies the state the best:

He was conscious of his body as a heavy cold horrible container. He had the feeling, coming to him as the memory of a dream, of being a…