The truth is that we are not safe from suffering. Suffering is an unavoidable reality of our lives and there is no possibility of escaping it.
When we encounter suffering and the orphan archetype within us awakens, we human beings choose different ways of responding. Yet the way we choose may remain with us throughout our lives.

The easier path is that, when the inner orphan returns in the form of disappointment, despair, suffering, heaviness, and limitation, we turn toward different forms of addiction—alcohol, sleeping medication, addictive substances, social media—to escape the orphan’s suffering. In doing this, however, we make addiction into a parent for the orphan who is searching for its parents. We answer the orphan in this way. As a result, we return to the same point again and again and never move beyond it. By choosing to remain at the level of the eternal child when confronting the orphan, we remain incapable of learning from suffering.

The genuine and more difficult path is to remain with suffering and answer the orphan through learning and artistic creation. If we accept the courage of being vulnerable, and if remaining within familiar order and fleeing suffering are not our only choices, we discover the capacity to endure suffering and learn from it by allowing our understanding of it to flow into whatever form of expression is available to us.
No choice comes with a guarantee that it is the true one. Ultimately, however, either we choose to remain small and undeveloped, or we accept vulnerability and growth.

Within each of us is a voice calling us toward something greater. Our inability to fulfil the demands of this inner voice and our failure to understand how to travel this path draw us into the cold, dark valley of depression.
In alchemy, reaching the stage of blackness is itself an achievement, and depression is that blackness—the lead of alchemy. The person who never reaches depression has achieved nothing, in the sense that depression signals the presence of a voice within that calls us toward change. If we deeply accept that what the orphan seeks is not outside us but somewhere in the depths of our own being, we turn our energy inward. We accept and embrace the whole of our being, even if we regard it as worthless, and with the fire and hammer of inner warmth and power we focus on turning the heavy black lead of depression into gold. We continue the alchemy of the spirit until, at last, our true spirit is reborn and united with us; this union means attaining the true Self.

Aydin Areta