mental health | personal story

Stepping Inside the Void

Realizations from standing on a metro platform

(TW: Mentions of suicidality & related thoughts)

Following the publication of my poem “Burnout”, I was encouraged by Will Pennington and Terry Pottinger to share more about my experience. I did a lot of thinking on how to write about it and what would be appropriate to share, until I came across Ian Nduhiu’s poem “Tomorrow never comes”. I decided to just let the words flow.

It was late in the afternoon, I had just finished class and I was heading home after an exhausting day of work and (unpaid) internship duties. I was vaguely aware of the date and it’s significance. It was just one day short of 14 years since my older brother’s passing. I was also aware that I was mentally exhausted, more than usual. I was just standing on the platform, waiting. A thought crossed my mind: “If I jumped nothing else would matter”.

As I have disclosed in some comments, I am a mental health professional. I knew that I wasn’t suicidal but the thought scared me. Before that moment, there were times that I had felt emotionally empty, but this time was different. It was as if I had stepped inside an abyss, or a black hole that sucked out all emotion. In that moment I connected the dots. This is what it feels like when some patients talk about pervasive hopelessness, apathy, and indifference.

The following days I had plenty of time to get better, at least to a level that I would be functional again. Not because I requested some time off, it was a scheduled time off for the winter break. Maybe deep inside I knew that the timing was good for me to break down. Perhaps if I still had to go to work and class, I wouldn’t have allowed the void to swallow me.

Then, I talked to my therapist about this thought. Even though he’s an analyst, he tried to investigate if it could have been the result of a compulsion. We concluded that it was more than that.

Every year when my brother’s death anniversary approaches I’m struggling, but it’s getting better as time goes by. Therapy has helped me identify and process the grief I wasn’t allowed to exhibit when he died. It also helped me understand that I was angry at him. He had promised to take me out of the shitty situation that we called “home”, but the drugs were more important for his emotional survival. Perhaps also for some hallucinations that tormented him.

And who am I to talk? Have I not tried to numb the pain through substances? Since his death I had made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t do any “hard drugs”. I tried all the rest though. Additionally, I figured out that addictions can also manifest through food or denial of it, through relationships, and through seeking pain and thrill.

So, you might ask, if I was aware that every year on that date I’m not doing very well, what was different that time? The difference was that I was already exhausted. I was severely burned out and any minor inconvenience could break me down. It wasn’t my brother’s death anniversary that was approaching that caused my scary thought. But it contributed to maximizing its reach in my psyche.

It’s been about 2.5 years since that day, and I can still recall how the void feels. I haven’t felt it with that intensity since, but now we know each other. I know that it’s lurking close by, observing my life from a distance. I’m doing my best to keep it at bay. I appreciate the lessons it taught me though. Not only to understand better some of my patients, but to empathize with them and myself on a whole different level.

I also have a poetic vision of it: I believe I have befriended the void by accepting it, and now it trusts me enough to teach me lessons from a distance. It carries with it millions of voices of people who have stepped in it. Some made it out, some didn’t. When I think of the void now, I think of how I can take better care of myself in order to live happily and help others have a good life as well.

I wish I didn’t have to go through so much stuff for my empathy and emotion sensitivity to develop, but it is what it is. I’m determined to make the best of it each and every day.

I believe that Stromae’s song “L’enfer” (“Hell”) tells the story better than me. Subtitles are available in the video.