It’s astounding how one can resist the pull of the Void (yea, capital v, of course).
In a long list of odd incidents, there are two major slaps that I’ll never forget.
To make things short, let’s say that the ending of my teen years wasn’t exactly nice, and one day I stole sleeping pills. Unfortunately, I had no clue about the appropriate dosage to not wake up again, and after long hours, I woke up to find a relative surprised to see me in bed in late afternoon. I was hiding the pills’ bottle under the cover, which must have looked somewhat suspicious, and my relative investigated. When she saw the bottle, she only said that I ‘should take some if it can make me nicer and less grumpy’. That was around the time when a neighbour (someone I hardly knew) caught me as I’d planned to run away; she invited me to her home, made me talk and convinced me that leaving wasn’t the answer.
My first missed attempt at silencing the Void still feels bitter because it taught me that my feelings are an embarrassment to the bipeds who are DNA-related to me, and as long as I’m silent, they don’t care if I’m fine or not.
The second slap is more recent, and due to complete strangers. One night, as one of my jobs was turning my life into a living hell, and my life at home was awful, and my health was in really bad shape, and I’d just lost two people who’d lost their fight against the Void, I took to surfing the Internet, looking for either the recipe for cyanide or a reason to go on. Believe it or not, but chemistry recipes are somewhat hard to find, and so I clicked a link to a so-called helpline.
Mind you, it worked but because the first thing on their webpage (I can’t remember which group it was) was basically saying something like “Thinking of suicide? Well, stop and think of the people you’d leave behind”. It was in the middle of the night, but I wanted to yell at the screen that I didn’t give a damn about the “people I’d leave behind” because it was about me. I wanted to stop being invisible, ignored and drowning in the Void.
When you’re thinking about putting an end to the pain, what you’d like to hear is something like “Talk to me, I’m ready to listen to you” (like that kind neighbour who probably saved me the day she stopped me in the street). Back then, I honestly didn’t give a fig about the rest of the world.
I was in so much pain that I wanted it to end. It felt like standing on the edge of a steep cliff with something as heavy as a planet crushing my back.
I live with the Void.
I have ups and downs.
I’ve tried chemical treatment (that makes life dull and worthless).
Therapy doesn’t work for me – at all.
I’m trying plants, and my writing is my therapy.
I know that I can snap and surrender to the Void; that’s somehow a form of sword of Damocles for me (I know it’s there, and I live with it). It’s having your feet already in a quicksand, knowing it, and hoping that the blades of grass that you’re holding in your hands aren’t going to break and make you sink into the cold sand.
By the way, a few recent events have made me realize that, except if I kick the bucket before my mother (and provided that she does bother to send the police over to my place to check on me), it’s probably the smell of decomp that’s going to tell my neighbours that there’s something wrong with me (though I wouldn’t be surprised to end up mummified – no, wait! The owner of the building would react within three months of my failing to pay the rent, that’s not long enough to be mummified).
It’s astounding how lonely one can be on a rock with seven billion people. I’m not even talking about actual human contact; the Internet has become so normal that disappearing from it with no warning generates, in most cases, silence.
In Maurice, E. M. Forster wrote “understanding nothing except that man has been created to feel pain and loneliness without help from heaven”.
I’ll go a step farther. In some cases, one can be dreadfully alone among people and then the toll of that emptiness in the heart and soul can drive anyone to wish to put an end to the pain.
If you know the Void, you know what I’m talking about.
If you’ve never been there, count your blessings.
The Void is like anti-matter for what makes one human. And it hurts so much.
It’s no wonder some people turn the light off
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