There are times when your mental health problems compound on one another. Often, we are an ever-growing, ever-entwining ball of string lights that we’d rather leave in the attic. But every once and a while the trauma planets align and one debilitating issue saves you from another. And so today I’d like to acknowledge my horrendous fear of the void and thank it for keeping me alive.
People keep trying to kill me. And while I was just dealing with, and attempting to heal from, the personally targeted, individual kind of death threats, the world decided to go into full-blown eugenics mode during a pandemic. And I went from getting thousands of death threats from Nazis to getting millions of death threats from just about everyone. From being threatened in my own home to being threatened to never leave my home. From strangers sending me detailed accounts of their plans to rape me, to friends sending me detailed accounts of their plans to abandon me and everyone like me.
I can’t pinpoint when the voice in my head that tells me I should kill myself started. Though to be fair, it often does not tell me to kill myself, it just tells me I should be dead. It’s quite similar to the sentiments from most people now who are horribly fatigued from *checks notes* wearing a bit of fabric over their snotholes. This voice, these thoughts, have been featuring very prominently in my brain for the past few months now and has increased with equal measure to the outside voices telling me the same thing. But I think it started when I realized there wasn’t anyone willing to help me, at least not on the scale that I needed. No amount of screaming got me the help I needed, so something in me became defeated.
The bad thoughts come up when I am over threshold. (A term I have really enjoyed using, having been dog training.) I would say “when I’m stressed” but “stressed” is a defanged term that makes it sound like Starbucks gave me the wrong soy latte and I was late to my yoga class. So when I can’t raise money for food, or when people are threatening to rape and murder me in my own home, or when most people around you have decided you should be dead or isolated forever, the bad thoughts pop up hundreds of times a day. “You should just be dead,” it says.
I believe I do know where the existential panic came from. My mother’s death when I was 2 weeks into being 17 years old was mostly gasoline on an already growing flame in terms of trauma manifestations and issues, but the dread of nonexistence really hit when she stopped existing. And left with no one but an abusive father, my whole world stopped existing. And I remember years later, sitting in traffic on 76 in my Toyota, having a crying panic attack because I let myself think about death. I had to (have to) be constantly thinking of other things, coming up with distractions or thought detours like a shark who can’t stop to sleep because if I let the dread stay around too long, it gets scary.
As you have probably already deduced, “It would be better if I were dead.” and “Not existing is the most frightening thing in the universe.” are potentially incompatible statements. And lucky for me, I don’t have any belief of a magical afterlife. Sure, maybe my existence gets absorbed back into the cosmos happily ever after or some other scientifically plausible bedtime story. But fuck all y’all, I need my ego. It’s all I have.
So while the voice that tells me death is better has been going of in increasingly alarming amounts recently, I have been able to summon my existential dread to drown it out. Suicide Man vs Existential Dread Man (the long lost verse to They Might Be Giants’s Particle Man) . So far, the dread is winning. I hope it continues to win, though the screaming in my head may get to be a bit much and would explain my recent headaches.
Thank you, fear of death and the unknown. I spend my life trying to avoid you, but here you are helping me stay out of the very thing you make me so scared of. I appreciate it, and if there’s anything I can do for you short of having to actually deal with you in any way because I can’t afford therapy, let me know.
