The Big Nothing and the Great Everything
An Open Letter to the Suicidal Self
Suicide is everywhere and nowhere.
You’ve likely been touched by it in some way. A friend who disappeared, a cousin who made an attempt. Or even a quiet, private hope in your own psyche that you might not wake up tomorrow feeling like Sisyphus checking his to-do list.
Despite how common it is,1 suicide is still something we speak about only in hushed tones—hidden under layers of euphemism.
Earlier this year, the devastating suicide of a friend shook me to my core.
This piece is an attempt to grapple with a reality that many of us are facing. It’s an attempt to offer hope, comfort, and solace to the suicidal mind from the perspective of someone who’s felt that way.
So as to not sound patronizing, I’ve written it as a letter to a version of myself experiencing suicidal ideation; and I hope that if you need to read this today— it finds you.
Dear Apollo,
I don’t really know how to say this without sounding dismissive and condescending- but here goes:
It gets better.
I know that’s not new or groundbreaking information. That you’ve heard it a thousand times before, and that any motivational speaker worth their booking fee has expressed in empty platitudes that life is worth living, and bad times don’t last forever, and blah blah blah blah blah.
The problem is that you think it’s BULLSHIT. It’s all bullshit.
You didn’t used to think that though.
You used to be bright eyed and full of hope for the world and your future. Not that you didn’t have hard times back then. You’ve always been aware of life’s ebbs and flows, but you used to be okay with it because that’s just how life is.2
But somewhere along the way, something shifted— something subtle but unmistakable.
One day you woke up and realized that the downs had stopped being downs and had become the whole damn thing, and this realization didn’t hit you like a slap to the face, or a punch to the gut. No. More like a slow-motion sinking feeling that the bottom has dropped out and now you’re stuck floating through the goddamn absence of everything.
It’s the recognition of a quiet drip-drip of color draining from the world while you were too busy fumbling for the light switch. You feel like a camel in the ER and the doctors are frantically trying to figure out if you have a son who's been a bit too careless on the sidewalk, or if that straw collection you've spent the last few years curating has finally reached its upper limit.
And the worst part is that you can’t even put your finger on when it began. All you know is that you woke up this morning to your bones feeling wrong, and your skin not fitting like it should, and your own name sounding like it belongs to someone else. You’ve got a case of the freaky fridays, but you can’t remember who you were before your soul was swapped.
But this isn’t an emergency, right? Nobody calls 911 for the guy staring into the mirror, with his own reflection sending him to uncanny valley. If it isn’t an emergency though, then why does it feel so earth shattering?
If you’re not you then who the hell are you?
You know plenty of people who love you. And you know they’d help if they could. But how do you even ask for help when you don’t know what’s wrong?
So you just sit with this dull ache and resign yourself to going through the motions of life without feeling the emotions that you tend to associate with living. Like Beethoven in his last years—pounding all the right keys, but unable to hear the tune.
And that’s when you start regarding these motivational clichés uttered by influencers and plastered on well meaning t-shirts with a sense of contempt. You hear: 'things getting better', 'you're not alone', and ‘just reach out to somebody’; and they don’t just feel meaningless, but actively alienating— because they presuppose a level of emotional continuity that no longer exists. They assume that there is a “before” and an “after,” that you’re experiencing a temporary crisis, when what you’re experiencing feels not like a crisis but a fundamental shift in what existence is and means.
It is not that you believe things will never get better, per se, but that the entire framework—better/worse, meaning/meaninglessness, suffering/relief—no longer makes intuitive sense.
This is, incidentally, the part of the discussion where most well-intentioned people will bring up the metaphor of clinical depression as a physical illness, (I.e. if you broke your leg, you wouldn’t just try to walk it off, would you? You would go to the doctor, you would let someone help you.) And while this is both true and useful in some contexts (certainly depression has clear neurological and biochemical components), it is also not quite the same thing, because the problem with a broken leg is that it is clearly, demonstrably, broken, whereas the problem with depression (I.e. your current sitch) is that it rewires the very apparatus through which brokenness is perceived, so that what you are left with is a condition that simultaneously feels unbearable and yet also feels like the only version of reality you have access to.
Which is all to say that by the time you are at the point where a motivational talk might theoretically be helpful, you have already spent weeks or months or years convincing yourself that motivational talks are a form of condescending propaganda designed for people whose inner lives are fundamentally different from yours. For people who have not figured it out yet, who still believe in all the little scripts about progress and healing and things getting better.
But not you. No. you see through all the bullshit. Feeling both superior to—and hopelessly beneath—the people who are somehow healed by these banal truisms.
Your superiority complex is rooted in your disillusion. You've let raw cynicism seep behind the lenses of your rose-colored glasses and tint them a shade somewhere between beige and grey. Your inferiority complex is rooted in the fear that maybe this is actually working for someone. That it's hitting them right where they need it and the tears and emotions are flowing.
But not for you. If you measured the level of the two complexes, divided that number by two and solved for x: you'd get a big fat 0 on the sentimentometer.
And you start feeling scared. Not of dying—no, dying’s easy. Dying’s the default setting. Entropy is built into the operating system of the universe. What really scares you is the idea that this is just how it is now. That the music’s gone for good. That you speed-ran 20, 30, 40 years of feelings and now they’re spent. All used up and hollowed out. That now it’s just a long, slow slide into the Big Blank Nothing with nothing to do but wait for the credits to roll.
The irony, of course, is that this itself is a script, a tired and well-worn story about how seeing through all the stories is somehow more true than believing them. When in reality it is just another kind of illusion, another form of certainty masquerading as insight.
But certainty can be the most seductive illusion of all.3
So let me propose an alternative version of the standard motivational speech:
You might be wrong.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
It. Might. Get. Better.
I’m not asking you to believe in the pithy platitudes from the grinning corporate mindfulness gurus, the heartfelt Instagram caption, or the bullet-pointed list of Self Care Tips—NO. You don’t have to believe a goddamn thing.
Because here’s the truth they don’t tell you in the brochures: YOU DON’T HAVE TO BELIEVE IT FOR IT TO BE TRUE.
Because if I’ve learned anything from my own time in the abyss—and man, let me tell you, I’ve SEEN it. I’ve stared into the bottomless pit of the great crushing Nothing with its hollow-eyed grin and its fingers curled around my throat like a handshake with the devil himself. I’ve walked the streets of the sleepless city with no music in my heart and the lights all dim and flickering like some great cosmic joke. I’ve lain awake at 4AM with my brain a rat’s nest of scrambled circuits.
What I’ve learned from all that is that depression is, among other things, a kind of epistemological arrogance. A certainty so deep and so all-consuming that it makes any alternative version of reality seem not just unlikely but impossible. It is the certainty that because things feel this way now, they have always felt this way, and will always feel this way. It is the certainty that you have already seen the full breadth of human experience. That you have felt all there is to feel. That you have already fast-forwarded to the end of the movie and can say, definitively, that it is not worth watching.
But what if you’re wrong?
What if, hidden somewhere in the future, there is a moment of light that you cannot yet conceive of, not because it does not exist, but because your current frame of reference is too small to contain it?
What if, somewhere down the line, your ears pop and the world floods back in and you realize that there was music playing all along, that it was not the world that was silent but you who had gone deaf? And when the earplugs come out, when the static clears, when the volume knob cranks back up to eleven and you feel again—oh, man, when you feel again—it’s gonna hit like a train. It’s gonna RUSH back in. Technicolor and blinding and ALIVE, and you’re gonna stand there laughing because you FORGOT. You forgot how good it can be, and now it’s back, and it’s yours.
What if there is still something out there worth staying for, and what if the only way to find out what it is is to stick around long enough to see?
Not because you believe in it. Not because you have faith. Not because some grinning self-help guru tells you to.
But simply because you might, in this one specific instance, not be as right as you think you are.
Postscript
Some things that have kept me from killing myself:
A well-timed phone call from my mom
Watching the sunset from the roof
Seeing two magpies
Early morning cold plunges
Conversations with close friends that see me
Witnessing the heartbreak of other suicides
The movie The Taste of Cherry
Long walks with no destination
A playlist called The equinox is coming up
My niece’s laughter
A pilgrimmage to Santiago
A literal sign that told me to keep going
Great literature
Yoga in the park with friends (the good intentions club)
Rock climbing
Late night Winco runs
Mary Oliver’s Poem Wild Geese
Swimming in the rain
A loving family
A book club that’s my second family
Writing this piece
Suicide is currently the 2nd leading cause of death for individuals aged 10–14 and 20–34, the 3rd leading cause for those aged 15–19, and the 4th leading cause for individuals aged 35–44
To mix Poor Richard with Lao Tzu: Life’s only guarantees are the ides of March, the ides of April, and the tides of change.
See the third delphic maxim: Surety Brings Ruin