Getting Through Tonight · Article AR-001

I want the pain to stop.

Ione Hepburn · 10 min read

If you have ever said that to yourself, you are not the first and you are not alone.

Sometimes that sentence is whispered.

Sometimes it is screamed inside your head while you sit quietly enough that no one around you knows anything is wrong.

And sometimes it becomes:

I don’t want to be here anymore.

I know something about that sentence, I want the pain to stop, because there have been different periods of my life when I have meant it in different ways.

Once, I wanted to die.

Years later, I knew I did not want to die, but when the sadness came, something inside me kept carrying me toward that same dark place.

That distinction matters.

But both required help.

Sometimes you don’t want death. You want an end to this.

The weight.

The thoughts.

The problem that refuses to be solved.

The disappointment after you had finally allowed yourself to hope again.

The exhaustion of waking up and remembering that you are still you, still here, and the thing you went to sleep trying to escape is waiting for you.

You get tired of carrying yourself.

And eventually the mind begins offering what sounds like a solution:

What if I just didn’t have to do this anymore?

For some people, that is not the same as wanting to die. They desperately want relief and have stopped being able to imagine another way to get it.

But I also want to be careful here.

Some people genuinely do want to die. If that is where you are, I am not going to tell you that you don’t mean it. I remember what it was like to mean it.

What I will tell you is that how certain you feel in this moment is not a reason to face the moment alone.

I remember my hole.

I was sixteen.

By then, I had accumulated enough hurt to believe I understood what the rest of my life was going to look like.

My childhood had included abuse, rejection, instability and loneliness. Education had become one of the ways I imagined escaping that life. So when I sat for an important examination and couldn’t complete it, I did not experience it simply as one bad examination.

My mind finished the whole story for me.

That evening I went home carrying far more than an examination.

I was carrying every hurt that had come before it and every terrible future my mind had constructed afterward.

I wanted everything to go away.

I attempted suicide.

And I survived.

People came to see me afterward. There were questions, tears, rumors, judgment and concern. I went to the hospital. I had counselling.

And then life continued.

That last part is important.

Because surviving a suicide attempt did not magically teach me how to live.

Fourteen years later, the darkness came differently.

By then I had a different life.

I was an adult. A mother. Educated. Functioning.

Surely I was no longer that sixteen-year-old girl.

Then one day, after another painful period in my life, my emotions became almost impossible for me to control.

One minute I was all right.

The next I was crying.

I remember telling my friend Monica something that, looking back, describes that period better than almost anything else I could say:

I know I don’t want to die, but when the sadness comes, it makes me feel like I do.

That frightened me.

Because this time I knew something my sixteen-year-old self didn’t know.

I knew that somewhere underneath the darkness, I wanted my life.

Yet knowing that did not automatically make me safe.

So I started calling people.

When the feeling came, I called a friend. Then another friend. One of them finally told me plainly that I needed professional help.

Eventually I saw a psychiatrist.

She told me she believed I had major depressive disorder.

I resisted that too.

Couldn’t I simply be sad?

Couldn’t I just talk my way through it?

And medication? I certainly didn’t want that. I had my own ideas about what taking medication for depression meant about a person, and therefore what it would mean about me.

But eventually I accepted help.

Therapy became different from what I had experienced before. My psychiatrist didn’t merely listen to my stories. We worked. She helped me examine my thinking, recognize unhealthy patterns and stop carrying responsibility for things that had happened to me.

Friends helped pay for some of my sessions.

One helped me with the medication.

Recovery was not one heroic decision I made by myself.

People helped me stay.

That is one of the reasons I am telling you this.

The hole lies about its size.

When you are deep enough in emotional pain, your world becomes very small.

Tomorrow disappears first.

Next month becomes irrelevant.

Next year sounds ridiculous.

People offer possibilities and you become frustrated because they don’t understand: I have already thought about everything.

I understand.

But imagine standing in a room after somebody turns off every light.

The furniture has not disappeared.

The doors have not disappeared.

The windows have not disappeared.

Your ability to see them has changed.

Severe emotional distress can do something similar.

It narrows attention. It makes problems feel permanent. It makes alternatives harder to imagine. And because all of this is happening inside your own mind, the conclusions can feel completely rational.

That is why tonight may not be the best time to make a permanent decision about your life.

You don’t need to solve your life tonight.

Hope used to frighten me too.

People like to talk about hope as though it is always beautiful.

It isn’t.

When you have been disappointed enough times, hope can feel dangerous.

Hope asks you to believe again.

And believing means you might be disappointed again.

I know what it is like to think, What is the point of getting my hopes up?

For years, I believed life owed me some kind of compensation for what had happened to me. I kept waiting for life to finally become what I thought it should have been.

Eventually I learned something different.

I didn’t need a guarantee that everything would become wonderful.

I needed enough possibility for the next step.

There is a difference between promising yourself a beautiful life and admitting that you don’t yet know what your life can become.

Sometimes I don’t know is enough hope for tonight.

So how do you get through tonight?

Do not make the assignment bigger than it is.

The assignment is not to repair your childhood, save your marriage, pay every bill, cure your depression, restore your faith, forgive anybody or figure out the next twenty years.

The assignment is to stay.

Put distance between yourself and anything you might use to hurt yourself. Give it to someone. Leave the environment if necessary. Go somewhere safer.

Then make time smaller.

Not next year.

Not next month.

Not even tomorrow if tomorrow feels impossible.

What do I need to do for the next hour?

Get near another person.

You don’t have to perform wellness for them. You don’t even have to tell the entire story.

Say one true sentence:

“I am not safe being by myself right now.”

Or:

“I’m having thoughts about suicide and I need you to stay with me.”

Then allow somebody to help.

Call a crisis service. Call a therapist. Call someone who loves you. Go to an emergency department if you may act on the thoughts.

And while you are getting through the hour, take care of the body carrying you through it.

Drink some water. Eat something if you haven’t eaten. Sit somewhere safer. Try to rest.

These things are not treatments for suicidal thoughts.

They are ways of helping you remain here while you get the treatment and human support you need.

I used to think needing help said something about me.

When the psychiatrist suggested medication, part of me resisted because of what I thought it meant.

I was educated.

I was functioning.

I wasn’t one of those people.

Except there are no those people.

There are people.

And sometimes people become ill. Sometimes the effects of trauma surface in ways we did not expect. Sometimes depression changes how we experience everything around us. Sometimes circumstances overwhelm the coping mechanisms that worked before.

I needed therapy.

I needed friends.

For a period, I needed medication.

And one of the most important things my psychiatrist eventually helped me discover was that underneath all that assistance, I still had strength of my own.

Receiving help did not erase that strength.

It helped me reach it.

If the pain is the problem, then let us treat the pain.

There may be something underneath yours.

Depression. Trauma. Grief. Abuse. A relationship. Loneliness. Money. Shame. Illness. Exhaustion.

Something that happened years ago that you keep insisting should no longer affect you.

Or perhaps right now you don’t even know what it is.

You don’t have to diagnose yourself tonight.

But you can let another person help you begin looking.

Because pain without a name can feel like the entire sky.

Once we begin understanding what is happening, we can start discovering where its edges are.

And edges give us somewhere to begin.

I cannot promise you a fairytale.

When I wrote my memoir, I wanted a happily-ever-after ending.

I didn’t get one.

Life continued being life. There were still disappointments, still losses, still things I had to learn about myself.

What changed was that I became better equipped to live through them.

In the final pages of Lessons from a Friend, I wrote that a happy ending does not have to be someone riding into the sunset. Sometimes a happy ending is the new beginning of a better life.

I like that even more now.

Because if you are reading this from inside your own hole, I don’t need you to believe that everything will become perfect.

I don’t even need you to believe me when I tell you that life can look different.

Just leave a little room for this:

I have wanted to die.

I have also desperately wanted to live while experiencing sadness that frightened me with thoughts of death.

I have needed friends, professional help and treatment.

And I have lived long enough to discover something my sixteen-year-old self could not possibly have known:

That is the terrible limitation of the hole.

You can only see from where you are standing.

You cannot see the whole of your life from the worst moment of it.

So if tonight all you can say is I want the pain to stop, then start there.

We do not have to solve your entire life tonight.

We need to help you stay long enough to find another way to treat the pain.

Please tell someone.

And for tonight, let that be enough.

About the author

Ione Hepburn, MA, LPCC, NCC, CLC, C-MI, is a Licensed Professional Clinical Mental Health Counselor licensed in the State of New Mexico, a National Certified Counselor, Certified Life Coach, Certified Meditation Instructor, and author of Lessons from a Friend. She works from Gestalt, mindfulness, motivational interviewing, person-centred and Gottman Method approaches.

Based in Nassau, The Bahamas, she works with individuals and couples, online in New Mexico and throughout The Bahamas, and in person in Nassau. Her writing draws on her own lived experience as much as her clinical training.