The Call of the Void
L’appel du Vide — or that little voice in your head that randomly goes, “What if I jumped off this roof?”
Staying home during this pandemic has been like the life I’ve always wanted, minus the guilt of being the buzzkill who always cancels on people. However, it’s also meant that I’ve had a lot more time alone with my thoughts, which aren’t always rainbows and sunshine.
I’ve always had a bit of an overactive imagination, and my mind is no stranger to the occasional bizarre thought. I’ve never really tried to analyze them or figure out where they’re coming from, but now that I’ve had nothing but time on my hands, going there was kind of inevitable.
My mum and I don’t see eye-to-eye on the staying-holed-up-in-my-room-all-day thing, so she’s been incessantly trying to get me to go up to the terrace for some fresh air. This is unappealing to me for two reasons: one, it means she’s going to try and get me to walk to-and-fro on the terrace, and two, I have a crippling fear of heights.
The latter is what makes what I’m about to say rather interesting:
Almost every single one of those five (okay, maybe it was three) times that I’ve gone up to the terrace, I’ve found myself standing close to the parapet, looking down and thinking, “What if I jumped?”
This is immediately followed by a vivid mental image of me actually jumping and ending up with a splat on the road that isn’t too far down below. This has happened several of those times I’ve been up on the terrace, and now that I think of it, I often have these thoughts whenever I’m standing somewhere high up.
But there’s just no logical explanation for it, because why would I think of doing the very thing I’m trying to avoid — falling to my death?
I started noticing a similar pattern of thoughts in other potentially risky situations. This one time while I was driving, I felt a strange, swelling desire to press down hard on the gas pedal, despite not being on an empty road.
Another time, I was in the kitchen holding a knife, and my mind suddenly went, “What if I just stabbed myself in the abdomen?” And for some odd reason, whenever I’m standing in front of the stove, I imagine it exploding and consuming me in flames.
It’s weird because I’ve never expressed a desire to take my own life, or anyone else’s. These thoughts just last for a few seconds, and then I’m able to acknowledge how ridiculous they are, brush them off, and move on with my life.
But the fact that I, the most cautious person on earth, was having these deranged thoughts even momentarily, was a little concerning. I needed to know if there was something to be worried about.
When I started doing some research online, the first thing that popped up was a suicide helpline*. But like I said, I’m not suicidal. After some more digging, I found what I was hoping to find:
The French term L’appel du Vide, which loosely translates to ‘The Call of the Void’.
It’s an unusual force luring us to take that step and do something incredibly destructive, maybe even fatal. While the phrase sounds rather poetic, I can’t think of a better way to put it. It makes me picture this dystopic abyss of chaos and madness where there’s nothing stopping us from doing whatever it is we feel like doing at any given moment.
While reading up some more, I found the only proper study that’s been conducted on the subject so far. Terming it the High Places Phenomenon¹ (HPP), a group of researchers in 2012 tried to explain this urge to jump by surveying a sample of 431 students.
To put it briefly, the researchers concluded that more than half the students who had never experienced suicidal thoughts had experienced HPP, and those with sensitivity to anxiety were more prone to these thoughts (which might explain why I experience them every so often).
And as for the cause behind HPP, one of the researchers, April Smith, has suggested that they’re the result of some form of miscommunication in our brains. She says that some systems in our brains process information much faster than the others and are outside our conscious control. Whenever we’re standing somewhere high up, these systems send us an alarm signal which makes us physically take a step back.
And then we start to think about what we just did and come to the conclusion that we must have wanted to jump. What she’s basically saying is we don’t actually have the thought that we want to jump, we just think we thought that. “An urge to jump affirms the urge to live,” she says, which also happens to be the name of the study.
In a podcast² discussing the same, April Smith says that although we might have these intrusive thoughts, it doesn’t mean we have a death wish, or that we’re murderous. She suggests that these thoughts are like static or chatter: we don’t have to take them seriously because thinking about it doesn’t necessarily mean we want to do it. These thoughts only become problematic when we make that connection, inevitably making us upset and ponder over it constantly.
While the study has attempted to explain the cause behind these thoughts, the only thing it could conclusively prove is that the call of the void is something many people have experienced in their lives. The rest is mere speculation that I’m not sure I completely agree with. And then I started to do a little speculation of my own. Why do we experience this strange desire to do things we know we’d never do?
Maybe this allows us to think about the kind of absolute freedom we all secretly crave — to not be bound by anything. Not by rules, not by morals, not by people. Nothing. The freedom to do as we please the second we feel like it.
These fleeting thoughts allow us a glimpse into the void: what each of these moments would be like if we could make the strongest, most dangerous choices available to us. And then we immediately take a step back because that’s probably more freedom than we can handle. It’s overwhelming, and frankly… just plain terrifying.
Knowing that we’re capable of that sort of destruction if it were allowed — it’s so disturbing that most of us would rather not have it. The only thing stopping us from being lured by the call of the void is our ability to gauge and fear the consequences of our actions.
Pretty scary to think that the only thing standing between me and the act of hurling myself over the parapet is my mind’s ability to process this.
Unsettling as that sounds, reading about the call of the void actually brought a great deal of comfort to me. It meant that what I’ve been experiencing is normal because the number of people who experience these thoughts is high enough to urge researchers to look into it.
Although I understand (and appreciate) the need to try and back everything up with a scientific explanation, I think there are some things like the call of the void that will just elude our understanding, no matter how hard we try.
I think we as people are generally uncomfortable with uncertainty. I sure am. I just can’t stand not knowing something. We seek explanations and research-backed data in order to feel like we’re in control of our lives. To feel safe.
That’s exactly what I did when I found out about the call of the void. But I found the theory’s exposition rather questionable and unconvincing. But that’s the thing, though: we can speculate, theorize and ruminate all we want, and we might even find a more widely accepted explanation for this in the future. But we also might not.
While we wait for the former, and in the event of the latter, we’re going to have to look for comfort elsewhere. Perhaps in the fact that we’re not alone.
*while it’s completely natural to experience these intrusive thoughts once in a while, they usually only last only for a few seconds. It can get upsetting if they linger around for much longer. These thoughts are not the same as contemplating suicide. If you’re experiencing suicidal/other distressing thoughts, it might be a good idea to talk to someone about it. There is nothing wrong with asking for help — people are willing to listen.
- Hames, J. L., Ribeiro, D., Smith, A. R., & Joiner Jr, T. E. (2012), ‘An Urge to Jump Affirms the Urge to Live: An Empirical Examination of the High Places Phenomenon’, Journal of Affective Disorders, vol. 136, pp 1114–1120.
- Johnson, B. B. (Host), Sivertson, A. (Host). (2018, June 29). Call of the Void [Audio Podcast].
