The Taboo Word
Not death, not sex, not violence, but a nasty e-word.
Like electrocutioner.
She is the electrocutioner. x 10
Plying with my birds, I wonder how the world could be
A perfect place to sing about, for anyone but me.
I see the shimmer of the dewdrops as I drink my tea
And when the foolishness is over, I am much more me.
This gem, one of many from The Residents, the only truly original band / art collective of all time in the world (not a biased opinion, I did my thorough research. See for yourself. The ignorance of your culture is not considered cool, anyway), is the last song on the B side of “Duck Stab” EP, one of their classic masterpieces from 1978.
That song came to my mind while I was thinking about electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), nowadays described as “a safe and effective treatment for various mental health conditions, including major depression, schizophrenia and shizoaffective disorder.”
Inducing seizures actually started as early as 16th century, but if it wasn’t for neurosyphilis, ECT might have never come into use. It all started with injecting camphor and metrazol into catatonic patients, causing them terror before it became effective. After that, several dogs suffered from cardiac arrest, before first cranial human trial, which was performed on a 39-year-old disorganized man, suffering from schizophrenia, found wandering at a train station in Rome. The man was apllied 110 volts of alternating current for 0.2 seconds, inducing a seizure.
Side effects, even with the present day most advanced procedure which involves giving patient a muscle relaxant and a general anesthetic, include: confusion, temporary memory loss, headache, muscle ache, nausea, jaw pain, upset stomach.
What was it like to be given ECT in the past century? A person who experienced it back then said – If I ever had to do that again, I would kill myself.
Neuromodulation, once nicknamed “funeral science”, along with ECT, also includes Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), and Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) for treating schizophrenia, whose side effects probably confirm the old nickname.
Today, this kind of therapy is used as the last resort, when medications don’t help. Just as the Polyvagal Theory suggests that depression is, actually, the last resort of a good biological system.
Apart from electrocution or electroshock treatment, there are many ugly words starting with e. Earthquake, exhaustion, excruciating, enemy, earache.
This website is called Ethereal…. Oh, wait. E is a good letter. Education. Earth. Enlightment. Exaltation. Evolution. Energy. Emotion.
Okay, still avoiding the taboo word – e m p t i n e s s.
The feared one. Especially in the modern, digital word, obsessed with content and meaning. How could it exist now anyway? It’s still present in the aforementioned depression, but the emptiness I felt and which lasted far longer than my over-stretched patience, felt nothing like depression. There was no sadness, no anxiety, worthlessness, or loss of activities. I have a lot to rejoice to. Also lot to be sad about. Nothing to be hopeless about. So, what was the thing with this vague emptiness? It kinda freaked me out because I’ve never felt something quite like that.
Depression, again? Been there, done that, not going back. No. This was simply vague. It more resembled the side effects of neuromodulation techniques, but on the soul level. I simply wanted to do nothing. To take a long rest while having so much to do and so many plans for the future, as always feeling guilt for doing almost nothing in a time when a day wasted is eternity lost.
There is a silence that goes deeper than the absence of sound. It lives in the hollow behind your ribs, in the spaces between thoughts, in the pause before answering, “I’m fine.”
Emptiness is not always loud. Sometimes it’s the soft hum of days blending into each other, the weightless drift through hours that mean nothing and take everything. It’s waking up and feeling like the world is a room you’ve been locked out of, watching life move behind the glass while you remain still.
It isn’t always sadness. Sadness has shape, edges, a reason you can point to. Emptiness is vaguer, foggier. It’s not having the energy to feel sad anymore. It’s standing in a place where joy once lived and not knowing when it left or why it hasn’t come back.
People ask, “What’s wrong?” and there’s nothing to say. Because there is no event, no incident—just a growing absence, a fading of color, a thinning of the self.
And yet, within that space—where nothing seems to live—there is also a kind of quiet potential. A moment where the noise has stopped, and for once, you can listen. Maybe not today. Maybe not soon. But emptiness is not always the end. Sometimes, it is the beginning of something new, something more honest. A blank page, painfully clean, waiting for you to remember how to write again.
And the more I was trying to find a reason or meaning behind it, the more I failed. A wise person told me to stop trying to find the meaning of it, and he was right.
The moment I loosened my grip and just let emptiness be, without my obsessive tendency to attach meaning to everything, the whole new world opened before my eyes (and ears). Another e-word became a forgotten melody of a long-time beloved band I haven’t listened to in ages, wise words of my guru finally reached my brain cells in a proper way (yeah, sometimes we need more time to process), and beauty (in art, love, and life) once again saved the world.