Dr. Sarah Marusek

French philosopher and playwright Jean Paul Sartre famously wrote, ‘Hell is just—other people’.

I reread his play No Exit after the fallout with my shaman doctor. I do remember reading it in French class during high school, but revisiting it again now was illuminating. In the play, three characters arrive in Hell expecting fire and brimstone but only find each other. At first, they are relieved. But then they drive each other absolutely crazy, hence the above quotation.

I read voraciously as a teenager to tame the monster. Other people hurt me in real life, so I taught myself to relate to every character, no matter what their circumstances, in order to protect myself. You see, showing people empathy in the real world makes it less likely that they will hurt me. Sometimes I would even fall in love with fictional characters, for example Javert in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables or Pierre in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

So, when I read No Exit back then, I took the characters deadly seriously.

Re-reading it now, the characters were totally unrelatable. But also oddly loveable, making me examine myself in a new way.

Part of my own agony is that I was never able to self-actualise because I have never felt safe in my own body. The monster occupying my nervous system still structurally prevents this. As a result, and I know it sounds crazy, but I have never learned how to love myself.

This is fucking huge.

I was always in need of help, but the world around me refused to recognise that and so I convinced myself that I was unworthy of being helped. Or loved. In fact, I thought I was a horrible piece of shit. I still do. Consequently, there has never been a truly healthy relationship in my life.

As a child, my mother dismissed my expression of suffering as histrionics; she would cruelly joke ‘Oh my Sarah Heartburn,’ after famed French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt. Feeling negative about others only made my monster grow, so it never occurred to me to think of my mother as mean.

I was the problem.

This is a terrible thing to think about oneself, but because I was searching for answers it also made me learn to relate even more with other people’s suffering, which is why I went to Iran and ended up researching Islamophobia and Hizbullah. It is also why I became an activist for Palestine.

But there is a serous price to pay for such empathy, as everything becomes your problem. After visiting Gaza in 2013 with a humanitarian initiative, my nervous system experienced horrific electrical shocks during the 2014 Israeli assault on the Strip. And when Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated, I felt more unsafe in my body (and in this world) than ever.

And then there is also a flip side, as I hurt when other people make mistakes or do things wrong. The monster punishes me for everything.

Thus, I can very much relate to the idea of Hell being other people.

Although I have had friends throughout my life, I have never had a serious relationship and always go home alone, where nobody knows what is going on – that is where the monster is in total control.

For example, it causes me pain to even think bad thoughts let alone perform them. Even on my own! My monster has me on a leash. Why?

Because there was an injury at the base of my nervous system, my concept of self had to be constructed around the injury. Although I was very talented, my abilities were unreliable and this took away my confidence. I did not feel proud about my achievements; in seventh grade I joined the varsity track team competing with juniors and seniors, who were many years older. Nevertheless, I still usually won my events and unusually I did four.

My school was so proud of my quadruple firsts it would make the announcements during homeroom. I will never forget the feeling I had after one particular track competition, when I again earned four firsts but did not perform anywhere near my personal best. On the bus home I cried about how the coming attention would bring me shame not pride.

This was not a bad attitude; it was a child in enormous psychological pain.

So, for me, Hell is both myself and other people.

I am so sensitive while working on myself now that I cannot be around people at all, including the shaman doctor, my butterfly, who was caring for me.

He could not see my monster and so despite all of the excellent work we achieved together, its invisibility to him was making it stronger.

For example, when I was in a particularly bad seizure, he would try to assure me that I was safe with him. What a beautiful thing to say, only for the monster to scream at me that I have never been safe and do not deserve safety. However, the shaman could not hear the monster saying this.

It sounds trivial, but this planted a seed for the monster to feed on.

So did recommending for me to go do really cool things in nature, when that was completely beyond my possibility to do, despite desperately wanting it.

I have been extremely disabled for the better part of five years now. And the closer I come to accessing the original injury in my face, the more disabilities I am experiencing. Which is even more annoying since I keep on looking better, so people thinking I am doing well only makes the monster grow.

There have been pockets of time when I did feel better – for example I could travel for health purposes or go to concerts. At one point I even took part time work (not working makes me feel like the biggest loser). But the job and my colleagues made me worse, so the monster got stronger.

My list of bodily issues right now is ridiculous. I am like a fucking cartoon of neurological weirdness. But most importantly, I feel manic and incompetent. Indeed, the mania is incredible; it is like being on bad speed every second of every day. My nervous system is so fucking desperate to heal right now.

Over the past year, it has been difficult to leave the house for any reason. When I suffer seizures, other people always make it worse, thinking they understand. Calling the police makes me feel like a criminal because I am very angry inside. Even though I can barely breathe, I end up crying and running away. So, I do not like having seizures in public.

The shaman was absolutely brilliant with my seizures. The only one who helped! But the problem was that because he could not recognise my true suffering, he was still feeding the monster. Towards the end of my treatment, my mobility had drastically decreased and I was sobbing all the time.

The shaman was perplexed why I was not feeling better. When he asked me to do something that I physically could not do, I had the biggest seizure yet.

Once again, I feared for my life, got angry and things ended badly. The monster ate the butterfly and I had to stop seeing the shaman.

In the following days, my body released some scar tissue and the monster lost an arm. Ending our misunderstanding was incredibly healing.

But I still continued sobbing and felt awful about having to do this all alone. I am angry that nobody can see my monster, no matter how much I try to communicate it. But I am also starting to realise that the monster will never leave me be if I do not let that anger go. There have been moments when I feel an existential kind of body panic that I have never felt before, far above and beyond the kind of malaise that Sartre writes about. With the monster starting to lose its physicality, my body is unsure of how to even be.

I cannot even begin to explain.

The monster has been in control my entire life, so I guess my body is just scared to have to figure it out all alone. Hopefully if I can realise the monster in these drawings, it will give me the courage to continue trying…