The gatekeepers of mercy
What Belgium Taught Me About Pain and Permission
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been researching how to die.
Not as a cry for help. Not as a metaphor. Not as a dramatic gesture. Just research. Cool, clinical, and necessary. Because when your mind is a warzone and your body is the prison keeping you trapped inside it, the idea of death starts to feel less like a horror and more like a release.
And I’m not even sure I really want to die. I just want out of the pain. I want freedom. I want to stop running code on broken hardware, endlessly looping through a hell I can’t debug.
The truth is, I feel nothing — or maybe everything — all the time. It's like there's a scream lodged in my chest that never makes it out. I want to break things. I want to erupt. I want to be real, even if that means I’m splattered across the walls in a symphony of red and horror. Because right now, I’m nothing. An absence. A void wearing skin. And the only time I feel even a flicker of truth is when I imagine bleeding. Not because I want to die, but because I want to know I’m still here.
So yeah, I looked into assisted death.
Canada? No chance. US? Laughable. You have to be physically dying, visibly deteriorating, conveniently terminal. Because if the pain isn’t something the doctors can see on a scan, it doesn’t count. You’re not sick — just dramatic. Just depressed. Just needing therapy or meds or a walk in the sun.
But then, Belgium.
Belgium is the one country in the world where you can request assisted death for psychiatric suffering. Real suffering. Invisible suffering. The kind that carves tunnels through your life while nobody notices you vanishing. And for a moment, I let myself believe. Maybe there’s a way out. A kind way out.
But there’s a catch. Of course there is.
If you're not a Belgian citizen? If you don’t live there? Then forget it. The psychiatric route is locked. Foreigners can only apply for euthanasia in cases of unbearable physical suffering. Which means that if your agony lives in your thoughts, if it floods your mind every day like poison, but doesn’t show up in your organs or blood tests, then you don’t qualify. You’re not in “enough” pain. Not the right kind of pain.
And just like that, even the most progressive system in the world slammed the door in my face.
“Nevertheless, not just anyone can apply for euthanasia in Belgium. Although euthanasia for psychiatric suffering is possible in Belgium, it does not apply to foreigners. ‘The consensus is that we only do that for foreigners with physical problems,’ stresses Distelmans.”
There it is. The quote that sealed it. The bureaucratic scalpel that carved “Not Enough” into my chest.
I am crushed.
And it feels petty and ugly to admit this — but I’m jealous. A friend of mine got approved for assisted death not long ago. They got their escape. They got mercy. Even though they didn’t want it. Even though it wasn’t fair. But still — they got the thing I can’t have. And that jealousy is the only real emotion I’ve felt in weeks. It burns.
Because it’s not just about wanting to die. It’s about wanting to know that I could. That if it ever got too much, there would be a door. An exit. A shred of autonomy in a life where I’ve been denied control again and again.
But there is no door. Not for people like me. Not for minds that scream quietly. Not for pain without bruises.
Instead, there is only waiting. Numbness. The unbearable weight of being told, again, that your pain doesn’t count. That you must continue to live in a body and brain that doesn’t want to be here, just because the system can’t see past its own definitions of suffering.
This isn’t a cry for help. This is a cry of help.
If Belgium — Belgium, the most liberal and humane system in the world — tells people like me that we don’t qualify for compassion, then what hope do the rest of us have?
The world gatekeeps even mercy. And I’m tired. So, so tired.