Seven times there has been an announcement.
In a Facebook group I used to admin called “The Learning Chef,” there were seven posts that I remember calling for:
“Can I get a heard for so-and-so, who took his own life?”
There have been others where I have written “Heard” in the comment section. As a young chef, I used to feel terrible in those few minutes and think about why people were led to do something so irreversibly terrible.
Was it because people who were usually misfits chose this occupation and became part of it? I think that question mostly came from denial: denial that I, too, was in an industry with disproportionate levels of self-harm and suicide, and that the work itself could be part of the cause.
It is so common that it is often treated as another “sad reality” of the industry. The ones who speak about the constant stress and the feeling of always being on the edge are often demeaned and relegated to the fringes.
“You are not made for this.”
Or they are called a wuss for not being able to survive in an environment where you have to perform every day. To perform the dance of the devil.
One of those people on the fringes—someone who managed to escape, but not before it completely broke and changed what was inside him—was Anthony Bourdain. That brokenness stayed and caught up to him late in his life.
When I first watched The Bear, I found relatability in many things. But I could not relate to Carmen’s character in certain scenes. I was lucky.
Lately, I have started not relating to him but empathising with him. I saw Carmen as two completely different characters in my first viewing and my most recent one. I am often so blindly positive about situations that I fail to see how negatively they are affecting me.
The feeling of being on the edge, the constant pressure to perform, and the crushing weight of anxiety and failure manifest physically.
You wake up in fight or flight, as if a ghost has been sitting on your chest all night. The sides of your face above your eyes are constantly clenched tight, and they hurt. The ever-present ball of anxiety gives you terrible reflux.
These are often considered merely the physical ailments of a physically demanding job. When you are fresh in the industry, they are normalised to the point that you become numb to them. The signals your body gives you become background noise. You learn to hide the discomfort so well that your facial expression detaches itself from the internal churning.
You can have an anxiety attack so bad that you start dry-heaving on the line. Your body wants to puke its lungs and liver out so that it can get off work, but it is sidelined and disregarded because you have a performance.
Performing the dance of the devil is in the details.
Some days after service, it takes two hours to shut the brain down. One of those hours is spent sitting on the couch, completely incapacitated, staring into nothing.
When Carmen looks at the fire in the kitchen and takes a moment not to put it out, but to think that perhaps if he left it going, it would burn the place down and take all the problems with it, I cannot help but think that he also wondered if the fire would burn the place down with him and his problems inside it.
I never wrote much about Bourdain because I thought of his memory as something my pen could never do justice to. I am gradually coming to believe that he learned to tread through the world with such incredible softness—and had such an ability to connect with people going through some of the worst times in human history—because he could empathise with all the brokenness, sorrow and unsaid words that lingered in the air.
Where you look at someone and just know.
In that moment, they shared comfort. That is probably what kept Tony from going over the edge for as long as he did.
A lot of people who die by suicide have thought about it multiple times. Over and over again, but never brought themselves to do it. Out of responsibility. Out of not having gathered the courage. Out of having empathised with the consequences. Or simply by taking a deep breath and hoping that eventually everything would be all right.
Some do this for years, and the people around them never have an inkling.
Why would the life of the party—the person who is always smiling—suddenly do such a thing? Because they perform really well.
Something pushes them over, like the final straw that breaks the camel’s back. They make peace with it and seemingly feel the happiest they have ever been, because eventually they will not have to perform. They will not have to figure it out. It is time to make their exit and not perform anymore.
To Tony, Chester, Robin, Tim, John, Melusi, Anton, Mihai, Andy, Jamal and Raul.