the.com/dark night of the soul

means A period of profound despair, doubt, or crisis—often spiritual or existential—that feels bottomless while you're in it.

from The phrase comes from the 16th-century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross, who wrote a poem (and later a treatise) called 'Noche Oscura del Alma,' describing the soul's painful journey of stripping away attachments and certainties to draw closer to God. For him it was a specific, almost technical stage of mystical purification, not just a bad week. The phrase drifted into everyday secular language over the following centuries, gradually losing its theological scaffolding and coming to mean any deep personal crisis of meaning, faith, or hope—the night you're convinced has no morning.