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A Recovering Existentialist (07/06/23)

As a child, I struggled with the fear that I would die in my sleep. I would intentionally keep myself awake, feeling every heartbeat ricochet off my ribs and resonate through the rest of my body. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. The more I thought about it, the faster it got, until it exploded into a cacophony of unintelligible thoughts and feelings. I couldn’t control it. In fact, at one point I was hospitalized for it. Anxiety. At least, that’s what the papers always said.

As I grew older the fear of dying in my sleep slowly subsided. I realized that hey, if I can make it 10 times out of the 10 I remembered, I was probably fine. But that doesn’t mean my thoughts never drifted. “What exactly am I? What’s my place in the grand scheme of things? Why do I exist?”

These types of thoughts are hard to shake. The proposition of it all really digs its heels into your psyche, questioning the very brain itself as to what its purpose truly is. They’re hard questions to provide answers for. It’s not like some great being is going to reach its giant hand down to you and guide you towards true enlightenment. For some, maybe, but for me, religion or the thought of a higher power never really comforted me. So, I was left to fend for myself, searching amongst a sea of memories for some kind of answer.

Then, from a point not shy of as far back as I can remember, therapy started.

According to my mother I was 7 when I started, but any recollection of that is vague at best. I remember the face of a woman in a neatly-kept office, with lots of fun educational toys and craft supplies. She and I never used them, but I remember seeing them there. I remember looking into her eyes every once in a while, nothing more than a fleeting glance. Eye contact. That was something else I struggled with.

The term “Anxiety” has always been thrown around a lot within my medical files. While I’ve never seen my official diagnostic sheet, I can only imagine “GENERALIZED ANXIETY DISORDER” is printed in large bold letters somewhere on the list. But, what exactly does that mean? What exactly am I generally anxious about? Does that mean everything?

For me, there was at one point where I really could pinpoint the majority of the anxious thinking:

“Who am I? What am I? What does it all mean?”

As a young adult, after a period of a few years without medical intervention, I started seeing a therapist again. I remember standing on the porch of my now ex-boyfriend’s parents’ home, praying with every ring that they would not pick up. But they did. I very shyly asked how hard it would be to get in with a therapist. They asked me the standard, run-of-the-mill questions, none of which I can remember with specific accuracy. Eventually, they gave me a time and date to come in and fill out paperwork, as well as meet my new therapist. John. That was his name, hopefully I could remember it.

I don’t remember the first appointment itself, but as each appointment came and went, I remember discussing the concept of Existentialism. According to Oxford Languages, Existentialism can be defined as “a philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.” In other words, it’s the concept that you are exactly what you think you are. But, what if you don’t know? What if you have absolutely no idea where to start?

We talked through these questions quite extensively, often over the course of several sessions. Other than the day-to-day drama of being a young adult, it was the primary focus of discussion. It truly was a concept that was hard for me to shake from my mind. Throughout the day, I would catch myself staring off into space, (which I later learned would eventually lead to full-blown dissociation for me,) unable to shake the feeling that I didn’t know what my purpose was or why I existed. I told John this, and once in a fleeting moment I felt like I could read his mind. This is a normal thing for an 18-year-old to be thinking, but to hyperfixate it on this much? Now, I don’t know if that’s actually what he was thinking, but in those seconds of watching his normally calm, pleasant face slowly morph into an expression of genuine concern and care, that’s how it felt.

So, we talked. And we talked. And we talked some more. He would ask me questions, and I would answer them. But from the standpoint of medical practice, it was much more than that. These questions would in turn make me myself think about the answers I was providing. For once, the questions I was being asked would produce something substantial, more than an “I don’t know.” These questions made me parse through the same bank of neurons that I was used to parsing, but now, instead of being guided by a single flame of a lighter, someone turned the overhead lights on in the warehouse.

This practice is a part of what is known as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or CBT. This practice is designed to rewire the neural pathways in your brain away from unhelpful ways of thinking, in favor of more positive, efficient ways of thinking. For me, this manifested in realizing that my answer to the question of “Why do I exist?” being “I don’t know” was largely unhelpful, at least to me. For some people, not knowing really is a case of “Ignorance is bliss,” and not knowing what exactly we’re all doing here is not a cause for concern. But for me, that wouldn’t cut it. I really, really needed answers, as I often did with other things as well.

Over time, I found myself gently guided in the direction of three main points: To live, to love, to experience. To live is to, quite literally, function. Breathe, eat, sleep, go to the bathroom at 3AM. All of the monotonous things that we don’t really think about most of the time. It’s all just business as usual. To love is to find passion in people, experiences, things. For me, my love has always been writing. It is a direct link to my thoughts, and in turn, helps me process them in a way that makes sense to me. “People'' are where I struggled, but that’s a topic for a different day. Finally, to experience. To experience life is to use the senses you are gifted with to perceive the world around you. Imagine for the moment the feeling you get when you look at a tree. What does it make you think about? Usually your first subconscious thought will be something like, “Yup, that’s a tree.” But then maybe you’ll notice that the trunk is brown, and that the leaves are green. You’ll notice the sound of those leaves rustling in the wind. You’ll notice the smell of the air that you just heard rustling. And it’ll go on, and on, and on, until you arrive at the final resting thought of “Wow, nature sure is nice.” That, my friends, is to experience.

“So what are you supposed to do with this information?” I asked. To live, to love, to experience. Sure, that makes sense, but why? Why do any of that?

And the answer John gave me was one I didn’t want to hear.

“Because.”

… Because what? Because why?

I can remember him smiling.

“Because, it’s what we, as humans, do.”

I could feel a small anger boiling up in me at that point. Why would he present me with such a vague answer and expect me to be satisfied? At that point I probably asked to talk about something else, largely to avoid confrontation.

But after that point, outside of therapy, I would find myself thinking of his response. “It’s what we, as humans, do.” Those three key points really are the essence of the human experience. It’s the constant that can be traced just as far back as we ourselves can be traced. If it worked for early humans, it should work for us too.

So, what is the takeaway from all of this? As an adult a few years past the teen years, I can tell you this much: You really do stop thinking about it all the time. Being alive becomes natural to you; you run through a day’s tasks without a second thought, and go to bed feeling accomplished about the things that you’ve done that are, in the grand scheme of the universe, inconsequential. But this inconsequentiality can be comforting, in a strange way. Every single decision that you make in your lifetime is not going to affect the fact that long after you’re gone, the sun will die and our solar system will collapse. The fact that you had a piece of cheesecake with your lunch on Thursday will not at all stop the inevitable progression of time long after we can even think about it progressing. Life goes on, and so do we.

So, stop asking what or why, and start asking yourself how. How can I make my life the most enjoyable it can be? How can I streamline my thoughts into the most positive and efficient little trails of neurons as possible?

And lastly, how can I listen to my own heartbeat, and think about how wonderful the miracle of human consciousness really is?

// E Arlo Sharp

#writing #creative writing #mental health #personal writing #existentialism #therapy #anxiety #generalized anxiety disorder #e arlo sharp #earlosharp

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