There is something new trying to be born inside of me from the death of something that once was. Death is a messy ordeal and quite emotional. But birth is even messier. Its visceral. There’s blood. People usually scream. Some may faint. And each time, there are always close family and friends who’d ‘rather not be here’. Maybe this resistance is my body’s way of rejecting this metamorphosis. It is angry and does not want to let go. This metamorphosis is painful; sandpaper against an already seeping wound of madness and folly, and the grinding sound that resonates from this infliction is always too deafening, never allowing any healthy meditative contemplation.
I’ve reached a crossroads, a place where life has finally revealed itself to me and the revelation – its face, if you will – is one of the most unbearable experiences my deepest imagination could ever conjure. No artistic illustration or conglomeration of words could attempt to describe the true terror of being face-to-face with existence – your own or that of others. When exposed and without filter, existence is gruesome. It pulses with a sick vibration of vitriolic uncertainty and power. It’s true darkness and blinding light simultaneously.
The realization of my own existence – and existence in general – manifests itself as depression and subsequent anxiety towards feeling depressed and anxious. The feels overlap and form a cyclic harmony of utter chaos and a delicate contradiction of absolute clarity. I can, quite clearly, see everything for the first time. I can see the meaninglessness of my meager existence; its past, present and future and the confrontation is something that my psyche cannot, does not, accept. The subsequent feeling is absolute terror projected outward as abject indifference. I dare not give physical agency to the terror for fear of its repercussions.
Every interaction – human to human, human to environment – seems to be in direction violation of existence; a constant resistant against the forces of complacency and complete despair. The fight is in the infinity between the possible outcomes between two choices, an oscillation of anxiety and debasement that teeters of the edge of explosive insanity. The clarity of my existence is labeled by some to be madness and, the reaction to it is therapeutic – either pharmacological or psychological. Therefore, the clarity has manifested the madness and the madness has manifested the clarity. But it was clarity, first, that was experienced and then contemplated ad infinitum.
The contemplation and ‘resistance’ to this clarity – the realization that I may be nothing – has lit a pyre of terror inside of me, its flames causing the burning of my anxiety towards each new moment of life. In a way, I see my life as my fault – the choices I have made, the paths I have chosen. The fault being in that I have become too awake to the fact that it all has absolutely no meaning outside of what you make it. But the essential question then becomes: what happens when you have lost the ‘self’? How then can meaning be conjured from nothingness?
The loss of my identity has cast part of my brain in a desperate search for a new one – a new ‘self’ – that can interact and ‘be’ part of the world. These in-between moments when no self exists – as is the case at this very moment – I experience as extreme terror, where even suicide seems to be a non-option because it requires a will that a person devoid of a self does not possess. Therefore, death is not an escape and the realization of this – the perpetual eternity of agony and despair – is terrifying. Where did my ‘self’ go? More to the point, where did it come from in the first place?
The crafting of my ‘self’ – the ego – has been stitched together, very deliberately, through years of observation and study of other people. After finding some trait or idiosyncrasy that seemed to be in harmony with the ones I deemed worthy, I would adopt – steal – a part of them and add it into my ‘self’ repertoire, thus helping to create this new person who desperately seeks out other ways of being; a personality digester. Again, this all has been – still is – very deliberate and conscious throughout the entirety of my life. It stands to reason that I have never had a personality of my own and, now that I have lost what I have created I am, for the first time, experiencing the world naked, as something new, birthed from the death of the old one.
My everyday struggle and inability to form simple decisions and analyses, is the residual effects of my old ‘self’ screaming out for some kind of existential effigy; a way of still remaining behind, even during its demise. My ‘self’ – which is difficult to label right now for, I am in between selves, at the moment – is in conflict with letting go and accepting what the present moment has to offer. Clarity of this and the realization of these self-inflicted psychic wounds, have left scars of depression, anxiety, hopelessness, despair, and intellectual poverty. Further exasperating the effects of the scars is the fact that I have memories of past lives that had the workings of normalcy stability. However, my ‘viewing’ of these memories inflicts further emotional scarring and subsequent resistance, for I long to go back and relive them.
The emotional scars are what I must learn to contend with; they are what need ‘treating’. At present, I am off in the past whiling remote-viewing the future. I cannot experience or even self-inflict the present moment. The act of provoking the ‘now’ into my existence is met with a futility that welds welted hopes and dreams. The hopefulness in this provocation is so powerful and, when it comes up empty, is so severe that the cycle of emotions lives me in a state of catatonia.
If I can find a way to exist – as in, the complete reconstruction of a new ‘self’ – then novel experiences can be welcomed into my life and I can, once again, live linearly. Now, life goes on by force of habit alone, nothing more. I am stuck in existential contemplation, a prison buried so deep under the Earth that nobody knows it is there. The prison’s inmate – the ‘self’ – is desperately trying to escape. I AM trying to break free. But to do that, I have to first realize that the lock must be picked and a secret tunnel be dug from my cell to the outside world. And the guards here keep 24- hour watch.
Author Notes: I write when I want to understand what is going through my brain at the moment. Let me know what you think and leave comments appropriately. Thank you for taking the time to read my piece. We are all a work-in-progress.
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United States • 39 years old