Existential Crisis

While I'm sitting here, Dr. Pepper in hand, with nothing better to do, I'd like to share one of my strangest and most personal experiences, which began around the middle of December and lasted for about 2 months afterwards. I went through several phases, but I believe that all of the things that I experienced were in fact the expression of a psychological issue, an internal conflict within me.

It all began one night in mid-December. I had just had a great day, having just gotten back from a friend's house. After getting ready, I went and lay down in my bed. At that instant, after several years without it ever crossing my mind, it hit me, hit me hard: some day, I am going to die, and there is nothing that I can do to change that. I just lay there, in the dark, and shivered at the thought of it. I had been so content without any religious beliefs, without any belief in any sort of God or afterlife, and now, the very idea that I would one day simply cease to experience, that I would be no more, terrified me. I stayed awake for about an hour and a half more, thinking about it, before I finally succumbed to my sleepiness and fell asleep.

The next morning was okay for the first 10 seconds of consciousness, before I was once again possessed by the fear of death. I actually began to cry. I hadn't cried in a long time, and I felt ashamed, ashamed that I was crying for myself, and for how much of a coward I was for fearing the loss of myself over anything else. My family was initially sympathetic, but even they began to get annoyed at my attitude after a while. But I couldn't stop thinking about it. I was distracted at school, at home, everywhere I went. There was simply no escaping that feeling of impending doom. That night, I began to feel a bit sick. I thought that I was finally dying. I thought that I could feel my life literally fading away. I lay down in bed, waiting for it to come. My mother became worried. She told me to eat something, to see if it would help me. I hadn't eaten for a while, as my depression had made me lose my appetite, so I got up, got some crackers and milk, and sat down on the couch in the living room with my mom. That was when I noticed something odd: my leg was shaking, shivering really. My mom told me to stop it, and that I was being silly with this obsession with death. I tried to make it stop, but it wouldn't. This wasn't the end of it; soon, my head felt strange, and I began to experience tunnel vision. My mother was getting a little unnerved now, and told me that I should definitely try to eat something. So I put the crackers in my mouth and chewed them. Now everything would have been fine if that had been the end of it, but of course it wasn't, as I found that my mouth had completely dried up, and that I was absolutely unable to swallow. I tried to wash the crackers down with the milk, but I couldn't even force the milk down. At this point, I was certain that there was a problem. My whole body had begun to shiver, and I began to experience heart palpitations(hearing your own heartbeat). I thought that this was the end, that I was certainly dying right there, on the couch.

But, thankfully and obviously, I didn't.

After I regained my senses(literally, my senses had gone completely haywire), I got up and felt a cool wave of relief that the black void of death hadn't consumed me(yet). I was still shivering from all over, that I couldn't stop. I decided that I had better use my time in this rational state of mind to look up my symptoms(since my mother didn't seem to think that I needed to see a doctor..hmm). I looked it up on the Internet, and found that my experiences matched almost perfectly with a typical panic attack. By this time, I had also broken out into a cold sweat, which made my diagnosis perfect. I came to terms with the fact that I had just suffered a pretty nasty(I guess) panic attack, and decided to call it a night.

Regardless of how much I knew about my current condition(as I had also become familiar with the definition of existential crisis the previous night as well), I could not escape the feelings of dread and despair that dogged me for the next month or so. I had frequent experiences of derealization, and occasionally experienced tunnel vision(which is a very strange experience, mind you), and my physical state matched my mental state quite well. Since my initial panic, I had very little appetite, and often felt drowsy and inactive. I constantly wanted to lay down, and felt sick to my stomach. When my grandparents tried to get me to eat, I had gotten through about half of the sandwich before I threw up. Mentally, I had become extremely paranoid, more so than usual. I would often get up at night and look out my window to be on the lookout for some unknown threat to my material existence(or possibly only existence). I came up with every possible death scenario, and actually thought them quite possible at the time. One night, I thought of the possibility of a black hole simply sucking the Earth in, destroying all life. In fact, I was convinced that this would happen, and kept getting up to look out my window, waiting for some dark spot to appear in the sky and soon engulf the entire world. I waited for the huge amount of gravity to suck me in, spaghettify my body and break me down into my most basic components. Another instance that exemplifies my paranoid and depressed mental state was when I was in my Life Wellness class, which is in the Athletics hallway, and has no windows. I kept thinking to myself "You know, a black hole or a nuclear bomb could destroy us all right now, and since we're here, in this room, with no contact with the outside world, we'll never see it coming". I'd say that I had definitely been quite mad at that time.

What really didn't help was the story we were reading in Spanish at the time, "El nino que se le murio a su amigo", or, in English, "The boy who died on his friend". Pretty obvious what it's about really. Wow, that depressed me even more than I already was. I became extremely sensitive to any mention of death(which is very frequent, so it's kind of hard to get around), and I had recurrent thoughts of just ending my earthly suffering right there, just to finally see what happens. I never acted upon it though, and at those thoughts, I decided that I needed help. I decided to see the school counselor.

I went into Ms. Shelton's office and sat down(after the usual wait, of course. It's not like I just sat in there and said "Counsel me, wench!" I do have manners, afterall). I told her my issue, quite plainly. After about 4 seconds of translating my language into something that she could understand, she asked me why I was feeling this way. She started to get an odd smile on her face, and she was starting to give me the creeps. I told her about my experience. She translated again, and smiled, telling me that I was a "blessing" and a "bright young man". She saw I was in GT (the Gifted and Talented Program), and explained that I was special or some magical thing as that, and told me that I wasn't really afraid of death, but rather was directing some other problem in my life towards that(yeah...). I told her, "No, I'm pretty sure I'm afraid of death". She essentially told me that I was wrong and said something about defense mechanisms and asked me if I were religious. I said "No, not really". She told me that her faith has gotten her through a lot, and that she recommends that I read John Locke. I don't know where Locke falls into any of that, since I'm fairly sure that his work has little to do with remedying an existential depressive episode.

So I left, completely reassured that the counselor was pretty much a dipstick, and decided to search for a way to cope with my problem through the awesome breadth of knowledge housed in the Internet. By looking up ways to soothe my depression, I slowly became less obsessed with death. I delved into various philosophies, many of which I had familiarity with from my studies as a young child of around 5 or 6 and later on, and others that I knew less about. I found the philosophies of Buddhism and the Spring and Autumn Period philosophies from China to be very enlightening(get it, enlightenment, Nirvana, Buddhism? haha). Slowly, yet surely, I stepped out of my 2 month long psychosis and became healthy in mind and body once again. Though I was no longer a complete nutter, I was still a tiny bit sensitive about death until maybe around April, and I was still very paranoid about certain, more realistic things(such as getting mugged and stabbed) for a while, though I eventually became essentially normal again by mid April.

Despite how painful it was to go through life being extremely paranoid, and later feeling as though my existence was absolutely meaningless, therefore making living absolutely pointless, I feel that this experience has allowed me to grow as a person, and to experience new ways of thinking thanks to the research I did on philosophy that I did to calm myself. I often look back on the experience wishing that it had never happened, and yet, I am glad that it did in a way. I seldom worry about death anymore, as it's really not important. This is embodied in the words of Arthur Schopenhauer: "Death is not a part of life".