An Existential Crisis

It crept up on me like the way summer turns to winter. Slowly overtime and then all of a sudden. Except it was more like a growing bacteria or fungi, something you wish wasn’t happening and often don’t even know that it is happening until it’s too late. Gradually, I began to feel lost. I was floating and not in a good way. I needed to be grounded. There were too many questions inside my head and everything lost meaning. Even myself. I began to question who I was, and why I didn’t even have an answer for that. I remember a time when I knew everything. I had a plan and a grasp on what I wanted and how to get there. But poof – it all disappeared.

They call it an existential Crisis. “They” being google, the God of the internet, he who knows all. But he didn’t know the answers to all my questions. I didn’t stay at home, moping around, trying to figure it all out ( at least I didn’t do a lot of that ). I carried on, staying my usual busy self. But I felt I wasn’t all there. It was as though I was drifting just above everyone else, in a different atmospheric level, seeing things through a fog. Just like in those movies where a person’s spirit floats out of their body and sees things from a different perspective.

I kept expecting to wake up and know the answers. My biggest question was what should I do. I’ve been making decisions, ones I didn’t want to make, without knowing what I wanted. But without knowing who I am, I can’t figure out what I want just yet. So I’ve been trapped in the place between being gone and being there.

This feeling has started to fade thankfully. By going back to the things I enjoyed, like reading and scrapbooking ( and trying to cut back on netflix ) I feel more like myself again. It seems that creativity has helped a lot. Yet there are still many unanswered questions; What am I doing? Where am I going? Why do we exist?

Today I attended the funeral of a classmate. Although I didn’t know him well, I’ve always held a high opinion of him. He was one of the first people I met in college and one that said hi and never ignored me. I thought he was kind and a rare gentleman for someone so young. From the sea of suits today at the church I know he was loved by many. It was heartbreaking to see the pain on the faces of his family, his friends and even the strangers to me who obviously knew him much better than I did. In his far too short life he had made such an impact on these people. It seams very unfair that his life could be just taken away like that.

But seeing how short our lives can be, really makes you think.

I figure that we exist to live. It really doesn’t matter that you don’t know where you’re going or that you don’t have all the answers. You’re alive and breathing. And in my opinion, it’s the people that make our lives mean so much more.