Existential crisis + severe anxiety and depression

[cinnamonapple89]

Hi! I'm new to this site and lurked for a while but felt I needed to join, because it feels so good to hear the other people feel the way i do, as no one in my real life does. please excuse punctuational errors, etc - just trying to get these thoughts from my mind to my hands as fast sa possible since my mind runs a mile a minute.

i have been depressed for as long as i can remember, but lately it's been on ANOTHER level. for some reason, i was thinking about death a lot. normally when i think about death, it's "omg my parents are aging and will die" but then it went to thinking about MY death and how weird it is to imagine not "being" anymore. then that led me to, well who made the rules that we even have to die anyway? to ISN'T IT WEIRD AS HELL TO THINK WE'RE ON A PLANET IN SPACE??? Like think about it...what is space??? what is this planet??? who made it? i find that my friends cling to religion, and that grounds you. I am not religious, so i don't have that tentpole. so they say "well God made it" and i say "OK WHERE DID GOD COME FROM?!?!?!"

These thoughts CONSUME me. i think really deeply about it then i go down a wikipedia rabbithole. i cry about it. i feel very "not me".everything feels strange now. i feel like i've opened a portal in my brain that will never be closed again - i'm too aware, and i will always remember this time when i was too aware and it'll bring me back. there's just no going back.

every 5 seconds, i sit and i think "omg i could die right now" "i could die right now" "what if my scheduled time to die was tomorrow at noon?" and it's the most scary feeling and i can't describe it to you - because no one knows. no one knows this stuff so there is NO comfort. we just accept hate that everything "is".

I also realized that I care A LOT what people think about me. like if someone else has an attitude with me, i will adopt that attitude. if someone else is sad, i adopt that sadness. i know there's people that don't like me, but i find that EVERY TIME i leave a room - no matter who is in that room, i think "i wonder what they're gonna say about me when i leave". that could be 2 coworkers in that room, that could be my parents in that room - doesn't matter. I feel like no one likes me, even though that's not true. i feel like people think i'm weird because i realized quickly that no, not everyone goes through this. everyone made me feel so crazy and i was feeling like "if you've never pondered your own existence then YOU'RE the crazy one."

i get scared and more isolated when i realize that we ARE alone. you are born to people, you have partners, you have children - but they are not you, and you are not them. you will NEVER fully know what another person is really thinking or feeling.

i've been slowly doing this for a while, but i am more isolated than ever, i also live in a basement apartment in new york. i just feel like this is my little safe zone, away from any potential harm or potential misunderstanding. i feel free. this is where i can feel totally FREE - just me.

I feel blessed to be going through this, but angry at the same time. i feel like i was chosen to think these thoughts for a reason. i feel like this is apart of a journey i'm supposed to be having now. i know it sounds weird but it really does make me feel...special. to whoever that higher power is.

This is only a small portion of what i'm really feeling, but this is the gist of it. i have never felt so depressed that i felt hopeless. i feel like i'm just like what is this? what is this for? why aren't we all 1 thing that looks exactly the same? what purpose did dinosaurs serve? like the mind is really SO powerful. the hopeless feeling honestly feel like something is physically pushing me down. imagine laying in a bed with something heavy across your chest and arms - that's exactly how i feel. i literally feel a weight.

i feel for everyone experiencing something similar. or maybe i'm the only weirdo.

[cinnamonapple89]

The fact that I even have the capability to be aware of myself is also an insane concept to me. language is a trippy concept for me. like i think SO deeply about EVERYTHING. it's draining.

[violetgenie]

You are not the only one who has these thoughts. Anxiety makes these thought patterns go off the rails. I can empathize with the lying in bed with a weight on your chest. I also ponder what purpose the dinosaurs served! Do you have trouble sleeping?

[cinnamonapple89 in reply to violetgenie]

Firstly, thank you so much for responding! I have no trouble falling asleep, but I don't know when the last time was that I slept through the night. I wake up at least 3 times...every night.

[violetgenie]

I would say that your anxiety has gotten to a point where you probably need to try a different medication or therapy or alternative therapy. When it starts giving you racing thoughts and screwing with your sleep, that's when you know the anxiety monster has gotten too much and needs to be beaten down.

[HopingCat]

I'm struggling with a similar nightmare. Go over my post and tell me if you think it's similar. Almost 4 months now. Do you feel unreal also?

[cinnamonapple89 in reply to HopingCat]

Yes! The hyperawareness is very weird. I can't not think about how "unreal" I am, and what it even means to be real...and then my body starts acting like it doesn't know how to work because i'm thinking SO HARD

[HopingCat in reply to cinnamonapple89]

Yep! It's like sensory overload and can't process it correctly. Mine came with this hell called depersonalization/derealization and it's been like this for almost 4 months. I'm literally in Hell

[Peacewithin1]

You literally described my exact thoughts about death and existence... even how I think about other people like for example, I will never know how they feel because they're them. The only thing is I don't care what others think of me because I'm to lost in my thoughts.

[Belo]

You are not alone especially on the death thing, thought i was alone too, just try to be positive and as for m i hbe tried not to think too much about it.

[begentle51 in reply to Belo]

Omg! I have these thoughts, never actually admitted to them until now. I just thought I was mad. Thank you for being honest and saying how you feel 🌸

[cinnamonapple89 in reply to begentle51]

Thank you for reading 💕

[jrcnpg]

In his seminal work, 'The Myth Of Sisyphus', Camus argues that there is only one philosophical question that needs to be faced, that being that if human life is as meaningless and absurd as it seems to be, there are only two answers to it; accept life as it is and make of it what you will or commit suicide. The myth is that Sisyphus was exiled from Mount Olympus and his punishment was to roll a huge boulder to the top of a hill then let it roll down to the bottom and then roll it back to the top.........this for all eternity.

To address your concerns about not being able to be someone other than yourself there's a poem by Matthew Arnold called, 'The Buried Self' in which he mourns the fact that we can never truly know another individual because we are not able to establish any apriori or indeed empirical intimate knowledge of anyone else. I, too, mull such things over and over and over in my mind at night, at the moment I am working through Cartesian dualism, that being a difficulty which has always attracted my full attention and, I gather, Descartes also.

This may sound daft in the extreme but a few years back I watched a documentary about jellyfish and through thinking about it I had around two hours sleep per night for a week or so. They have no central nervous system, no brain, no stomach, nothing we as human beings could identify with yet the point is that they are there, they are sentient and we share the world with them.

I think you may have gathered by now that I have a special interest in literature and that is because I have a BA(Hons.) in the subject. Poetry is a beautiful expression of the human condition, philosophy is a discreet examination of and conclusion of very specific points of interest.

I would like to keep in touch, it is not very often that we find someone with the same kind of thought processes as ourselves, this an invitation to anyone who would like to keep in touch for the reasons I have mentioned.

Regards

John

[cinnamonapple89 in reply to jrcnpg]

Wow this is amazing. I will be following you and reason up on what you referenced. Thank you so much for responding to this.

[hairyfairy in reply to jrcnpg]

The tale of Sisyphus sums up the human condition very well, apart from the fact that he had to do what he did for eternity, &

humans only live for a few decades.

[jrcnpg in reply to hairyfairy]

The last line of 'The Myth Of Sisyphus' reads 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy'. The fact that his punishment was as it was intensified it. I don't think that Camus was concerned with fact and fiction when writing 'The Myth Of Sisyphus'. He chose that particular myth because of its conveyance of absurdity.

[hairyfairy]

These are exactly the thoughts that run through my mind in the wee small hours!