I’m lying in bed in the late spring of 2020, my head clouded with scribbling thoughts. My life feels hollow—stripped of its charm, school reduced to screens and friendships reduced to FaceTime. A familiar question rears its head: Why?
Why am I doing any of this? Why make and keep friends, why go to meetings and involve myself, Zoom after Zoom after Zoom, why care—when it all ends, inevitably, soon, the same way. Like a child, I asked, and asked, and asked—and always came up empty. It seemed that life itself was hollow—everything around me, everything I was, everyone I loved. Questions rang out like chiming bells–Why? Why? Why?
Those terrible chimes churned through my skull. I dug for answers, instinctively and obsessively, a prisoner to those mockingly repetitive questions. My brain twisted itself into spirals, concentric rings, as those invading questions spiraled ever-inward, never reaching an answer, only tightening their grip. “What’s the point of anything?” “If we’re all going to die, why even bother?”
We all ARE going to die, after all, however much we try to ignore it. It’s hard to find a point in doing anything—realizing dreams, having conversations, building a personal sense of purpose—when everything seems so hollow, so temporary, so futile.
When your life gets derailed by existential despair, when you feel like a prisoner to your spiraling mind, when you can’t do what you want to do because you can’t even think straight, it’s easy to just throw your hands up and admit defeat.
But, after you wallow in that nihilism, for a while, it starts to get old. It’s not very productive to see everything as hollow, or very fun either. And so eventually, you get tired of feeling exhausted and hopeless. Eventually, you begin to loosen those wrought-iron spirals, slowly and painstakingly. You put yourself back on track, tuning out those fruitless questions. You read a few good books, you take a hike, and above all, you get up and you go on. Eventually, the air is a little less musty, the world seems a little less hollow, the inside of your head a little quieter.
And one day, as you’re laughing with friends, you realize that maybe we can decide what matters—maybe, if all is hollow, we can choose to fill the things we care about with meaning.
Writing this essay as the autumn leaves fall around me, it’s easy to be reminded of life’s inherent impermanence. We’re not here for very long, and no amount of mental re-framing or self-care will change that. The ultimate limit on our behavior is the time we have to act, when our intentions may extend far beyond that scope. The problem of reconciling those two—the infinite nature of human consciousness and the finite nature of our bodies, minds, and world—can seem impossible. It’s certainly not one that an 18-year-old high schooler has any solution to, or one that can be accomplished in the span of just a few essays.
We’re fundamentally unable to do everything we want to, and part of being human is learning to cope with that fact. We’re all impermanent—blindsided by barriers to our goals, be it concentric rings of questions or clouds of depression, anxiety, or grief. But we can grow from that. We can get up, we can examine our intentions and walk towards them again.
I realize this all sounds idealistic—and I’ll probably think differently later in life, my thoughts colored by new decades of experience and pondering. Above all, though, I hope I never lose sight of the idea that no matter what, we can get up.Â