My Nine-year Old Self and my Existential Crisis

Existential crises are supposed to arrive in college. That’s when you stay awake until three in the morning, smoke some killer pot, read Nietzsche badly, and wonder whether life has any meaning.

Y’all, mine arrived when I was nine.

Yeah. I was ahead of my peers. While the other kids worried about multiplication tables, baseball stats, and getting picked last for kickball, there I was melting down over the fact that I was trapped inside a human body and had no idea why the hell I’d been put here.

I didn’t have the language for it then, but the question was clear enough. Why am I here? Why am I inside this thing? Why can’t I remember what came before it? Why does everyone else act as though this arrangement is normal?

Man, that last question bothered me most. Everyone around me seemed comfortable with waking up inside a biological machine that required constant feeding, cleaning, sleep, getting sick, and eventually dying. They went about their routines as if none of this was deeply strange.

I recall freaking out my mother. See, at this time I was melting down on a regular basis. Then one time I climbed to the highest point in my multilevel treehouse, about 30-feet up. My poor mom had no idea what to do with me, which was fair. Most parents in the 1960s weren’t prepared for a nine-year-old having a metaphysical meltdown. You can handle a scraped knee. It’s harder when your child wants to know why they’re on this planet.

Well, we tried therapy.

Thankfully, we found a counselor who wasn’t some religious wanker. I didn’t need someone telling me I was suffering because I hadn’t accepted the correct doctrine or joined the right church. He listened and tried to help, but he had no idea what to do with me either.

From his position, I was probably an anxious child with an overactive imagination. That wasn’t entirely wrong. I just didn’t understand the full problem.

The question I was asking then, and also in my 20s was: WHY am I here?