Existential anxiety

As a child, for many years, I used to have this experience at regular intervals: I’d wake up from a deep nightime sleep or a brief daytime nap, suddenly very alert, my heart racing, with a strong and unshakeable feeling that I had something very important to do, I was running out of time to do it, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember what this all-important task was.

The feeling, this panic would then haunt me for a long time. I’d put pen to paper to record what I could remember of dreams, in a desperate effort to try and unearth my purpose, always just out of reach, always just out of consciousness. When I thought about what I wanted to do – even then, that was to write something meaningful, come up with some mind-opening story – I’d agonise over the lack of inspiration, motivation, time, and opportunity.

I no longer wake up with the dread that I can’t remember what it is that I’m supposed to do, but I am still haunted by the fear of wasting time, and when my brain refuses to work the way I’d like it to, and my hands are too tired to write, I despair that I’m wasting the precious time that I have to make things happen. This is not the capitalist horror of lack of productivity though – it’s something deeper, scarier, existential anxiety, perhaps, that I must scribble all over in order to black it out. In my thrifted secretaire desk, piles of notebooks weighed down by haphazardly jotted thoughts, unfinished stories, and first drafts of poems build a wall against existential dread even as they paradoxically feed it: Why are the stories unfinished? Why are the poems so disorderly?

Very occasionally, I will ask myself, looking at all the notebooks I’ve accumulated over more than a decade: Is this really what I’m supposed to do with my little life? But that question does not hold. It disintegrates as soon as I pick out a new notebook, as soon as I make its crisp blank pages crinkle for the first time.

Not so long ago, when I was having (another) existential crisis over the state of my life, someone very seriously advised me to calm down a bit with all this poetry and apply myself diligently to something more remunerative. I shuddered and immediately told them: “I can’t do that!” By which I meant, I can’t downgrade all this poetry from where it currently stands in my life.

All of which is to say, it matters little whether or not this is what I’m “meant” to do with my little life. I and the act of writing have fallen into each other somehow, and now it is more of me than my lungs. Silly, really, but there you go. I guess that’s why I’ve always had a soft spot for the Romantics. I’ll always be searching for that little blue flower. Whether or not I ever find is irrelevant. The search, the obsession is the purpose. After all, the destination is quite the same for everyone.