How My Existential Crisis Triggered My Self-Discovery
Before then, I swayed through life directionless
Straight out of college into my first job, I had a major existential crisis.
The immanent monotony of leading a traditional life, coupled with the empty canvas of all the quantum possibilities of who I could be made me question my perception of life.
Up until then, I swayed through life directionless. I played it safe and did the bare minimum to get by, but deep down I felt a void as if a black hole was growing in me each day, engulfing my very existence.
My life felt like a lie.
The duality of my existence shrieked aloud the disharmony between my inner and outer self. My psyche was massively polarized.
The immanent monotony of leading a traditional life, coupled with the empty canvas of all the quantum possibilities of who I could be made me question my perception of life.
I grew up in an environment where ego and anger prevailed over love and peace. Being a person of a peaceful disposition, I could not resonate with most of my family, which made me feel outrightly disconnected from my roots.
A major impetus that caused my polarization.
Furthermore, my parents encouraged me to pursue a hobby that I neither enjoyed nor was good at, which gravely affected my sense of self-worth. My natural talents never found a medium to shape up to their fullest expression.
A second impetus for my psychic polarization.
As someone who craved self-expression, the stilted emotions of my disconnected childhood along with my failed creative pursuit rippled into my adult life and the chaos became my personality.
The polarization blocked the healthy and natural evolution of my personality. Though I felt sparks of creativity as an adult, I was not a master in any creative pursuits. So I stuck to what I knew the best, even though it did not resonate with it wholeheartedly.
The polarization blocked the healthy and natural evolution of my personality.
No matter how hard I tried to fit in, this life did not jibe with me. I felt out of place every day at work. I knew I had to reevaluate my life and take on the arduous path to consciously shed the layers that no longer worked for me.
For the first time, I felt excited and blissful as I was now consciously building my character. However, it required some serious deconstruction first.
It all started with reviewing my relationship.
I was in a two-year-long toxic relationship with a man whose unhealthy mindset about life was sinking us. I was equally toxic, but I was open to evaluating and working on myself, and he was not.
My mindset was shifting towards a more conscious life, which was pulling us apart energetically. But we felt too safe in each other’s toxicity that we could not let go of our dependencies. As much as I despised our relationship, he felt like home.
The convoluted concept of love I experienced while growing up attracted the same equation in my relationship. Even though the toxicity affected me across all layers of my being, I held on to it until I was burning, and letting go was the only choice.
Physically, I was emancipated.
I had a skin infection that I ignored for months.
Mentally, I was disillusioned into accepting my present as a good life, and emotionally I was havoc, detached from life, and perpetually melancholic. Triggers would get me to react instantly, as I lacked control over my emotions.
The only good thing was with all this self-searching, I was growing spiritually. I was getting better at connecting with my intuition and my consciousness was expanding.
But it was time to dig deeper.
And there I was taking a trip down the rabbit hole of buried sexual traumas, unresolved relationship issues with the mother, self-worthiness dysphoria, holding on to grudges, and the grief of my late father.
All this chaos on the inside manifested in a life of self-sabotage, with no healthy boundaries.
I went into a hermit mode.
Awareness of my wounds made me utterly self-conscious. I could not get myself to interact with people, as I felt extremely fragile.
At the time, in 2019, I had no job and no money and I started a new hobby of photography to distract myself, naively hoping to make ends meet straight out. And in Jan 2020, I went through the dark night of the soul. This was a time when every aspect of my life was in shambles from my health to finances, relationships to self-esteem. But every time I healed a certain wound, it resurfaced the moment there was a trigger. After my breakup with my two-year-long partner, I consciously chose partners with immanent red flags.
You might ask why?
Well, what I realized is awareness and internalization are two different things.
Childhood programming is deep. It forms the very essence of our personality, hence healing such grave wounds requires time, love, willpower, and kindness toward ourselves.
With time I learned to control my ego, connect and act by my intuition irrespective of the doubts and fears my ego continues to project.
I am finally aware of who I am.
I am esoteric. I choose freedom in life and I wish to be in service of others. That is my purpose. I was never meant to fit in, after all, it explains why I had to experience all the trauma I did.
Would I be who I am without it?
I highly doubt it.
After shedding my layers for all these years, I wonder sometimes if I am a different person now!
I’m not sure about the difference but I surely am the version who is in a harmonious relationship with her authentic self. Life has never been so satisfying.
My existential crisis was uncomfortable and extremely difficult but it wasn't without purpose. It has thought me a few things that redefined my belief system:
1. The Past Is Fluid: Knowing that as a conscious creator, I have the power to deconstruct my past and assign it meaning where I no longer associate as the victim, has freed me from my own boundaries of identity.
I now perceive the past as fluid, as a moment in time I choose to identify with.
Though I accept it as a part of myself I look at it from a detached point of view. This shift in perspective has helped me realize the importance of the present moment. After all, now is the instant we have to create the magic, to craft a past that suits our fancy.
2. Healing Happens In Layers: The healing journey never stops. Physical reality is so dense that unless you can renounce materialism altogether, it is impossible to be completely free from the shackles of cause & effect.
Healing is like knowledge, the more you know the more you realize how much you do not know. Especially for deep wounds, the energy takes time to clear as it has seeped through many layers of your psyche over the years.
Healing is forgiveness. It alchemizes the wound into love. It sets you free and clears the energy from your electromagnetic field so that you no longer attract that frequency.
It took me years but I had to forgive my mother for every healing trigger I was experiencing that led me to this point. In a moment, all the resentment I held towards her transmuted into an understanding that she did the best she could with what she had.
If not for those experiences, I would never be the person I am today.
3. Life Is About Flowing: For most of my life, I was a control freak. I thought if I could cautiously plan my life and follow through with it religiously, I would be successful and happy. So every time something went out of control, I turned into an insomniac.
It was not until I surrendered that I started flowing through life.
Knowing that there is a higher power who will inevitably align things in my favor, I began to experience a sense of peace like a baby in the comfort of its parents knowing that it is protected.
