happenings

Hello all. I am alive. It made me feel really good to come back and see all those comments of people that care... sometimes, especially on vacation, especially amidst family crisises (is that the plural?) I just feel so... forgotten. Never really unloved- I've always felt loved- but uncared about. I'll talk to people and in the middle of what I'm saying they'll talk to someone else. That happened a lot last week when I was rafting with my family, because my family's a bit like that. I guess I just get annoying or something, so they quit caring about what I'm saying. But nobody can interrupt me here.
My church camp was really fun when it comes to the social stuff. I worked hard at being social, and Olivia helped. But what must really be written about the church camp is that I had a complete and total breakdown. Every day I was so... not depressed but... anxious... that I just didn't want to be with people. I literally was too exhausted to go through the effort it took to talk to someone. I just couldn't handle it, so I kinda shut down. Every day over and over in my head there was such panic, such fear, such utter chaos and such a feeling of disconnection. There was nothing to hold onto. I was at church camp and I didn't believe in God. I didn't believe in... anything. It happened just like it did four years ago when we almost had to come home from Maui early because I was going crazy. The only way I could describe it then was crazy. I couldn't explain the things I was feeling to anyone, which just made me feel even more alone and isolated. This time I have the word in my vocabulary to encase the whole experience, to make it so you understand what it is like: total, absolute nihilism.
Yes, nihilism. My worst fear. And it enguilfs me so thoroughly that when I am in it, I cannot remember ever not being in it, and I cannot imagine a future in which it will not be there. I just... deny everything. Life is meaningless. So what. We make friends, get married, have kids, die. But it's nothing. It's all superficial. It's surface-features. I can't even remember it perfectly now, thank God. When I am like this, I just don't seen any reason to be alive. I don't see any purpose for any of the things people do. People are just effecting out these hollow existences that don't matter, that disappear in the mosaic. Everything is... empty. Just so pointless.
The worst part, though, is that it's not just life that's pointless and empty, but death. There is no God, no nothing. Either you stop existing abruptly and your consciousness goes away- which was the most kind thing I could think of happening when you died- or you went to heaven and lived eternally in this pointless, meaningless state, or you went to hell and felt... awful... forever and ever and ever...
It makes me shudder thinking about it, even now, trying to explain it, trying to remember it for you and myself. I couldn't live, because there was no reason for living. But I couldn't die either, because death was even worse- an eternity of that miserable feeling. When I am depressed I get suicidal, and death seems like a haven. That week at church camp there was just no escape at all. There was nowhere to run. There was nowhere that contained any meaning. I would start obsessing over the pointlessness, over the hollowness before and after deaths extending forever into time. Then I would start becoming extremely anxious and get anxiety attacks. Then those anxiety attacks would build and build into full-blown panic attacks. And then I couldn't breathe and I couldn't do anything. What do you do, then? When you can't live, because it's driving you crazy, and every waking moment is filled with nihilism, and you can't die, because it is the summation of everything you fear in the realm of existence? I was terrified of life, and terrified of death. There was nowhere to go. There was no alleviation. Cutting would have done nothing. Suicide would have realized my worst fears.

People think that suicidal depression is as bad as it gets. No, you're wrong. It's this nihilism. It is this complete fear of... everything. That's what it was most characterized by- a fear that I cannot even imgine now that I am sane again. I can only read through my journal entries and wonder how I survived the week.

I called my parents, panicky, breathing hard, five, six times or more every day. I tried to explain to them what was wrong, but I didn't have the word- nihilism- yet. It was only this amorphous, terrible thing that I could not escape because there was nothing else in the world but that creature. I called one night sobbing. I was in the corner of my bed, and I just couldn't believe in anything anymore. Why was I alive? Why was I there? What was ever the reason for breathing, for living, for dying, when everyone lived those mediocre, pointless lives? I can't explain the horror. I know I sound melodramatic and hopelessly emo. But it was real. It wasn't some superficial insanity. It was full-blown. There was no anasthetic, but there was no way to feel.

I had to have a bunch of the counselors there give me a blessing, which is something our church does when you're really sick. I shuddered there on my chair, trying to think about God, when God meant pointless eternities of misery. My parents told me to take more buspar, so I doubled it. Slowly, despairingly, it began to work. For four hours at a time I would be okay, and then the terror would come back. I would come crawling back to the buspar. It was my only connection to any sort of reality that I could cope with, that held meaning and sanity. It pulled me back from that state I was in, the state in which I believed there was no other state. Being in and out of those two states, when I was sane I could begin to believe that perhaps the insanity was transient, and in that possibility there was hope, something that simply did not exist in any shape or form in the other reality I was living in.

When my parents came for me I was a wreck. I was holding it together, cobbling it with buspar, but the second the buspar ran out I was back in my nightmare, back in my endless succession of panic attacks. My mother gave me xanax, which I guess my psychiatrist prescribed for me when they called him while I was at camp. I kept having those attacks of nihilism when I didn't take a pill just on time, but it started to wind down. I started to come back to a world with meaning, the world most of us live in. That's where I'm at now. I'm okay again, but I'm really dependent on the pills, and I'm really afraid of going back to that place. I fear it more than anything. More even than eternal damnation, I think. I can handle depression. But that way I was living... that's as much hell as there can be for me. It cannot possibly get worse than that. (knock on wood.)

I am okay now. I went rafting and had fun. The anxiety is managable. I drove back seven hours all by myself from Wyoming today, listening to this book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintanance which was very interesting, and with which I disagreed with vehemently. I believe in my religion again, and in myself, and in happiness, and calmness, and belief itself. I lost my concept of just pure believing as a verb for a while there, but I have found it again. The book said one thing that I believed though and found immensely interesting... you know that delay between when you see the tree and when your mind becomes aware of seeing the tree? (there is a delay, it is a tiny fraction of a second, but from the reading I've done on neuroscience, and I think to anyone who thinks about it logically, there is definitely a delay.) If you think about that delay- and how really the past only exists in our minds, and has no reality, and the future exists only in our plans and has no reality, so reality exists only NOW- then there really is no reality for a conscious being besides itself. Anything it sees is the past. That fraction of a second, that tiny delay, makes what we perceive are reality really only a thing of our minds.

Wow. What an awesome take on existentialism. It made me stop and smile and laugh because the concept is just so... cool. So something I could have never thought of.

Anyway, my college creative writing class starts tomorrow and I'm scared to death. I bet they will all hate me. I don't know what to bring, how to act, where to sit. No, I'll sit in the back. And I'll make Olivia take me there. But I really am scared.

My SAT scores have diminished any hubris I had built up though. I am very angry with myself, and very disappointed. I will have to pray that my ACT scores are good enough, or pray I can do better on the SAT's or ACT's if I take them in the fall. That is my last chance...

Scores:
critical reading: 800
writing: 780
math: 660

Why can I do calculus, and linear algebra, and solve multivariable discrete dynamical systems with these variable matrices so easily, when I cannot do algebra for a stupid SAT?

There is hope in my ACT's though. I felt alright about the math on those. I will know tomorrow morning. Pray to the God you believe in for me, please. I need it. The strength of everything is in belief.