I thought of writing this already in the last post. But it didn’t seem to really fit. In the end, I am going to write about it, anyways. I am just in the mood.

Dealing with all these personal horrors I dealt with yesterday, I just realized, had been a really dreadful anxiety – reality in my early adult years. I have been able to “forget” the generalized anxiety and depression, the panic attacks that used to haunt me because of the racing thoughts going in circles in my head, leading to catastrophizing levels I would never reach today anymore – thank god.

Today, I think, dealing with these aspects of personal horror, that tended to be existential dread so grave, it paralyzed me until I really had the feeling of being frozen stiff, is very helpful in terms of Psycho – Education, and that is another reason why I need dealing with Cosmic Horror and philosophical horror as well. It is, retrospectively speaking, a way to spin the mobile that is my life system, sending shock waves through the system that I can rationally handle today, when I was not able to do so when I was younger.

When I was younger, my racing mind even brought me so far as to question not only the sense behind what I was doing at that very moment (some therapists may have diagnosed a “quarter life crisis”). I went even deeper and started questioning all of my existence, existence of the sense behind it all, the existence of the universe as such. A deeply Ligotti-esque nihilistic and pessimistic, even antinatalist view towards the world, as far as I can still retrospectively remember and apply terms I now have for it to this retrospective memory.

This existential crisis hit me in 2002, when I was almost exactly quarter of a millenium old. I found myself deep in a nihilistic, very anxious, ver depressed, gloomy mood and I questioned everything. I always tried to think of when I would have reached Rock Bottom.

The personal horror I encountered was, there is no rock bottom.

There are a lot of therapists and coaches, or influencers, if you will, that claim that once you reached rock bottom, it won’t go any deeper.

But let me tell you, there is always a deeper. The deepest will be, eventually, the void in which you lose the faith in everything, where you won’t find any answers anymore. This is, I think, the same situation Ted (the protagonist of the short story I covered yesterday) finds himself in at the end of the story. It’s a state of absolute helplessness, and even the thought of suicide wouldn’t seem like a solution anymore. Because in my rock bottom state, suicide hadn’t made any sense, because it hadn’t anything sensible to it. Like the apocalypse. And that is a very frightful thought, I must admit even today. I have clung to life too much to think about suicide as more than a theoretical option, as I would have been too afraid to die. See, this is the irrational abyss you fall ever deeper into, and the thought of the apocalypse like in the short story of yesterday’s post is an even worse thought than death itself. And that was my personal horror back then. Not necessarily to die, but to lead a life (or die a death I didn’t want) in absolute meaninglessness.

Working with these extremes, at least the abstract issues of Cosmic Horror, is thus the way for me to find a system where I can define the borders of meaningfulness myself. As soon as my mind touches the borders in the manifestation as something like the end of the world, my hands start getting sweaty again.

But I realized that once in a while, I need to confront myself with exactly that so I can recalibrate where I want to have the borders of my philosophical system in order to stay in the comfort zone, if you will, where dealing with horror remains a playground where I can feel enough thrill and shivers to have the feeling to be alive and take delight in it and to enjoy life. Enjoy life, because I can deal with my personal horror in a playful way, and because I know that my “nemesis personal horror” is far away enough.

To keep it far away enough not to fall into that abyss again, where substance abuse is the only measure to numb the anxieties and depressions coming up from that abyss with no rock bottom.

Sorry to have sounded very gloomy lately, but this is something I have to deal with once in a while, so the pendulum can swing back into more emotionally friendly areas.

Until next time, keep up the faith in yourself and take one step at a time.