Philosophy almost killed me

TW: su!c!de, depression, nihilism

At one point in my life, I hit rock bottom. This was about 2 years ago now. I think there were more than one reason to it, but I definitely know what made it all so bad I saw no other way out than to end it.

My life has been quite difficult since the day my mother gave birth to me, but it didn’t really reach me until i turned 9. Then things started getting to me, for example that people treated me differently from others, it kind of made me feel abnormal because I thought something was seriously wrong with me, although I didn’t know what since I was so young. Things became a lot harder as I grew up, my mother became more ill, and it reached a point where she tried to take her own life twice, in our house. My dad divorced her shortly after, because he couldn’t take it anymore, he had fought so hard to keep our family together. I felt really miserable. 

Lots of things happened after that, and it’s too much to write in one sitting, but the point is, life started losing all it’s meaning after everything started to calm down. I knew my life never could be exactly what I wanted it to be, I had grown up too quickly, and worst of all, now I was also trans. I hated myself for making my life even harder, but I now know it’s not my fault. 

I started watching videos on youtube about both psychology and philosophy. It was all so intriguing to me how the brain worked, and how my past experiences affect me today. Why I act like I do, I somehow turned into my own psychologist. I wrote poems about difficult thoughts and feelings, death, nothingness, I wrote in my diary everyday. 

I wanted to learn about astrophysics, quantummechanics, the most advanced stuff to literally exist and as expected I only got a vague image of how it all worked. It is too massive and eternal to ever comprehend. The thought of black holes and existence in itself almost put me in a mental paralysis. Existence in itself, and why anything would exist at all, how pointless it all is, existence just for the point of existence. I started going down in a spiral of pessimistic nihilism, until the point where it felt like reality was only projected before me on a canvas. Nothing was real to me anymore. There was no happiness or relief in doing anything, and I was mentally in a room of despair and darkness. Just the fact to me then that I had a physical body was pure torment and it could only be described as a flesh prison. I had literally nothing that mattered to me, except for my dad. The thought of him finding my dead body was even worse than the thought of lifelong torment. It was a horrible loop of existential dread, depression, paranoia and anxiety.

And then I got the diagnosis depression. Turns out I was severely depressed. I was medicated for it, I still take antidepressants, and it really changed my life. However as every person that takes antidepressants know, you just stop feeling anything altogether for a very long while. Today I feel good, I feel normal, and I am grateful. But the depression will probably always linger just beneath the surface. And also, once you’re exposed to existential philosophy you can never really escape it. It becomes a part of who you are and deepens your understanding of life. I hope it becomes helpful to me some day, maybe it already has and I just haven’t realised it. But it really helps to write about it, writing all this kind of felt like a therapy session. Today I am very into absurdism and the absurdist view on life.

Feel free to comment literally anything, this will always be a safe space. Always remember that you are not alone.

-noie