TL;DR: Recognizing what's causing my existential crisis and that the existential crisis means nothing doesn't stop me from struggling with an existential crisis, hence the struggle means nothing, and that makes me sad. Rinse repeat ad nauseam.
Many people have at least one point in their life where they can reference all other events relative to that one point in time. Some examples are the 9/11 attacks or having children (not that those two things have anything in common, unless you've seen the bedrooms of most two year old kids...both things exemplify the word "chaos"). Many American adults over the age of 25 or 30 can remember exactly what they were doing when 9/11 happened, or what events were going on in their life when their children came into being. I think the reason for this is because events on that scale tend to completely sideswipe our lives, for good or bad, and that sideswipe creates a mental time stamp that marks a change in some aspect of life, and for some reason that time period stays more vividly in the long term memory than other things do.
For me, it's when I got the flu. I don't mean the dozen or so other times I caught the flu and I felt like shit for a few days and got over it. I was very nearly killed in a very permanent way by the flu, which is the very last way I expected to be shuffled off the proverbial mortal coil. I have Asthma, and allergies, and like a moron, I smoked cigarettes. The whole family was coming down with a creeping crud of some sort, and I felt more cruddy than usual, and at some point that's now somewhat foggy to me because of the proceeding events, I became aware that an ER visit might be in my best interest. I expected the usual breathing treatments and medications with the typical "quit smoking and follow up with your doctor" chiding that ER doctors give when a tobacco addled idiot stumbles into their ER with a lower respiratory tract infection.
Then, I woke up almost a week later with my arms restrained and a tube down my throat doing my breathing for me. I wasn't even in the same hospital I walked into. Apparently I had been intubated and airlifted to a hospital with a better equipped ICU. I would later learn that your proximity to the elevator can tell you your doctor's outlook on your chances of survival, in order to minimize other patients exposure to your corpse as they're transporting you to the morgue. I was right across the hall from the elevator.
Then, I woke up almost a week later with my arms restrained and a tube down my throat doing my breathing for me. I wasn't even in the same hospital I walked into. Apparently I had been intubated and airlifted to a hospital with a better equipped ICU. I would later learn that your proximity to the elevator can tell you your doctor's outlook on your chances of survival, in order to minimize other patients exposure to your corpse as they're transporting you to the morgue. I was right across the hall from the elevator.
Without going into too much gory detail, bad things happen to a body that hasn't moved in a week. At the point that I woke up, I was no longer battling the flu...that had been knocked out of my system days prior. I was recovering from almost dying of lung failure and the extreme medical interventions that are required to keep a person alive whose lungs have decided to punch out. It was almost two days after waking up that they would even risk letting me breathe on my own. Because of my extreme stubborn nature and refusal to cooperate with nurses otherwise, I left the hospital entirely another two days later under the condition that I met certain criteria such as a fully functioning digestive system and good oxygen and carbon dioxide levels without supplemental oxygen. You'd be amazed at how challenging just breathing or pooping can be when you haven't done either of those on your own in a week. You can probably guess what happened when I attempted to step out of bed the first time. Unsupervised. Without permission. There's a reason they put alarms on hospital beds, apparently.
I knew in a nutshell what happened, but I'm the type that has to have all the technical details to have a complete picture. I had to live a patch of my life through the eyes of other people. This apparently bothered me on a deep level, especially when I found out that the doctors failed to mention some vital information to me, like just exactly how close of a scrape I had with death. I had a 30% chance of survival. The odds were clearly not in my favor. They had to invent entirely new cocktails of sedatives (which included diamorphine, aka medically pure heroine, that's typically used at end of life to "ease passing") because despite my small stature apparently I'm more difficult than an elephant to keep sedated, benzodiazapines weren't working, and I would wake up fighting with no warning to the nurses...hence the restraints. I had lost 20 lbs, I couldn't walk without falling over, I clearly had some form of mental side effects thanks to either the sedatives or the CO2 levels in my blood or both, and even 3 months later I struggle to remember things that used to be no effort to retain.
It wasn't until after I got home that I started having issues. Nightmares, sudden aversions to things I used to love (like Futurama and the smell of fruit scented antiseptics), existential crises over daily mundane things, and desires to do dumb things I previously didn't care about were only the tip of the iceberg. According to my husband I'd also had a personality shift and an even crappier than usual ability to retain and comprehend information. Sadly the latter bothered me more than the former because I had grown cocky with my high IQ and it took several arguments with my husband to figure out that personality is probably a lot more important than perceived intelligence.
The fact that it took weeks to piece together everything that had happened to me and come to terms with it is what I think took me so long to start recovering mentally or emotionally. I went into the hospital somewhat content with my place in the universe and came out bitching about my lack of place in the universe. I went into the hospital with a five octave singing voice and even 3 months later I'm lucky if I have 3 octaves without fraying. I went into the hospital a somewhat religious individual and came out almost a staunch agnostic (a firmly believing fence rider...isn't that like fighting for the right to vote undecided?) A lot of things had changed with me going into the hospital, with most of it being negative, and I'm willing to admit that it created just the type of mental time stamp I vaguely remember rambling about just a bit a go. The only thing I can say with any degree of positiveness is that I went into the hospital slightly overweight and even today I'm well inside my healthy BMI for someone my height and gender.
I had contemplated my mortality many times before but was never actually faced with it in any real way, and so I think my midlife crisis was kick-started about a decade too early because I suddenly started questioning the meaning of my life, the impact I was leaving on the world, and my inability to play the violin. Of course, I'm a mommy and a wife which gives my life meaning by default, but I've never been the type to just settle on the default settings (which is ironic because I made no deviations from this blog's theme's default settings). That doesn't mean I'm not happy with being a wife or a mommy; both my husband and my baby are amazing people that I love more than anyone or anything else. But, my husband has visited many places around the planet, formed lots of cool memories, and done lots of cool things. My daughter will one day have her own life goals and achievements that will probably outdo anything anyone in my generation can even dream up. At most, I've dabbled in life. I've done a little of this but not a lot of that. I've gone to college twice but never earned a degree (well, I have, but was denied it, which is an angry rant for another day), I've been on road trips but never traveled abroad, I've had jobs but never created a career for myself nor contributed to anything much much bigger than myself. I'm approaching middle age and the highlight of my day is what new words my toddler has learned, having my husband come home from work, and what my item level is on my max level character in Final Fantasy XIV. And that scares me.
Don't get me wrong, the small things give life meaning. I literally jump with joy when my daughter does something new, and at this stage in her life, there's something new every day. Because of her and my husband, my family life is complete in every sense. I have lots of hobbies so I'm hardly ever bored. In fact, I have so many interests that I find myself being gripped with indecision because I have so much to choose from. Games, books, podcasts, art, music...it's all just a distraction at the end of the day. I don't want to be 80, on my death bed and thinking "I read every Stephen King book and beat every Final Fantasy game I ever played. Yay..." That's depressing. I need to know I have a place in the grand scheme of things, and my inability to find that place is what puts me in a moody little bubble on some days. Do I go back to school? Do I pursue the career tracks I racked up several thousand dollars of debt to educate and prepare myself for? Do I accept my place in life and stop wondering what to do and just keeping doing what I'm doing? Why was I content with my achievements in life prior to almost kicking the bucket, and why am I not content now? Does the fact that I almost died even change anything or give that question more meaning? Probably not, but it changed my perception on life as a whole.
Don't worry, that confused me too. I realized it's completely possible to suddenly question the meaning of everything, spazz out at your place in it all...or lack of it, and still acknowledge that the question itself is meaningless to everyone else but you. I realize that the universe will be neither better nor worse after I'm gone despite my best efforts, and the universe doesn't care about the effort I put forth to get it to notice me. It still doesn't stop me from pouting about it like the left out middle child, and that's the part I'm having trouble reconciling. But don't worry. I'm normally a very comical person and this will probably be the most depressing blog post you'll see from me by far. And yes, I did quit smoking.
Don't worry, that confused me too. I realized it's completely possible to suddenly question the meaning of everything, spazz out at your place in it all...or lack of it, and still acknowledge that the question itself is meaningless to everyone else but you. I realize that the universe will be neither better nor worse after I'm gone despite my best efforts, and the universe doesn't care about the effort I put forth to get it to notice me. It still doesn't stop me from pouting about it like the left out middle child, and that's the part I'm having trouble reconciling. But don't worry. I'm normally a very comical person and this will probably be the most depressing blog post you'll see from me by far. And yes, I did quit smoking.
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