I owe Kierkegaard and Nietzsche an apology.
For the last 13 years, I’ve blamed my anxiety on them. As it turns out, it was just coincidence that I had my first real panic attack after reading The Birth of Tragedy.
A friend recently sent me a post she found on a psychology forum after Googling “life is futile”. It was a fresh look at existentialism, written by someone who wanted to put a new spin on an old philosophy. The writer of the post (“ModernCondition”) chose to look at the futility of life as a liberating concept: if it’s meaningless, then I can decide to make it meaningful. I am able ascribe to my life whatever meanings and purposes I want. The choice is mine.
For reasons I’ll never understand, after reading said post, my brain selected that very moment to recall a long-forgotten memory: me, nine years old, lying in bed in the dark, my eyes shut tight and my mind filled with the image of a huge, brilliant night sky (I grew up in Upstate New York, where you could actually see the stars at night). I remembered feeling completely overcome by the star-studded sky – it was so vast, so never-ending and I was so, so small. In the tiniest sliver of an instant, my young mind formed questions of which it has never, ever been able to let go.
Why am I here? Why do I exist? Am I really here? Do I actually exist?
My first, legitimate existential crisis occurred at the age of nine, not 20 as I’d so long believed. All this time I’d blamed Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, declaring that I’d never had an anxious moment in my life before those two postmodern bastards showed up. It was their fault. But no, it wasn’t. It was mine.
This epiphany sent me scurrying for my copy of Plato Not Prozac, by Lou Marinoff, Ph.D. I hadn’t picked up this book in at least seven years, but I had a very faint memory of what he wrote about existentialism and anxiety.
Thinking about a universe of randomness and indifference leads many into the depths of despair. We are deprived of the rich and highly textured fabric that connects us to one another. It is an alienating, isolating, soulless worldview… Kierkegaard realized the difficulty of confronting pure existence – no essence, no mystery, no intangibles, no meaning, no purpose, no value. An abyss looms, where hope, progress and ideals look like illusions. Your existence becomes very thin, and the easy trap to fall into is to wonder why you are alive at all… Many people go through an existential phase and gradually build meaning and purpose back into their lives, eventually leaving the angst behind.
The best part about tracking down this paragraph? At some point, I had written the word “anxiety” at the top of the page and then drew a bunch of arrows and stars to different places in the text.
A peacefulness came over me unlike anything I’ve ever known.
“Ah,” I murmured, smiling to myself. “I get it.”
Thirteen years ago, I read Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety and didn’t understand it. Not at all. Not even a little bit. I read it again the following year, hoping 12 months of maturity would allow me to grasp the meaning behind it. Not a chance. I read it once more, this time with the assistance of a book called Kierkegaard for Beginners, convinced that it was going to help me finally unlock the secret I was sure that freaking book harbored. Needless to say, I struck out again and after three attempts, I’d had enough. I relegated The Concept of Anxiety to the bookshelf where it sat, untouched, until now.
When Kierkegaard wrote about anxiety, he was writing about what Marinoff described as the alienation, isolation and separateness we feel when we consider the futility of life. But The Concept of Anxiety does not end on that depressing conclusion. Instead, Kierkegaard goes on to discuss anxiety as a saving grace.
“Anxiety is freedom’s possibility,” he wrote in the last chapter of the discourse. “Whoever is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility.”
Then, when [anxiety] announces itself, when it cunningly pretends to have invented a new instrument of torture, far more terrible than anything before, he does not shrink back, and still less does he attempt to hold it off with noise and confusion; but he bids it welcome, greets it festively, and like Socrates, who raised the poisoned cup, he shuts himself up with it and says as a patient would say to the surgeon when the painful operation is about to begin: Now I am ready. Then anxiety enters into his soul and searches out everything and anxiously torments everything finite and petty out of him, and then it leads him where he wants to go.
It leads me where I want to go. Where I end up is my choice.
It appears that not only do I owe Kierkegaard and Nietzsche an apology, but a thank you, as well.
Now I am ready.
