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Related: About this forumDrifting in an existential vacuum for 13 years...
13 years ago tonight--at this moment--I emerged from a 9-hour surgery for a subarachnoid brain aneurysm. I was just starting to write my PhD thesis...but never finished. I spent nearly a month in the hospital. Why I survived without deficits and recovered with greater physical strength and health while others suffered--even died--remains a source of torment. Survivor guilt? Perhaps.
Despite a wonderful wife and daughters, and extended family, I'm really feeling like the larger meaning in and of my life is elusive. There are so many things I wished I'd done and want to do. My life's dream has long been to work in a refugee relief camp. How far, far away that notion is from my Iowa home.
Maybe I want too much...or maybe I have too little agency. I just feel like I'm drifting in an existential vacuum at the most precipitous and potentially effective point in my life. I'm unsure what to do. Thanks for hearing me. Tonight will pass.
NYC_SKP
(68,644 posts)I suppose everyone's experience is different but I want to say that the feeling you're having might be as much a gift as a burden, I'm not sure.
Some of us spend our entire lives fitting in, for better or worse, trying to find our place and purpose.
Could it be that a slightly higher plane or level of consciousness is one with greater uncertainty?
I hope you get to a refugee camp, and I know you can if you want to.
Be well, my SAH was last May. Next Tuesday I have a PEEK cranioplastic implant installed where the bone flap was before it went septic.
Removal of that rotten chunk in November put my head in a different place.
Take care.
steve2470
(37,457 posts)I'm always a huge believer in therapy. I'm NOT slighting you or calling you "mentally ill", just to be clear. Many well-adjusted, normal people go for situations very similar to the one you describe.
If I were in your situation, I would pursue existential-oriented therapy. A book that might be helpful is Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl, who was a Nazi concentration camp survivor and the founder of logotherapy.
I wish you much good success, whatever you decide.
hunter
(38,311 posts)Big nose, mental illness, a brain accident...
What is the meaning of life?
I don't know.
Every day is a new story, good or bad.
Sure, I'll always have stories I'm unable to tell, some that will die with me, but the day I have no story to tell, not even to myself, will be the day I stopped living, even if I continue to breathe long after.