Prose: Existential Crisis in July
It was about ten years ago I found one of my coworkers crying in the dressing room at the store we worked at. She was having an absolute breakdown in the fitting room closest to the hallway where we had our shipments delivered, and was crying so loud, our UPS guy could hear her. I walked around the corner to see the black curtain secured to the opposite side of the booth, with two black pumps slumped on the ground. After a short conversation, I managed to derive that she was having an existential crisis…an absolute breakdown.
She said her entire life was falling apart and had been for the last six years. That morning, she woke up, everything seemed remotely normal on the drive to work, and when she clocked in, she felt a deep sorrow overtake her heart. She panicked at the feeling, then ran to the dressing room, and watched herself lose it in the studio lit vanity mirror. She declared life was against her, nothing good was happening in life, and for every effort she put towards making life what she wanted it, the world replied with twice as many failures.
It’s a feeling we’ve all had at one point or another. That overwhelming sense of not only being lost in life but the world itself is against us. The strange evidence seen in roadblock after roadblock on our self-determined path to happiness. Eventually, it all adds up and the sheer will to continue forward is snuffed out with tears and a breakdown in a dressing room…on a Monday, nonetheless.
As I offered my condolences to her dying dreams, I began to realize a few things of my own. It appeared that what she was experiencing as failure after failure wasn’t the result of some malicious force preventing her from joy but only the everyday dilemmas that happen to anyone who wants to accomplish something beyond the norm. She protested my point and said life was so good a few months ago, and now it had all fallen apart in the span of days. Truthfully, it hadn’t.
It just felt that way to her.
And because her perception of life had shifted, so did life itself.
Rarely do we give our emotions enough credit for the power they have on our reality. She had felt a great loss, a perpetual sense of doubt, she had felt the world was over, and so on a rather mundane Monday morning in July, her world had come to an end.
The ability to acknowledge this particular habit is something easier said than done.
It sounds simple: adjust your emotions, and the world will follow.
But that’s not true at all.
Is it?
Negative things happen, dreams fall apart, breakdowns ensue, and the following day may be even worse. We shouldn’t discredit our emotions, deny them, or ignore them. In reality, we should embrace our emotions, explore them, let them play out, and then, most importantly: let them go. Because emotions, as is with all things in life, are temporary at best. The joys, the wins, the love, the romance, the happiness, all come and go, along with loss, failure, and even death. My lovely coworker had attached herself to the emotions of failure and refused to let them go.
She refused to see the joys in life around her because she was horrified of losing them. A strange dilemma: deny happiness exists because the moment you acknowledge it, you begin to see it slip through your fingers. She found more solace in seeing failure on the horizon because she had grown used to knowing it, and thus, it was safe. Again, sounds strange, but we’ve all done this before. We’ve expected the worse on account of fearing the best, because if everything works out, then what? It’s only down from the top. And that fear, that dread of success, begins to skew our perspective. It works its way into our minds, our views, our discourse, it begins to manifest our take on the world and our own life. Suddenly, without knowing why, you can’t find happiness anymore and feel you have no control of your own life.
After coercing her out of the dressing room and into the stockroom we were able to have a coherent conversation. She went through a few breathing exercises and sat on the steel stool that faced our manager laptop. I began to review her story, how she told me and we found a lot of unifying themes in her language. Phrases like, “I knew it wouldn’t happen right”, “I knew it wasn’t going to work out.” “I don’t know what went wrong” and “I don’t know how to fix this”.
The language indicated her perspective was anticipating a result and she only saw the result she was anticipating. Hardships happen, sometimes plans fail, life can suck, but nothing will change if we don’t allow ourselves to shift perspective. It can be daunting, terrifying even, to let go of the familiar negative-space that we’ve found ourselves inhabiting but there is no choice, eventually, you’ll have to find the wisdom in failure to see the success waiting for you in the future. It doesn’t mean life won’t suck anymore, trust me, it will. What it does mean, is when life begins to fall apart, you’ll be able to note where it broke, find the pieces after the dust has settled, and know how to put them back together in a new combination that’s even stronger than it was in the first place. Its merely a learning curve discovered in the midst of life. Yes, you will experience a shit ton of hardship, take notes, appreciate your scars, and when you refuse to give-in to habitual negative-perspectives, you’ll be able to push forward, and see the good things among the rubble.
When she stopped crying, calmed down, and stood up from the stool she apologized for her outburst. I refused her apology, as it was unnecessary. I told her it was entirely understandable, and that we all forget how powerful perspective can be.