About two years ago, I got COVID. At the time, the world was in a deeply confused state. I was filled to the brim with anxiety and overfilling with dread each new day.
One night, I had trouble breathing. Not to the point of needing medical assistance, but enough to scare you straight into a state of panic based on everything you heard about this virus thus far. I thought I was going to die that night. I had a panic attack. The first I could recall in my life.
My entire life flashed before my eyes. My childhood of being dressed up daily as Spider-Man. My adolescence where my entire personality revolved around skateboarding. My young adulthood where I’d take on an obsession with computers.
I was 30 years old and faced death through a dark night of the soul. At the height of it all, I came to the acceptance that if this was the way I was leaving this world, then it was meant to be. But fate had another plan for me.
For the next couple years, I would suffer physical and mental symptoms that were excruciatingly painful. Each new day felt like an eternal punishment. I was a prisoner of my mind tormented by troubled thoughts and fears of what would happen to my health next.
I’d live with chronic headaches and back pain while trying to keep a stoic appearance. While I felt like I was going crazy, I was just a little unwell. To most in passing, you wouldn’t be able to tell. But if you stay a while, maybe you’d see a different side of me.
I would spend these two years thinking deeply while I would suffer. I’d reflect often on my thoughts, experiences, and actions to gain some sense of understanding. I’d contemplate my understanding further to see if it reflected my reality.
I’d come to a realization that I’m obsessive-compulsive. Not clinically, but more-so as a shitty superpower that happens to also be your kryptonite. Everything started to make sense now. My obsessions through my upbringing. My obsessions with the symptoms I’d experience. My obsessions with the thoughts in my head.
If Stan Lee were still alive, he might pen me a superhero name like “The Overthinker” whose power is to analyze every situation to an excessive degree like a master strategian, but often gets bogged down in their own thoughts rendering them unable to take any action. My arch-nemesis might be “The Spontaneous Saboteur” who has no special powers in particular outside the fact that they actually take action while “The Overthinker” is debilitated.
My new obsession would slowly become the opposite of obsession — balance and detachment. I’d come across Stoic, Buddhist, and Taoist texts that I’d find regular peace in. The ideas of separating and living in harmony with your mind and body, your unconscious and conscious, your ego and id.
These two primary forces — whatever you want to call them were constantly in conflict throughout my life. They will even likely continue to battle for all of eternity. In many traditions, it is not unheard of for one force to be overpowering of another until a great inner conflict is resolved to bring balance or even overpower its opposite. The idea of bringing order to chaos or in contemporary nerd terms, the force awakening to overcome the dark side. What I didn’t notice is that these two years would be a great clash of these two forces without any sort of knowing.
One day, I’d experience death, but through the lens of the ego. I would transform as a person. My sense of self, identity, and individuality had dissolved. I felt a newfound feeling of oneness with the universe. Each new day was not about me anymore. It was about others. I’d live each day embodying the idea of ubuntu. I am because we are.
The influence one has when they embody ubuntu is its own Jedi mind trick in that people are drawn to the kindness, generosity, and strong sense of social responsibility. You’re seen as your real self. You’re authentic, caring, and trustworthy. You create a sense of belonging that others want to be apart of. You’re now representing the best aspects of human nature.
But the suffering remained. The separation and balancing of the illusion had me obsessing beyond doubt. I began doubting everything I knew including my senses, my beliefs, and even my existence. I would have my own Descartes moment where that if I realized that even if I doubted everything else, I could not doubt that I was thinking.
This act of thinking might be proof of my existence similar to Descartes’s notable “I think, therefore I am” quote which was the one thing I could know with certainty. I’d then play with the concept of the absurd. That my life is a metaphor for the human condition. That one could see the nihilistic hellscape or recognize the absurdity of life leading to a liberation in our search for meaning.
For some time, I would see the futile mundanity as the struggle of human existence. It was not until I would read an essay by Albert Camus where he suggested that we must continue to live our lives and create our own meaning in a world that can lack inherent purpose. This recognition of the absurdity can be both a source of anxiety and despair, but it can also be a source of true freedom.
Where am I now? Recently I read a book that has been on my reading list for a couple years simply titled “Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection” by John E. Sarno MD. Within the first page, I found the answer to much of my suffering. It reads:
“Talk to your brain: Tell it you won’t take it anymore.”
In the book, he outlines a persona susceptible to this chronic pain that matches my description perfectly. That is a person who is hardworking, hyper-responsible, conscientious, ambitious, and achieving. All of which builds up pressure on the beleaguered self.
Sure enough, only one week later, majority of my symptoms have disappeared overnight. Each new day when a new acute pain comes on and my brain desperately tries to keep conditioning me, I literally tell my brain to “Fuck Off” and it’s working. I feel stronger than I’ve ever felt before. I spent an entire night ugly crying at how beautiful life had become again. It isn’t to say it wasn’t beautiful before, but now that the pain has largely subsided, I can once again feel.
I cannot foolishly believe that the pain will not return, because it probably will. Just that my humanity is a constant self-overcoming. And today my friends, I conquered.
