(I Just) Died in your Arms

 I almost died and it taught me more about life than I ever could have read or heard about.

There is a sick kind of cycle I find myself in when something profound happens to me — I try to distance and protect myself from it as much as possible. The first thing I thought to do after I almost died was drinking myself into a stupor, so much so that I could drown out the voices that pleaded with me to finally pull the trigger.

Almost dying, at first, did the opposite of what it was supposed to do. I did not feel immense pleasure in the present moment. No, at first, I wanted to be back in the dissociative purgatory state I had been in.

What I had seen when I went under was nothing short of nostalgic on a cosmic level. I was nostalgic in a way that surpassed subjectivity and the linear nature of time. I had experienced complete identity dissolution, and my first-person perspective changed from my own which I usually had, to that of a little boy. I had become a seven-year-old boy, and I could see through his eyes. I looked at my altered parents who were sitting in their chairs, waiting for me to open my Christmas presents. I looked at my brother who was a little older than me, beaming about Christmas morning. Then, I snapped back to reality, and thought the most isolating thought ever: What is this horrific place and why would it take me away from such solace?

I longed for a life I never experienced after that day.

Even when I snapped out of my trance, I couldn't stop the grief for a life I had not lived. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the first-person freeze frame from the boy’s perspective I had seen when I went under. I could not stop feeling decay overwhelm me. My suicidal thoughts did not become quieter, but instead so loud I could barely focus on anything in reality anymore. I read so much about near-death experiences changing people's lives, and I couldn't help but feel ashamed that mine had only managed to make me weaker.

All I could think about was how I wanted to start my life over again. I felt too far gone, that the years I spent wanting to die, I actually spent doing nothing to improve myself. Being in the shoes of a child only furthered my thought that I should restart my life since I hated the trajectory that mine was going in. I felt the most connected to my soul over my body, and to feel it leave and go into another body only confirmed what I was thinking — that I am not my body, and I need to leave. Since I never could imagine myself grown up, I never paid attention to when people were explaining the directions for the future. And being in the body of a child made me only realize how much I longed to do my one life over again, because I viscerally hated the way I lived the first time around. I wanted a do-over desperately.

Right after this experience happened, I went on a weekend getaway with my fraternity to the University of Oklahoma for a football game. That weekend I drank the most I ever have, partied all three nights then ultimately passed out, lost my phone and belongings, and came back a bigger mess than when I left.

Since I had lost my phone and also hadn't texted anyone, my parents and my loved ones were worried about me that I died. They banged on my door and barged in, assuming me to be in some kind of life-or-death trouble. As I called my parents to alert them that I was alive, I felt like a tree falling in the middle of an empty forest. It felt like I was dead those few days, because are you alive if no one knows you are? The metaphor of dying started to take over my whole life and I started to become obsessed with it. It started to seem easy, so easy in fact that I longed for that experience again and for it to completely overwhelm me and take me with it this time.

It was the most pleasure I had ever felt in my life. What did that mean if it was the closest thing I had experienced to death?

My dreams and daydreams were haunted by wishes to dissociate and be in that boy's body again. I didn't know what about the life I had built seemed so insufferable, but I decided I couldn't be a part of this world as myself anymore. I hated myself from every crevice, and I hated the way I was handling this traumatic situation as well. I feel piteous, but at the same time, not anything to be pitied.

But, little did I know, was that this experience would send me down a deep rabbit hole that would fuel my purpose in life. It gave me questions, in a world I noticed would look down on those that asked questions. I found questions that were not unimportant to ask, such as if we have any meaning in the world, but more about the foundations of our minds and the elasticity of consciousness.

        It's what led me to creating this blog and all of my theories I've thought of thus far. I just needed to die to teach me how to live.