Two years ago I came across a YouTube video of a Canadian psychologist and a psychology professor, who spoke against a law they wanted to pass in his country. The video went viral because its subject was controversial. I listened to the psychologist and liked his way of thinking. As a result, I went into his YouTube channel and saw that for years he had uploaded all of his lectures and courses, so that anyone who wishes could listen to them. And so, I started listening. He had a course on personality theories and a course called "Maps of Meaning". Each lecture was two and a half hours long, at least 13 lectures per course. I was fascinated. He spoke of taking responsibility, of improving the present and future self, of finding meaning.
Meaning has always been difficult for me. Ever since I understood death and the fact that I would eventually die, all I hoped was that I would not have been born. I was 9 years old. This thought brought with it resentments toward the world, about my parents, about myself. This thought is what led to the beginning of my depression at the age of 10. Over the years, anger, cynicism, despair, and a lot of confusion were added to my resentments. There were nights I did not sleep, afraid of the day to come. There were also good days when I did not think about the future, only about the present and my friends. And there were days when I wanted to die.
Things got worse after I got fibromyalgia at the age of 19. Suddenly everything hurt, I did not have the energy to get out of bed. These were things that did not happen to me during the most difficult days before I got sick. If beforehand I felt lost, after I got fibromyalgia, I felt completely hopeless. Since it took me 5 years to get a diagnosis, I was told many times that everyone is tired and everybody hurts. How can I survive if I do not have the energy to move? How do people live without wanting to die with all this pain and exhaustion? There was a time when I did not know what to do when I opened my eyes in the morning, if I did not write a to-do list the night before, which included:
Get out of bed
Go to the bathroom to pee
Brush teeth
Change clothes
Eat breakfast
Everything I did was engulfed in a cloud of fatigue and pain, but most of all, in a cloud of cynicism and despair. I was a summer camp counselor and traveled the United States to run away. I did a bachelor's degree in art and education in a city far away from my parents to run away. I did a master's degree in conservation of material cultural heritage to run away. I said things like: "There really is no meaning to anything, so at least I will do an useless degree in interesting things”, "I've already done one useless degree, and so why not do a useless master's degree as well”?
During those years I started psychotherapy, in which I learned to separate myself from the environment and to understand what I did not like or did not want. I received diagnoses of fibromyalgia and depression and began taking medication, which reduced the level of pain and exhaustion to a tolerable level, and gave me the opportunity to feel things other than despair. I still continue taking medication and they are my life-line.
About four years ago someone recommended me a YouTube channel of an American mortician and a funeral home director, who talks about death and her work with it. Suddenly I realized I was not the only one obsessed with death, frightened but also fascinated by it. There is her, who was interested in death from an early age, so she did a bachelor's degree in medieval culture and then studied to become a licensed mortician, while working in the crematorium of a funeral home. She talks to other professionals in the death industry - hospices nurses, death Doulas, artists whose main preoccupation is death, forensic investigators, body farm owners, death photographers, death history researchers and many more. I found a kind of framework where I could talk about my death curiosity without people raising an eyebrow, or telling me that the issue is too heavy and depressing.
So how does this relate to the psychologist I mentioned at the beginning of my post, or to my new website? In the two years I have been listening to the psychologist, reading his articles and his two books, combined with bibliotherapy I began around the same time, my approach to life has changed. I feel less cynical and angry. I'm still feel hopeless every now and then, and still scared and anxious, but I accept it and try to manage these feelings, instead of the other way around. After many years of doing things to run away, I decided to take responsibility for finding my meaning, because I decided there had to be a meaning, and that I wanted to find it.
I'm looking, checking and investigating all the time. I create and read, and want to share it with the world. I have a feeling that my meaning is related to the combination of creating, writing, researching, learning and teaching, and death. When I think of this combination as my way of life, as a meaning, I have a number of possibilities for moving forward. One is academic research - a PhD, which somehow combines all of the above. I am at the beginning of the process of searching for a supervisor and focusing my research topic. I'm not rushing this process, hoping that I will achieve the optimal accuracy of a subject and a supervisor. Another possibility is sharing my world with the world. Sharing the pieces I keep creating, sharing my thoughts and plans, updating on their development, writing articles or reviews on topics I read about, regardless of doctoral studies (I did do a master's degree research, so I have some tools for critical thinking). Unlike my process with academic research, here I feel like I do not have to wait for accuracy and focus. I decided to act here and now. To try and experiment with all of this, to play and taste, and with you, my audience, to focus and hopefully find meaning.
After all, what is life if not a series of trials and errors on the way to improving the future, while trying to find meaning.