#existential therapy

Me talking to my therapist: So anyway, I’ve been reading again. It’s been nice. I’ve gotten into IWTV and that’s been nice. Then I read TVL and ended up crying my eyes out in the bathtub because Lestat voices exactly how I feel about death and my anxiety around it. What if there’s nothing after all this? Will I know I’m dead? Because I want to know I’m dead! Do humans believe in God so they don’t fear death? Should I believe in God so I don’t fear death because He will be there when I die? And then Lestat’s mum says he’s having these thoughts because he wants to control everything but can’t and…I’m just having a hard time now. I’m a very death positive person on the outside. I was the one who kept it together when my dad died. I’m the one who touched and handled his ashes. But I’m a complete disaster!

My therapist: Have you heard about existential therapy?

From an existential perspective, then, we are first and foremost a verb-like being, and it is only subsequently that we may define ourselves as a noun-like thing: such as ‘an extrovert’ or ‘a therapist’. This is the meaning of the well-known Sartrean phrase: ‘Existence precedes essence’. In other words, human beings are not fixed selves, but a relationship towards their own being; or, as Kierkegaard puts it, ‘a relation that relates itself to itself’. For Heidegger, too, the essence of human existence is ‘self-interpretation’. As human beings, we are constantly making sense of ourselves and understanding who we are – even if this is not at a level of reflective self-awareness.

Been watching this lady, an existential therapist by trade, since roughly 2016. She saved my brain a fair few times during some dark days.

Here, she describes rain... and what I like about it so much. Especially in the last thirty seconds. So much joy.