40. Mount Eerie - “Youth”
This is a three part epic. It’s a musical score that gives voice to the psyche as it wrestles with itself. It’s the captain going down with their ship, riding the S.S. Anxiety into the cold embrace of an existential crisis.
It begins by encompassing that disconnect from reality that all of us seem to feel sooner or late, the slow seeping of anxiety as it rises up to engulf you, choking your thoughts and clouding out all reason in its attempt to silently suffocate you. You try to reason with it and reassure yourself, but its coming, its inevitable, you can’t stop it, you know it and you hate it, but all you can do is watch it approach…
And then it’s here, a cacophony of thought, you’re inundated by it at first, drowned and tossed by it, your mind becomes a rag doll, beaten every which way by the feeling that’s bursting from you even as you seem powerless against it. You almost succumb to hopelessness. You’re so close to giving up, to sinking down and disappearing, but something keeps you holding on….
And then you grow used to it… you come to know the chaos, you adapt to it like us humans are so good at doing, and you gain your sea legs as the faint voice of reason rises above the crashing waves and gusts of wind to keep you going. You realize you may not be happy or good, that you didn’t ask for this, but that you are resilient, you may be scared, but you can handle the influx of thought, you can ride the storm. It changes you, hardening and softening you over and over, toughening you, closing you off from the world, from the humanity within and outside of you, even as the world and yourself open up and become stuffed with more feeling and emotion than imaginable. It doesn’t make sense, but its happening. Everything becomes so big, so significant, and you hate it, but you need it, because its only by feeling it that you can defeat it. Its only by coming so close to the edge, to losing it all, that you truly begin to understand what its all worth, what matters most, and what you can hold on to when everything else - even yourself, changes and disappears.
