Dendritic Growth

The abyss is often seen as a terror—something to run from or act as though it were a barrier. It is understood as a void—the "great chasm fixed" between two impossible points of existence or the deepest strata of our earth and seas. You've perhaps heard that Nietzsche said if you gaze into it long enough, it gazes back. It is not a space to be navigated lightly; instead, entered with caution, or better yet, avoided entirely.

It is our inner world, the parts that we refuse to touch. It is the emptiness of psychosis,

the immeasurability of space,

the cold of death,

the unseen and the unknown

that cause our mind and body to recoil.

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Throughout my college years (all seven), I changed my degree three times: first, musical theater; second, international affairs; and third, philosophy. It took me a while to realize that philosophy was the perfect guide and perhaps even cure for much of what ailed me. I was an anxious person, full of existential dread, and deeply concerned with what others thought of me.

My primary focus when studying musical theater was sustaining a high D longer than my rival in the program. That was during the day. My nights were consumed by surviving my recently diagnosed severe chronic depression without the Prozac my mother had just thrown out.

I dropped out and took four years off to join the workforce.

By the time I had gotten around to studying international affairs, I was cycling through various medications in an attempt to treat near-constant suicidal ideation. The barrage of neoliberal rhetoric thrown at you in my program was...disheartening. Small bastions of thought taught within the school were critical of the imperialistic status quo, and I found my home there.

Those professors guided me toward political theory classes, leading to a third program change. At first, I made philosophy a minor. I switched entirely when I started taking existentialism. Albert Camus and Friedrich Nietzsche captured me first, although, by the end of the semester, you couldn't tear my nose out of Simone de Beauvoir.

I found a kinship with these thinkers. Whether it was Camus' idea of the fundamental question of philosophy, Nietzsche's gazing abyss, or de Beauvoir's crisis of subjectivity, I had found where I was meant to be. They supplied me with nuanced perspectives at a time when the splitting of my undiagnosed and untreated bipolar disorder felt like a death sentence.

The wonderful thing about changing my major to philosophy is that it lit something inside of me and sparked a realization that the unanswerable was nothing to fear but, instead, something to ponder—a wonderful, unsolvable mystery that could provide the meaning I had been searching for.

As my mind expanded, so did my understanding of myself and my patience for the work necessary to change what wasn't serving me. The stoics sheltered me, the absurdists reasoned with me, and the feminists empowered me. I found my youthful sense of justice reignited while studying social epistemology and turned my search toward Afro-pessimism, critical race theory, and other post-colonial frameworks.

During this time, I began critically assessing the patterns I had witnessed in my behavior throughout my life. Some parts felt like "severe chronic depression," just like I had been told, but there were other parts that felt different. I had managed to piece together that I might be bipolar, but I needed a doctor to assess me and confirm or deny my suspicions.

When I received my diagnosis, I felt equipped to handle the years of treatment to come. Ready, even. You could say I was able to surrender to cognitive behavioral therapy and work to rewire my brain because I had already surrendered and rewired it several times before. Philosophy had afforded me the imagination I needed to rein in the disorder wreaking havoc on my life.

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The abyss is often seen as a terror–but it doesn't need to be. It can be the tightly wrapped arms of a dear friend who knows the most about you. A soft night air that offers relief, not judgment. It can comfort you like the washed-out words and worn-down pages of a book you could recite in your sleep.

We can stop running from it.