When I was eleven years old, my parents divorced. This came as a shock to me, and understandably so, given the fact that I don’t have a single memory of my mother and my father fighting to this day. But I do remember the totaled cars, and my missing wallets. Silverware that has been in the family for generations goes missing while broken pens and straws take it’s place. This all went on under my nose for years. But I didn’t know what it was or what it meant.  When my mother came home one day in June of 2013 and told me that my father wasn’t going to be in my life, I somehow knew. I knew that he was an addict, and I don’t know how I knew, but my mother told me that my father wasn’t coming home, I asked her if it was the pills. And she cried more.

That was the day that I recognized that I could not have a childhood like my peers. I immediately couldn’t relate to them, and not in a ignorant or prudish way, because I wanted to relate to them, but the bag was pulled over my head and I was taken off somewhere deep behind my eyes. From that day on, I lost friends, gained an incredible amount of weight, isolated myself from everyone around me, and suffered in a general sense. I had therapists that would send me outside for the session to talk to my mother instead of me, and one that would fall asleep every minute like clockwork. And then, after all of that for five years, my father relapsed after being clean for nine months and passed away twenty days before my sixteenth birthday.

Fast forward a year or two and one short stint in a mental hospital, my best friend showed me a book, saying it would help me. I went to a run down bookstore in Portland and found it. The Stranger by Albert Camus. I had just started to read philosophy as a coping mechanism which I regret to this day for the misconceptions it led me to, and I had a sense of this back then that I ignored, but my friend assured me that this was not one of those books.

I read existentialist writers for a long time and learned a lot from what I read, but I used the “nothing matters” part of their idea’s and not the “so have fun with it” part that is a necessity when taking things like that in. Soon after reading the stranger, though, I realized a lot of the ways I was suppressing myself and it gave me a good perspective on how miserable it would be if I let myself believe the notion that nothing matters and nothing else. Now this is where I believe society could benefit. Personally, I think that the largest obstacle todays generation has to overcome is the paralyzing anxiety – paralyzing in the most general way possible – that keeps everyone isolated in their own heads. I see so many people walking around that are prisoners to themselves. Some people make it out, and some people don’t, but I really want to believe that if there was a solid and coherent attempt at having the teachings of many great existentialists brought to the people, a large majority of people would be able to move on from the one thing that truly keeps us from moving forward.