Why Am I in This Room? An Existential Crisis

Lost in My Own House

I kept getting lost in my house. Not in the sense of forgetting how to get from one room to the next or having a mansion that’s so big that I didn’t know where I was. But lost in the sense of constantly being confused about my intentions.

I needed reminders to prompt me to ask myself, “Why am I here?” and, more specifically, “Why am I in this room?” I was forgetful, true, but this went beyond that, into a need to know something bigger. I needed to prove that I existed and the only way I could figure that out was to start living more in the present.

I printed out “Why am I going upstairs?” along with other equally lofty questions like “Why am I going downstairs?” and taped them up all around my house, in every room. If I was going to lead a more conscious life, I needed to do it all the time, so the reminders needed to be everywhere. If I looked up, I needed to see them.

At first it helped. I think. I felt a little more like I was living in a focused way because I was forgetting less frequently why I was in a room. But soon things took a turn for the worse. The reminders mocked me. My thought process was something like this:

Why did I go into this room? To find something I lost? To take a nap? But I’m not tired. In fact, I’m keyed up and getting more anxious thinking about it. I guess I’ll go to my office because at least I can be productive there. But I don’t want to work, and I can’t think of anything specific to work on. Turning on the computer and checking emails smacks of effort. That’s a phrase I learned from Lisa Simpson on an episode of The Simpsons where she was trying to impress the cool kids and suppress her nerd-like tendencies. That was a good one. But The Simpsons went downhill after the first few seasons. There is occasionally a good new episode though. I haven’t watched it in a long time, and I need a laugh, so I should give the new season another try. Where are those DVDs? Is this a scratch? Oh no, there’s a scratch. I’ll get a microcloth. It looks dirty. How did that happen?

And so on, ad infinitum.

The reminders became troublesome in other ways. They were everywhere. I couldn’t look up without seeing one. And they were proving, instant by instant, that I was lost and directionless. My brain started taking that out one step further, into conclusion. Every time I didn’t have an answer to one of the questions was a failure. Failure upon failure. That generalized out to “I’m a failure.”

Those messages embedded in me at an early age that I thought 30 years of therapy had gotten rid of suddenly re-emerged: “I’m stupid.” “I don’t know what I’m doing.” “I’m not worth it.” Those thoughts are insidious, and they reappeared without my awareness. So, I felt their effects without being able to identify what was going on.

If I were able to identify them, in real time preferably, then I’d be able to label them as distortions, to remind myself that I am an adult now, to come up with proof that I am, in fact, worth it, and to fend off the negative self-talk with something more akin to reality. But I couldn’t do that. This was further proof of my stupidity and failure.

I left the reminders up, oblivious to the effect they had taken on. If I had had friends over during that time, they probably would have thought I had lost it. But fortunately, I didn’t have any friends.

Eventually I stopped thinking. I would look up and “Why am I in this room?” became the shape of the letters of the words and the spacing between lines and the distance from one letter to the next and the wider margins on the right vs. the left and the look of the Scotch tape at the top of the paper, and the worry that when I took down the signs, the tape would peel the paint off the walls and that I would have to do touch-ups, but that probably wasn’t going to be possible because I doubted I still had the paint and even if I did it probably needed to be stirred before it could be applied and I didn’t have anything to stir it with and it would take too much effort and anxiety to drive to Home Depot to get a paint stick, and even if I did all that I probably would just fuck it up because I’m just so stupid.

Here I am.