In Defense of Video Games!

"Some research suggests that video games, especially action games that play with life and death, provide a particularly effective means of engaging our attentional mechanisms. By mobilizing our alerting and reward systems, video games massively modulate learning. The dopamine circuit, for example, fires when we play an action game. Psychologist Daphné Bavelier has shown that this translates into rapid learning. The most violent action games seem to have the most intense effects, perhaps because they most strongly mobilize the brain’s alerting circuits. Ten hours of gameplay suffice to improve visual detection, refine the rapid estimation of the number of objects on the screen, and expand the capacity to concentrate on a target without being distracted. A video game player manages to make ultra-fast decisions without compromising his or her performance. 

Parents and teachers complain that today’s children, plugged into computers, tablets, consoles, and other devices, constantly zap from one activity to the next and have lost the capacity to concentrate—but this is untrue. Far from reducing our ability to concentrate, video games can actually increase it. In the future, will they help us remobilize synaptic plasticity in adults and children alike? Undoubtedly, they are a powerful stimulant of attention, which is why my laboratory has developed a whole range of educational tablet games for math and reading, based on cognitive science principles."

Source: https://lithub.com/how-we-pay-attention-changes-the-very-shape-of-our-brains/

After a decade-long break from them, I recently started playing video games again for a few hours a week.  The research cited above makes me feel even better about my decision.  In addition to allowing me to relax and unwind, video games might also be great for my mental acuity. 

Theories about anxiety

Really fascinating idea on why anxiety seems to be so common these days.

Consider the evolutionary context that anxiety involved in: it created a fight or flight response to deal with short-term emergencies that almost always had obvious solutions. For nearly our entire ancestral past, we’ve had problems that had clear solutions. Did that nearby bush slightly move? Anxiety and stress created a sense of urgency and alertness and caused you to investigate this short term problem. Is there a wild animal nearby? Anxiety can save the day for this black and white problem as well. The stress response causes tunnel vision and intense concentration for the duration of the danger. You get the idea. These “ancestral” examples are practically endless.

Now consider modern problems and how potentially long-term and uncertain they are. We are practically flooded with such issues as we age.  

"Mental pain is elusive. Financial woes, an uncommunicative spouse, existential angst—none of these stressors necessarily yields to a single simple solution. Neither fight nor flight is satisfactory. While stress arousal is a fitting mode to meet emergency, as an ongoing state it is a disaster."

We have a coping mechanism that was created to deal with problems that no longer exist (outside of very rare situations)...

“Far more common is psychological pain—affront to one’s self esteem, apprehension, loss. We meet these pains with an alarm system tuned by millions of years of more primal threats.”

Quotes from  Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception

Outdated Evolutionary Responses

Evolutionary psychologists consistently emphasize a central theme; the human mind evolved and was shaped during a time period that contained environmental pressures that are no longer relevant today, and as a result, our responses to many modern problems are often times wrong. There are numerous ways that this phenomena manifests itself. Many times, the outcomes of our behavior are detrimental. For instance, the lack of any meaningful human action for addressing global warming and environmental degradation in general is one major context where this issue is strongly prevalent. Another context is how people respond to verbal confrontation and handle themselves during arguments. For instance:

arguing stirs up our fight-or-flight response. Once biological arousal takes over we start to feel the effects of nature's mechanism that prepares us for aggressive action. To understand our patterns of arguing, we need to learn about fight-or-flight arousal. Once we recognize the signs that we are in an aroused state, such as pounding heart and increased muscle tone, we may realize how often even trivial arguments are triggering full-blown biological responses. An argument about a TV clicker can seem to our mammalian brain as threatening as a lion leaping towards our throat.

It's clear why such needlessly intense responses to verbal confrontations are problematic; the nature of the problem (a simple verbal confrontation) does not warrant the intensity and seriousness  of the response. We do not need our bodies to go into fight-or-flight mode to deal with situations that  don't even pose a remote threat to our safety. We do not need our stress hormones flaring up. The fight-or-flight response has evolved to deal with emergencies and it's mistakenly being used to deal with relatively trivial everyday matters. Such a response can "protect us from threat, by physically preparing us to fight for our life or run for it. It can come in handy when there’s, say, a bus hurtling towards us and we need to get out of the way. It’s not so handy when the issue is that of Oreos, or more specifically, that someone has taken the last one."

Once our emotions and rational thinking are "hijacked" via the flight-or-flight mechanism, our rational and more restrained side "gets sidelined in favor of the more primitive, automatic, unthinking part. As a result, there’s likely to be yelling, personal sledging and aggression. Nobody listens and nobody is heard."

Additionally,

in situations of high stress, fear or distrust, the hormone and neurotransmitter cortisol floods the brain. Executive functions that help us with advanced thought processes like strategy, trust building, and compassion shut down. And the amygdala, our instinctive brain, takes over. The body makes a chemical choice about how best to protect itself...we default to one of four responses: fight (keep arguing the point), flight (revert to, and hide behind, group consensus), freeze (disengage from the argument by shutting up) or appease (make nice with your adversary by simply agreeing with him)

None of the responses offered by the fight-or-flight mechanism make sense in most professional, interpersonal, and social situations. The severity and inappropriateness of the response often times leads to misunderstanding, unnecessary arguing, lack of cooperation, and hurt feelings. What makes the situation even more problematic is that our brains actually reward us for giving into these irrational responses because "when [we] argue and win, [our] brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes [us] feel good, dominant, even invincible. It’s a the feeling any of us would want to replicate. So the next time we’re in a tense situation, we fight again. We get addicted to being right."

Ultimately, once a discussion turns into an argument or any sort of verbal confrontation, "It's no longer an exercise in logic and reasoning. It's just a fight. And being in a fight brings its own frame of mind, a whole set of attitudes, expectations, and conditioned reactions that go along with arguing. As soon as that happens, no one cares who is right and who is wrong. All that matters is who is friend and who is foe."

Given this information on how we seem to be "wired" to respond to even the slightest hint of verbal aggression, our goal should be to hijack the hijacker and cut off our automatic aggressive response before it has a chance to do damage. Consider the implications in professional settings where we need to work with strangers. If we are interacting with someone whose cooperation we need, what should our response be when we sense aggression from them in the form of a condescending or disrespectful tone? Should we match their tone and be aggressive in return? Given the information previously discussed, this would be a very poor course of action to take. Such a response will give the person in front of us a reason or the opportunity to allow the more "primal" parts of their brain to take over and sabotage their reasoning. Once this happens, we have lost the person and they are very unlikely to play along and comply with our requests. For all practical purposes, both their body and mind are now responding to us as if we are the "enemy" and we are literally putting their physical safety at risk. During such a state of emotional and physiological arousal, the last thing on the person's mind is to cooperate with the "foe" in front of them; an emergency mode has been activated and cooperation has been thrown out the window.

The proper response to the above situation is to do our absolute best to keep our calm and not allow the person to detect even the most minute evidence of aggressive behavior or tone. If we do not give their body and mind the opportunity to go into a "self defense" mode then they are much more likely to cooperate with us and treat us as a potential friend instead of an enemy. Maintaining emotional restraint under emotionally charged circumstances is easier said than done but the rewards greatly outweigh the immediate costs.



Sources cited:

http://www.mental-health-survival-guide.com/arguing.htm

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/karen-young/brain-during-an-argument_b_7540148.html

https://hbr.org/2013/02/break-your-addiction-to-being/

http://theweek.com/articles/454234/how-win-every-argument

The Case of Mr. Thompson

This is the most brutal and depressing description of someone's mental condition I have ever read. This sounds like a nightmare. The worst part is the patient not even having the cognitive ability to realize the state that he is in.

The author is describing the patient "Mr. Thompson." The patient is unable to form new memories and his working memory is essentially a few seconds long. He forgets everything after that brief duration and has to start from the beginning over, and over, and over, and over again.

The following quotes are from the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks.

He remembered nothing for more than a few seconds. He was continually disoriented. Abysses of amnesia continually opened beneath him, but he would bridge them, nimbly, by fluent confabulations and fictions of all kinds. For him they were not fictions, but how he suddenly saw, or interpreted, the world. Its radical flux and incoherence could not be tolerated, acknowledged, for an instant--there was, instead, this strange, delirious, quasi-coherence, as Mr. Thompson, with his ceaseless, unconscious, quick-fire inventions, continually improvised a world around him--an Arabian Nights world, a phantasmagoria, a dream, of ever-changing people, figures, situations--continual, kaleidoscopic mutations and transformations.

[He was] continually creating a world and a self, to replace what was continually being forgotten and lost. Such a patient must literally make himself (and his world) up every moment... Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy--hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania. Unable to maintain a genuine narrative or continuity, unable to maintain a genuine inner world, he is driven to the proliferation of pseudo-narratives, in a pseduo-continuity, pseudo-worlds peopled by pseudo-people, phantoms...

Here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing--and he must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him...

He can never stop running, for the breach in memory, in existence, in meaning, is never healed but has to be bridged, to be 'patched', every second. And the bridges, the patches, for all their brilliance, fail to work--because they are confabulations, fictions, which cannot do service for reality, while also failing to correspond with reality...

Our efforts to cure Mr. Thompson will all fail--even increase his confabulatory pressure. But when we abdicate our efforts, and let him be, he sometimes wanders out in the quiet and undemanding garden which surrounds the Home, and there, in its quietness, he recovers his own quiet. The presence of others, other people, excite and rattle him, force him into an endless, frenzied, social chatter, a veritable delirium of identity-making and seeking; the presence of plants, a quiet garden, the non-human order, making no social or human demands upon him, allow this identity-delirium to relax, to subside, and by their quiet, non-human self sufficiency and completeness allow him a rare quietness and self-sufficiency of his own, by offering (beneath, or beyond, all merely human identities and relations) a deep wordless communion with Nature itself, and with this the restored sense of being in the world, being real.

Life Lessons

I recently read letters written by the author Rainer Maria Rilke. He sent  these letters to his friend Mr. Knopps. Rainer provides thoughtful and moving advice to his friend to help him gain perspective on the life difficulties that he is facing. There is an immense amount of wisdom in Rainer's words and he helped me gain clarity on various issues that I think about in my own life. My hope is that by sharing these thoughts, I can help others with their difficulties as well.

Rainer begins by discussing the importance of remembering our inner worth even when we find ourselves in difficult external circumstances:

And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds—wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories?

It's important to remember that even during our struggles and when life isn't going in the direction we want, we still have a rich inner world that we have cultivated and formed throughout our lifetime. This internal value cannot be taken away from us even when our surroundings have changed for the worse.  We can tap into this core and use it as a source of emotional strength to help us persevere through arduous times.

Related to this idea is exploring our inner selves to discover solutions to our problems and for tapping our creativity:

Sir, I can’t give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.

Often times, going deep into ourselves can be a terrifying experience and it potentially scares many people because they end up being viewed as someone who “takes things too seriously” and “overthinks” everything. Additionally, if one does not have experience with introspection then the inner world has remained largely unexplored. If something is unexplored, it contains numerous uncertainties and unknowns. Such an environment (whether real or in our mind) can be an intimidating place to enter, at least initially. Rainer uses a beautiful metaphor to describe this foreign inner landscape and why it can be frightening:

Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.

Furthermore, such introspection could have heavy costs because

every person must choose how much truth he can stand. ― Irvin D. Yalom. 

By going down the road of self-awareness, we eventually start discovering issues that are emotionally challenging to confront. For instance, we potentially end up asking questions about life's meaning, what we are meant to devote ourselves to, what it means to lead a fulfilling life, what should be our priorities, and other "big" questions that do not have easy and straightforward answers. Such questions are difficult and intimidating to face directly and a simpler and more tempting solution could be avoidance and distraction.

However, having said that, the “cost” of going down this path is absolutely worth it and we can end up living more honest, genuine, and meaningful lives. We might not be as happy as someone who didn’t go through the same trial but at least we will be more self aware and honest with ourselves. Rainer touches upon this topic as well: 

Nevertheless, even then, this self-searching that I as of you will not have been for nothing. Your life will still find its own paths from there, and that they may be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you.

The mental and emotional effort that we exert will not be in vain and we can come out the other end as someone who is more prepared to lead a fulfilling life. Additionally, such a deliberate introspective quest can allow us to truly address the root of our anxieties and fears:

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly.

Throughout this whole process, Rainer advises a change in our perspective and learning to accept uncertainty and asking questions instead of fearing it and hoping it will go away as soon as possible. He advises

to have patience with everything unresolved in [our] heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

He recommends welcoming the mystery and looking at it as a challenging puzzle to discover and solve over time because

it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult.

The more challenging an ordeal is, the more we learn in the process of conquering it. Further, the most worthwhile goals, wants, and desires are difficult to attain and take an immense amount of work and a certain amount of suffering. But, if something is difficult to attain, it's likely that the sense of satisfaction and happiness after attaining it is going to be significant. Additionally, the journey towards the goal itself will be full of growth and self discovery.  This is assuming the goal isn’t rooted in consumerism or anything else equally superficial.

Rainer explores this issue even further with a wonderful metaphor:

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Such a change in perspective is essential for confronting aspects of our lives that create fear and anxiety.

Rainer then continues on to discuss the importance of forming valuable friendships, He believes we should

seek out some simple and true feeling of what [we] have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when [we] change again and again.

Instead of focusing on what an "ideal" friendship is or having a laundry list of restrictions for filtering out who can be our friend and who can't, we should instead focus on core attributes such as how kind and caring the person is. For instance, if we can't have a deep intellectual connection with someone, should we discount them as a potential close friend? What if this individual is caring and is there to support us when we are facing difficult emotional situations? Such a personality trait should not be discounted and it can survive and always be a friendship-strengthening force no matter what kinds of changes we go through. A friend who cares about us is always a blessing, both during difficult and favorable times.

However, if we do end up failing to form close friendships, Rainer has additional advice:

If there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things; they will not abandon you; and the nights are still there, and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands; everything in the world of Things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in.

If we find ourselves being consistently disappointed and hurt by the people in our lives, we should cultivate hobbies, learn to appreciate time spent in nature, and have solitary activities that we can be involved in as a way of coping with interpersonal shortcomings and struggles.  This isn't an ideal path to take since it involves further isolation but it's perhaps better than doing nothing at all and becoming even more idle and potentially depressed.

Rainer also discusses the importance of moving past personal boundaries and expanding our horizons. He uses an apt metaphor to make his point:

If we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security.

We are often times tempted to settle for security instead of exploration or going past our boundaries. Being cautious provides us with comfort and security and such a path is quite tempting. A sense of security is comforting in the short term but it gains us nothing in the long-term and it stifles growth.

Rainer also has encouraging advice for getting through our melancholic days:

But in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now do, more than anything else.

It's true that sometimes the only way to power through a low point is to do our best to simply wait it out. Depending on how serious the issue is, sometimes a single night's rest can do wonders in changing our outlook and mood. However, for more serious situations, it could take considerably longer. But the underlying idea should not be forgotten: the passage of time can have a healing effect. 

And finally, let's not forget that going through difficult times and experiencing emotional setbacks can give us a unique insight into helping others during their times of most need:

And if there is one more thing that I must say to you, it is this: Don’t think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you much pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.

Sometimes, the words "I know, I've been there and it does get better. Let's talk. I'm here to listen" can mean the world to a person who might be at their lowest point. Them realizing that we have experienced something similar to what they are feeling now can help immensely and allow them to trust us to listen to them non-judgmentally.  Being there for someone and having them feel heard can have immense emotional benefits, but if the person also knows that we have relevant personal experience, then they are even more likely to feel comfortable and share their innermost troubles with us.

I hope Rainer Maria Rilke's thoughtful commentary and beautiful metaphors can help others as much as they helped me. That is my goal for sharing this.

What do we learn at the bottom of the pit?

I descended into dark places recently and it has been one of the scariest experiences in my life thus far. As difficult as it is to write some of this, I would like to share it because I might possibly help someone else who is going through something painful and they see no way out.  I want to show them that there is a way out and there is a proper way of handling a terrifying situation.

Ultimately, I do not know how I managed to descend this far but I imagine it started with the initial panic attack which happened recently (about two weeks ago). After that particular incident, I was optimistic and every day I was feeling better and better. Then, I realized that I was not through the ordeal just yet and there was more to come. For those who don't know, a panic attack involves symptoms such as an increased heart rate, a sense of doom and dread, severe anxiety, a fight or flight response, and other symptoms. One key symptom that is very difficult to describe is what's called a "detached sense of reality." Imagine you know exactly where you are and what time it is and other details about your immediate environment and your life. However, something... something doesn't feel quite right. You feel as if you are outside your own body and you aren't a unified whole. You are a collection of parts.  There is a lack of continuity from one instance to the next.  This is the symptom I started to experience throughout the day and it started to cause immense anxiety because I was unable to be properly immersed in my environment and with the people in it. I also started to sleep only 2-3 hours a night instead of my usual 7-8 hours. Additionally, I could barely eat. The insomnia and hunger made the situation that much worse.

Unfortunately, these feelings took a turn for the worse. I started experiencing even darker thoughts and I was unable to experience any joy or happiness. The usual activities and things that would make me happy completely failed to make a difference. For instance, I was unable to smile or laugh at a picture of a puppy tumbling down the stairs.  In the past, I would have the widest grin on my face at such a sight. I was barely able to force a smile in the mornings when greeting a coworker. During conversations, people would be concerned and ask what was wrong. I was able to communicate and function and I looked relatively fine on the surface but underneath I was in a dark place and I was unable to connect with the world around me. I was unable to experience positive emotions or extract any joy out of situations that would usually make me happy.  Perhaps the most terrifying part during all this was the incredibly strong and disturbing illusion that these feelings were never going to go away and I was going to be forced to live such a detached and joyless life forever. Logic, my ever-comforting source of solace, kept failing me. I felt absolutely hopeless and was fighting a losing battle against my own mind. Once these fatalistic and catastrophic feelings started to take hold, I was on my way to the lowest point possible and started experiencing thoughts of death and suicide.  I was unable to stop thoughts such as "there is no joy, what's the point of living?" and "why are you even alive?" Perhaps the most paralyzing thought of all was "why don't you kill yourself?" It hurts me to even write these out but I can't deny that these thoughts haunted me.

Thankfully, I was never in any real danger and there was no real risk of me acting on these thoughts but since I had never had such ideas in my life, I was in a state of complete shock, mental paralysis, and defeat. I had absolutely no idea what to do. I had never experienced anything this dark and morbid. During one of the lowest points, I ran down the stairs while at work and I called the suicide help hotline to have someone, anyone, to hear me and tell me it's alright. The act of actually conveying these thoughts out loud to someone and being able to cry provided a deep sense of relief. This is when I realized I needed help and I could not take on this battle alone. I started to reach out to friends and coworkers. I am grateful that each and every one of them came through and talked to me and supported me. I am not religious but I feel blessed to have caring people in my life. This is when I learned my greatest lesson that I hope others will take to heart as well. During your darkest times, you cannot get out on your own. You need friends. You need family. You need someone to talk to. If you feel isolated and have absolutely no one, call a hotline or any other free service. The simple act of connecting with another human being, even a stranger, during such a vulnerable time is absolutely therapeutic even if you don't immediately realize or feel the effects. Your mind is a dangerous animal and it can make you believe that the situation is not going to get better and you will be stuck in pain forever. During these dark times, you will lose your ability to defend against such catastrophic thoughts and logic will very likely fail you and it will feel like your mind is divided and fighting against itself in some kind of internal mental civil war. You need allies. Sharing the dark thoughts and not feeling like you're alone in fighting them is absolutely essential. Do not take on the struggle alone and do not feel that you are "weak" for needing help. All of us need help at one point or another and that's absolutely ok. This is the other lesson I learned from this experience. It's alright to be vulnerable and let your heart out and allow people to be there for you. Often times, you are doing them a favor by allowing them to support you. You are not being a burden. It feels good to help someone in need, especially someone in immense need.

I would like to end on a positive note and with some words of wisdom. Treat your brain and your mind like you would treat any other muscle. If you lift too many weights or jog for too many miles, your body can fail you and you need a break. If you break an arm, you need a cast and other kinds of treatments to fix the issue. Your mind can suffer the same way. The way it gets "hurt" and pushed to exhaustion is through stress. Do NOT underestimate the effects of stressful events. If you deal with several major disappointments in a short period of time, this is most likely going to have some kind of effect on your mind and it's going to manifest itself in various ways after you surpass a certain tolerance level of mental threshold. What's essential to note here is that you will not consciously be aware of when this threshold is actually surpassed. For me, it seemed to show itself in the form of a panic attack and through the emotions and feelings I described above. For you, it might be other symptoms. Each person is affected by different events and to varying degrees and often times we aren't even aware of what can actually hurt us significantly. Don't think you are "above" being hurt by what you think is a minor setback. Logically, something might seem insignificant on the surface, but your mind and subconscious thought processes could still have a strong reaction.

At the end of it all, when nothing seems to help and everything seems hopeless, never forget that the people in your life can help and allow you to start climbing from the pit you fell in. All of us need help sometimes. Let them be there for you. A loving and long hug from your mother or your friend can mean a world of difference. Whatever you ultimately decide to do, never EVER isolate yourself and keep your feelings to yourself. You are not alone and you should not allow yourself to feel alone.

What the hell was THAT?

I am recounting my experience of something that happened very recently as a way of trying to make at least some sense of it.

I was taken to the ER for having my first ever genuine and prolonged panic attack. I figure that the best way to tackle an issue is to try to take it head on instead of avoiding thinking about it with the hopes that it won't happen again.  I believe avoiding an issue is generally a mistake.  Making decisions with fear as your motivation often ends badly.

I've had minor occurrences of panic attack'esque episodes in the past but this time it was distinctly different and a whole new kind of beast.  It occurred at 1:25am. I got up for a bathroom break like numerous times before. When I came back to bed and threw the sheets over me, I realized something was very very wrong.  I felt a fear so primal and unrecognizable that I had no idea what was happening to me. The incredibly foreign nature of what I was feeling added to the panic and made the whole situation that much more terrifying. I started trembling uncontrollably even though it was not cold.  My heart rate skyrocketed and I could feel my heart fiercely beating against my chest. I turned on the lights and sat on my bed in a complete daze. My father got alarmed and woke up from the light. He came into my room and repeatedly asked what was wrong.  I kept trembling and staring in random directions. I finally managed to mutter "emergency room... now..."

After the symptoms finally subsided and the nurses could find nothing physically wrong with me,  I thought about why I couldn't answer my father when he kept asking what was wrong with me.  I realized that the answer I wanted to give him would make me sound insane and that made me very afraid. A quick web.md search yielded the symptom I was too scared to even attempt to describe:

"Feeling unreal or detached from your surroundings."

Besides the physical symptoms such as trembling and an increased heart rate, this was the mental symptom I was utterly terrified of. I quite literally felt like I was viewing my body from somewhere high above and outside of it. I felt my "essence" fading from me. I couldn't stop myself from thinking about what actually makes me "Vahagn." I didn't think of myself as a unified whole. I thought of myself as a massive collection of cells. I saw myself as groups of organs surrounded by flesh. I viewed my brain as a collection of neurons and I could not stop thinking about how all those neurons work together to form who I am. I could not understand how they formed my consciousness and stored my memories.  I asked myself "why are these neurons working together to store my memories and who I am? What's stopping them from erasing me completely?"  I believe I was having an existential crisis in the most literal way I could possibly experience it and the ordeal was immensely terrifying and it caused me to question the very essence of reality and what ultimately makes me, "me."

I never want to go through this experience again but if it does decide to show up again. .. bring it the fuck on. I'm ready for you.