A Brief Series of Existential Crises

Written by Kylie Ziemke

“My name is Kylie Ziemke, and I’m a junior Neuroscience and Psychology double major. I have always loved creative writing, so much so that I almost majored in it, but in the end my passion for science and the brain won out. I love mixing abstract concepts like existentialism with scientific ones like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and I think there’s a power to understanding that those concepts really aren’t all that different. I wrote "A Brief Series of Existential Crises" as a semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical account of the multiple philosophical and existential questions I’ve asked myself over the years, things like ‘What’s real?’ and ‘Why am I here?’ In the story, the narrator attempts to find answers to these questions through the lens of transformation, and finds beauty in the constant yet ever-changing nature of the world around her and her place in it.”

I was six years old when I had my first existential crisis.

Sat on one of the twenty-five colored squares on my kindergarten classroom’s rug, picking at

some questionable substance that had long since dried to the faded nylon, a terrible realization

struck me: I did not remember every day of my life.

I thought back to the first day of school not six months ago when my teacher met me at the front

door of the classroom and led me to this very square of carpet. This is your square for the whole

year, she had told me. I could still hear her voice so clearly, could still picture the classroom

through those eyes of mine that had never seen it before. And yet I did not remember the rest of

that day.

In fact, I barely remembered my life at all. Sure, I knew my name and my family and all the

important things about my life. I knew where I had been and what I had done. I knew these

things the way I knew how to breathe: implicitly, naturally, without thought.

But I could not picture all those moments. Could not see all my memories from the eyes I wore

that day. I could not recall all the conversations I’d had just this day, let alone this past week, this

past month, this past year...

How many conversations was I forgetting? How many moments? How many school assignments

and bike rides and play dates weren’t actually recollectable?

My kindergarten classroom spun and twisted around me.

If I couldn’t remember what I did while I was alive, did I even exist at all? How do I know my

name if I can’t remember when I was first told those sharp consonants and soft vowels floated

together to mean me? How do I know my sister if I don’t recall all the life we’ve lived together?

I focused hard on my thoughts, on the brightly colored walls and six-year-olds around me. I am

here, I thought. And if I am here now, on this day, in this moment, then I must have been here on

all the other days too. And I might not remember this moment in an hour or day or week or

month or year, but I was still here when it happened.

My kindergarten classroom stopped spinning. I was sitting on the carpet and not, as it turns out,

at the center of a cataclysmic tornado.

This was my first philosophical reckoning. It was not my last.

Nine years old and on the way home from a Saturday soccer match, it occurred to me that books

were just pages filled with words that were made of letters that were assigned trivial sounds. I

thought about these ink markings and how nonsensical they were, how they so quickly became

gibberish the way words do when you say them over and over too many times.

How did reading even work? Had I just spent my life staring at symbols and convincing myself

they meant something?

The car shook around me in a violent earthquake, and it only stopped when I looked outside the

window and read a billboard. Those painted lines made sense to me. They communicated

something in a language I could understand.

The world fell back into place, but only briefly.

Newly thirteen and chatting with my grandma as we got our nails done for my birthday, I became

suddenly aware of the fact that she would die. That my parents would die. That my sister and dog

and friends and I would all die. I had known this, of course. Had known death and its

inevitability.

But it was like in the blink of an eye, looking at the years of gravity weighing down on my

grandma, everything became inconceivably temporary. It wasn’t just the people around me that

would be gone - eventually, it would be this nail salon, the trees outside, the cars, the houses, the

birds and squirrels...

None of it would last.

Did anything matter if it would all erode and rot and die and fade and be forgotten? Was I even

alive, or was I a corpse waiting for my heart to stop beating?

The storm in my mind raged on, lightning and thunder and crisis.

Fifteen and restless to leave AP Chemistry and get to lunch, my teacher introduced the Laws of

Thermodynamics. By the time we were dismissed to the cafeteria, I could no longer stomach the

thought of food.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, my teacher had told us. It can only be transformed.

Yet here I was, this ball of mass constantly consuming. I stole light from the sun to see, air from

the sky to breathe, nutrients from the ground to feed, water from the rivers to drink. What right

did I have to take these things for myself? To pump energy into my body, to pump my blood and

think my thoughts, to walk this Earth?

All I seemed to do was take, and what did I give in return? Was my purpose in life simply to

consume energy from the universe before withering away into nothingness?

Nothingness... oblivion... how could energy be neither created nor destroyed when I was

devouring energy every day without producing any more? What transformation could I possibly

be giving this energy to justify my endless taking of it?

This was my fourth and most terrible existential crisis. My event horizon. My point of no return.

I stared long and hard at the world around me. Transformation. I must be transforming what I

take and consume and devour into something other, something new. Physics and chemistry and

the universe said so. If gravity was real, so too must this law be.

Next to me, someone laughed at a joke. I thought of my own laughter. Maybe the breath I expel

as I chuckle at a joke is the same air that whips in someone’s ears as they fly across the water on

a speed boat, so loud and sharp it whistles and deafens and consumes and reminds you that you

are alive.

Maybe my blood carries minerals that were chipped into a million tiny pieces by a million years

of work of a relentless river. Now those minerals course through the blood in my veins, carrying

with them life and sustenance to my organs, pumping my heart, coating my everything.

With this blood from the rivers and rocks I am alive. I am alive and able to move, to send small

ripples into the earth with each step, to leave behind waves of seismic activity that shake those

very rocks and rivers.

Maybe my forgotten memories are the shadows of fingerprint smudges on desks and shoes left at

the door and smiles given to strangers.

Maybe the rays of light that fled from the sun and bounced off those books filled with stories and

words and ink hit my retina and changed a photon into a message. And that message danced

across my neurons until a picture was formed in the lens of my eyes.

Maybe transformation turns electromagnetic waves into a sunset. Into a world that is seen only

because electrons dare to whirl around in endless chaotic motion.

Maybe these storms in my mind are synapses firing with the same electrical signal as lightning

bolts flashing through the sky. There and gone in a blink, devastatingly bright, leaving an imprint

on the back of my eyes.

This my mind, my laughter and blood, these my bones, my visions and storms... maybe I take

this energy around me and then give it back transformed. Maybe, if I do nothing else, my life can

serve as a conduit for turning minerals into earthquakes and wind into laughter.

Maybe life has meaning because of transformation, because we do not consume without giving

back in equal yet different measure.

And maybe, just maybe, this was not an existential crisis after all, but an epiphany.