my early existential crisis.

i just started reading a book that i have resisted reading for over a year now. (everyone was reading it.)

Eat, Pray, Love, so i heard, was about a woman who goes to italy, india and indonesia.

HOW IRRITATING, i thought. some writer decided she wanted to go to three beautiful countries and got some publishing company to pay for it. how pretentious. how obnoxious. no. way.

But then, in March, i ran out of books. and i needed something to read before bed (i must have something to read before bed). So, i picked it up. The thing is, it's really good. It is. And it strangely mirrors a lot of the things i've been going through - the self-questioning, the fear, the ground shifting, the fear and the need for healing.

i could do a book review (but i'm not done yet...) but i'll just talk about one particular point. the author, elizabeth gilbert, talks about her "existential crisis" on her tenth birthday. when she realized that life was passing by so quickly she could hardly hold onto it. she had hit the double digits, and that meant that one day everyone she loved would die.

i had a moment like that when i was five. at least i think i was five. i remember lying in bed, unable to sleep. and sometimes i would play tricks on myself to get myself to sleep. count, think of something else. for some reason that night i started thinking of my family. and then i started to think about what would happen if they all died. all of them. (i was a reeeally melodramatic kid). it started with my brother. what if tim was dead? i thought of all the everyday ways he wouldn't be in my life. then i thought about my dad. dead. then the one that scared me the most - mom. dead. all gone.

and i felt what can only be described as blind panic - like when you've lost something so valuable to you that you start tearing your room apart looking for it. i went right down the family line. uncle mike, aunt prue. cousins. dead, dead, dead. grandparents (who maybe logically should have been first in this thought process) dead. gone. mom's side of the family. dad's side of the family. dead. dead.

and then i was crying uncontrollably. i worked myself into such a self-pitying fit of loneliness - at age five - that i was scared to go to sleep. until i snapped myself out of it. Wait. they're not dead. they're alive. and you're safe. at home. For now. so i went to sleep with a tear-streaked face and stuffed up nose that night, safe.

from that night forward, though, time seemed to go a little faster. summers flew by. and i was just setting myself up for a fall sometime in the future. and basing my sense of security on those who surround me in the present. knowing that they wouldn't always be there. and really fearing - because everything was so temporary. Now, if only a publishing company would pay me to go abroad and work all this out.....(how pretentious).