Hi, Endless Void…
How are you doing today? If you’ll permit me to be a little bit angsty and nihilistic today… Noted possible fascist (maybe? idk, jury always seems to be out) and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (yes… *that* angsty and nihilisitc) has a quote out there that makes the rounds online every now and again. It goes like this:
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
I first read that when I was probably 14 years old, first being exposed to actual philosophy and historical analysis, and I never really put much thought into what it means. I was a brooding teenager at the time and just thought it was some uber dark, goth as shit thing to steal for my myspace or something. Of course, it’s one of the more obvious and perhaps “trope-ified” ideas in media these days. Nietzsche was saying that one should be careful when combating evil so that they do not become evil their self in the process. There is a cost too great, and your own soul is always just that.
Of course, Nietzsche lived in a time when “true evil” was engulfing the world in its dark tendrils. He may not have seen how far it went, or the cost associated with destroying it, but he did wind up being right, in a sense at least. Perhaps he just understood history well enough though, because it’s not like the kind of evil humanity was cooking up at the turn of the 20th century was anything truly new. Our story as a species is littered with uniquely human atrocities. Things that fiction authors and script writers can’t even make up themselves. It’s that level of monstrous. So monstrous that it simply *must* be real life.
I have said before that I really don’t want to talk about my atheism, and – for what it’s worth – that’s not really what I’m here to do today anyway. I’m just going to give a brief synopsis of who I am as a person, and ceasing to believe in God is certainly essential to how I arrived here.
When talking about atheism before, I mentioned that I think there are essentially two different flavors of atheist. To distill it more succinctly though, one group sees the world in black and white logic, the other is able to perceive the shades of gray. Whatever the case may be, this is heavily related to an individual’s concept of morality. The theist would say that morality is what the deity and his prophets say it is. It need no further explanation – although people will interpret it into the ground and to suit their own needs, of course. The *atheist*, on the other hand, doesn’t have a divinely mandated code of ethics to follow. This forces them to self-assess – well, ideally they would do that… being an atheist does not automatically make you an emotionally intelligent or otherwise smart person by any stretch of the imagination.
Point is, atheists frequently debate over where morality and ethics come from. This isn’t unique to us either. This is something that philosophers from the ancient Greeks to Kant to Popper and beyond have wrestled with for thousands of years. Morality didn’t pop into existence with the US constitution or something. For me, morality is relatively simple I guess. I don’t know what came first exactly: my morality or my profession, but the two things are tightly wound together. My morality is simply this: One should strive to do as much good for others as they can while also doing the least amount of harm possible.
That’s my “golden rule”, and I tie it to my profession as a healthcare professional, because it’s close to identical to the oath that we are all expected to take and live by in our profession. Benevolence, non-maleficence, heal and advocate, “do no harm”. I suppose I do know how I arrived at this sense of morality though. It’s just not something I speak of that often because of how personal it is. I guess anonymity has me feeling chatty this morning though. So allow me to tell a story.
I used to be a drug addict many years ago. I entered my adult life hooked on all flavors of opiates. I started with opium of all things – crazy what you can find in the big city, eh? Then pills became easier. And eventually heroin became my wife and my life. I started selling weed and psychedelics (while partaking occasionally myself of course) just to get money for more of what I really wanted. I spent some time living on the streets, brief though it may have been, but I was faded at pretty much all hours of the day. And if I wasn’t, I was trying to be.
Now, no one really just falls into a drug addiction. There is pretty universally some sort of preceding factors that lead into it. Maybe it’s childhood trauma, maybe it’s a sheer inability to cope with stress, financial hardship (paradoxically maybe), loss of a loved one, or even just progressive escalation after being prescribed pain pills for a car accident or something. What I’m saying is, all addicts have a reason for being addicts. Even if they’ll insist otherwise, that it just makes them feel good. And make no mistake, it *does* make you feel good, fleeting though it may be.
So what’s my excuse exactly? Not really anything especially exciting, I guess. I don’t think anyone would be interested in reading a book about my life, is my point. I’ve got some trauma, I’ve got some mental health issues, I’ve got some impulsivity, and I just had the opportunity there. And opportunity/availability is probably 50% of it at least. I didn’t believe in God anymore at this point though. I stopped believing in God when the church told me my mom committed a sin by having me as a teenager, before ever being married. I decided that God wasn’t for me at least. Then other incidents and life events had me bouncing from deism to buddhism to edgy satanism and wiccan for awhile. I called myself “agnostic” for awhile and finally just said “fuck it, I don’t care, I’m an atheist because this shit just means nothing to me anyway.”
I can tell you, Endless Void, I struggled immensely with the question of purpose, of morality when I had these realizations. There ceased to be a point to it all. You find some fleeting pleasure where you can while those neurons are still firing and then you fuckin’ die. All of that to eventually be forgotten forever. I read a funny tweet one time where someone responded to a comment about how everyone is eventually forgotten completely with “not if I eat the mona lisa”… Thing is though, even then, hilarious stranger. Someday, the mona lisa will be forgotten, and with it the person that consumed it. Eternity – for humanity – is incomprehensible and impossible. It makes it easy to understand how someone might come to really identify with the brooding aimlessness of Nietzsche’s philosophies, doesn’t it?
I think this lack of purpose was at the core of my drug addiction though. I wanted to feel something and I wanted to contrast the something with nothing. Heroin gave me that on a silver platter. To this day it’s hard for me to say I’ve ever come to experience a greater pleasure, honestly. Yet here I am, 10+ years clean and sober. How did we get here, Endless Void?
Well, heroin wasn’t my only love affair of course. I really loved my psychedelics. And one night they granted to me “what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity”. They didn’t give me a focused purpose or anything, but they inspired me to want to find one. So I secretly went through rehab – my family knew nothing of my addiction at this point – and I told everyone I loved I was moving away. This was to escape my enablers and get a clean slate. I had family living in another state so I went and stayed with them while I got myself back on my feet. I made new friends, was loving my job as a bartender in the big city. Everything was good, but purpose continued to elude me.
And then I met her.
One day at work the new batch of servers came in for training. I had become great friends with another bartender that nailed the saying into my head: “don’t shit where you eat”, but one of these new servers… Something about her – eh, let’s be real, I thought she was beautiful. That was enough for me to forget my best friend’s advice. Her training ends for the day, I’m still at work for a couple more hours myself, but I got some downtime so I approached her and asked her name, had some small talk. I find out that she just moved to this city, didn’t really know anyone yet. Perfect, so I offer to have a drink with her at my favorite spot that evening, get to know each other, maybe show her around if I manage to not scare her off. She agrees, and so begins 10 of the most pivotal months of my life. The period of time that walked me right into where I am now. The beautifully chaotic, whirlwind kind of an era that would define anyone.
It turns out, this person moved to the city for the *exact* same reasons I did. They had a love affair with sweet lady H, had been through rehab, and they needed a restart. Now, 2025 me would consider that an immediate red flag, do not move forward with this kind of thing. I was a couple years clean at that point…. she was a couple months. But it just felt as though she was created in a lab to *get me* or something. From our beliefs, to our interests, to our personalities and even weird, quirky behaviors. My dumbass suddenly believed in soulmates.
Anyway, we relapsed together.
My return to my first love was more fleeting for me than it was for her though. I didn’t go right back to heroin, but I was taking pills again. I don’t know exactly what triggered in me, but I was somehow able to make myself stop before it got out of control again. She was not. I guess that’s the difference between 2 years and 2 months clean and sober? I don’t know.
The internet wasn’t *quite* as ubiquitous at that time as it is now. So needless to say, I’d never heard someone say before “I can fix her.” I figured it was something I thought up all on my own. And I tried. I tried to make her stop. I tried to “save” her.
And I failed.
I at last had to consult with my closest people. I called my mom, crying uncontrollably, begging her to tell me the secret thing I needed to do to fix all of this. That was the day I learned that, obviously, there isn’t a solution for every problem. Sometimes, inevitability comes knocking and it won’t let you refuse to answer. It just breaks in and takes every thing from you that isn’t nailed down. I told my best friend what was going on, and she told me it was time to stop. That she’d “beat the shit” out of me if I continued to contact this girl, because all that was going to happen was that I would eventually collapse again and probably wind up dead, another addiction statistic. So I stopped reaching out to her. And after one last message she sent me that I refused to respond to… I never heard from her again.
The year was 2012. All of her social media she had is gone. It’s as though she vanished without a trace. It took me a long time to come to terms with things, but eventually I did.
In the year 2013, I got off work one day and found myself having that purposeless crisis yet again. I’d been moved away from my home town for almost five years at this point, I was still healing but gonna make it. I called my mom again and told her, I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know where I’m going. I need help. She reminded me of my stupid childhood dreams of being a doctor. I never had the work ethic or mental fortitude to actually do it. That ship had sailed. “Well, what about nursing school?” she asked me. I didn’t really feel like I had the work ethic or mental fortitude for that either, but after I hung up I had a realization.
I found my morality. I found my purpose. This girl had completely rewired my brain in the ways it needed and I discovered – in the sorrow of it all – who I wanted to be. That very day, I told myself that I was going to *learn* how to help people. That I wouldn’t be stabbing in the dark again. That even if I ran into someone that couldn’t be helped, I would *at least* have the tools and the knowledge to know what to do to try. I would never again be at a confused, desperate loss to help another person.
It’s kind of a cliche that so many nurses, when asked why they became a nurse, kind of plainly just say that they “want to help people”. I didn’t merely *want* to help people though. I needed to help others. I needed something to give what happened to me, to her, to everyone I ever lost to despair, addiction, mental illness, whatever, an actual reason for happening. I refused to allow it to be for nothing. I vowed that if anyone in need ever came to me for help, that I would make sure that coming to me gave them the best possible chance. That even if they wound up being helpless, they received the best care they possibly could. I would ensure that I said, that I did the right things. That I never again felt the panic of wanting to help someone without having a fucking clue how to do it.
Glorious purpose.
Up until that point, I was ill equipped to fight the monsters. They consumed me. I gazed into the abyss and the abyss gazed back. It pulled me in. But in that moment, I found my way out. I could see the light emerging over the edge of that event horizon, not bent or frozen by physics, but attainable.
I became a nurse. I found myself, and I guess the rest is history still being written. Perhaps paradoxically though, finding purpose is only the beginning of it all, and with it comes a myriad of its own fresh, new problems. Stability is a dangerous thing, honestly. Especially for a recovered drug addict that spent most her life not really giving a shit what the next day would bring.
In my last entry I wrote about Eros and lost love. This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced this, this miserable break up and the hopeless feelings that come with it. Interestingly enough though, I wasn’t really talking about the collapse of my most recent relationship in that entry though. No, that shock hit me several months ago. My mind has been made up and fairly content with things on that front for some time now. I’ve had time to process it and all that remains is the logistics now. So it goes.
No… my last entry wasn’t about being betrayed by Eros again. It was about Eros deciding to change her strategy rather than letting me go. It took me a long time to get here, but have you – Endless Void – ever heard of the concept of the “rebound” in the context of breaking up? I’m sure you have. It’s such a commonly known thing that I’m sure anyone could explain it and give an example of when they had to suffer through it before.
Well, I think I’ve already experienced mine, and that was really what my last entry was about. It’s not the first time I’ve been through it before… but it is the first time it ever hurt me so badly. The first time I really lost my senses over it and forgot everything I thought I knew about relationships. My experience vanished all at once and I walked right into the trap while I said aloud that I refuse to walk into this trap. It was the first time in my life that the rebound was so potently mutual. That it didn’t feel like it would be something temporary. I have never believed in hokey, spiritualist crap… but I believed in this instance that all the shitty things that happened this past year had happened for a reason. And *this* was the reason.
It wasn’t though, it was just another rebound I guess. That was the point at which Eros pulled the dagger out of my heart, gently laid a kiss on my forehead, and left me lying in ruin. A bloody mess. Alone again with nothing but the framework of purpose and morality that I had built for myself. A framework that wound up meaning painfully little for my own betterment and well being. Yet again, I couldn’t save someone. This time it wasn’t just someone else though. It was also myself. Eros whispered to me, “Let my brothers and sisters break your fall. It isn’t *our* time yet though.”
This is the first time in my life that the aftermath, the rebound has hurt me more than the initial loss. It’s a strange feeling. “Sobering” perhaps even. Maybe we never really have it figured out?
Endless Void, I’ve been crying intermittently since last night, and I’m not really sure why. I mean, I am, but I just don’t think I should feel this way. It shouldn’t be this painful. It wasn’t the same as losing a 7 year long relationship. It wasn’t like I lost someone that knew me completely, inside and out. It was too new and fleeting for that.
And yet, I feel like I’ve lost apart of myself anyway. I know what love feels like. I’ve known it for years, haven’t I? Eros and I are so well acquainted. But this… this still felt like “something entirely new”. This was unfamiliar. This was something far too world changing to be so fleeting. I had never before felt as though I arrived precisely where I needed to be. I’d never been in a situation before where I saw so much of myself in another person, and they saw so much of who they are within me. Perception of time itself warped and twisted in their presence. My gay little heart wanted to drive a uhaul to her house to pick up her whole life and run away with her.
Was this Eros trying to stay with me? Trying to tell me that she actually does want to be with me? I don’t know. It’s been one day and I’m writing love letters to the ether. It’s embarrassing, honestly. I feel like I’ve forgotten everything I knew about this kind of stuff. Maybe I’ll come back to my senses in time and things are just still too fresh? I don’t know. Our entire known universe just seemed to be guiding us toward each other. We both said it, we both felt it.
And yet we both ran from it. So maybe we were too alike or something?
I don’t know, Endless Void. I promise this brooding angst won’t be the new theme of this blog that no one but you reads. I have too many things I want to talk about and explore for that. But it might be awhile before I see the meaning in it all again. At the moment, I just don’t really understand the world well enough to talk about much else. To ponder much else. I’ll get there eventually though, I’m sure.
You know… for how famous he is and how often Rick Sanchez wannabes want to pretend they’ve mastered his works, Friedrich Nietzsche’s “nihilism” was only half of what he brought to the table. What I mean by that, is that Nietzsche did arrive at some flavor of nihilism in his outlook, but he didn’t arrive there and then stop. The thesis of his work isn’t “the world, existence, life has no meaning”. Nietzsche can very much be seen as the sort of godfather of post modern deconstruction. His full outlook on existence can best be summarized like this:
There is no inherent meaning to life or existence. We’re all suffering through the same existential crisis of seeking out an objective purpose for it all. The truth is though, no such thing exists… Which is why the onus is on us to find meaning in everything ourselves, as individuals. It’s on us to keep asking questions, to discover a meaning that makes the internal, existential screaming shut. the fuck. up.
As an atheist with no evidence to the contrary, I’m kind of forced to operate under the assumption that this life is the only one I’ll ever have. That eternal darkness beyond darkness is what I ultimately have to look forward to. That it’s all any of us have to look forward to. It’s all my siblings, my lovers, my friends, and even the people, the patients I help along the way – ultimately – have to look forward to. If there is anything even approaching objective truth in the world, it’s that we will all die eventually, time will forget us, and any purpose or impression we inject into the material world will just someday fade into dust. Into the ashes left behind by the burning ambition and yearning of the human condition.
The truth is though, if that is the case, then it’s not *really* the thing that we have to look forward to, now is it? What even is nothingness? Can you comprehend it, what it means, what it feels like? I certainly can’t. It’s the lack of experience, intention, desire, expression. It’s the lack of “thing”. I think humans get so needlessly attached to the concept of eternity that they never stop to consider the importance of the finite. I don’t know if religion has done this to us all or if it’s just instinctual or something. Why do we value so much the questions regarding an unknown eternity, when this finite experience is standing right the fuck in front of us?
I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t know if eternity is something that this mind of mine will ever be blessed to witness or truly comprehend. I can’t know. What I do know, however, is that someday this meat suit will give out. My heart will stop beating for good, my brain will slowly starve to death, and that beyond that I will eventually be completely and utterly forgotten. I would like to think that I did everything I wanted to do with my finite time that I had, when I at last reach that certain point. I hope that when my time comes, I can look death in the face and be okay with it. Welcoming even, in a positive way.
Right now, I feel like I’ve made one of the biggest mistakes of my finite existence I guess. I’m not complete yet. I’m not fully grown. I’m still missing something. And I hope now, with everything that I currently am, that I didn’t just lose out on the path to life without regret.
Perhaps it’s just one more thing that time will have to help me come to terms with.
agirlhasnoname. 