“Eventually, you go. You go to the dark alley and begin to venture… step by step, closer and closer, deeper and deeper, towards that part of you that you try so hard to fight off, only to find yourself returning again and again, seeking comfort from the most harmful part of what makes you you.”

I have spent the last four years researching and studying Philosophy of Consciousness, specifically looking into the Self or the subjective experience. This journey has been one of the most trying times in my life. To say I have had to make sacrifices seems a bit of a misnomer as I have had colleagues who’ve made astoundingly more drastic ones than I ever did. Instead, when I reflect back on these past four years, I see decisions I made and decisions I didn’t. I see the mistakes, the accomplishments, the immaturity and the regret. I see four years of loss, sorrow, numbness and destitute, all resulting in the complete and utter surrendering of myself and all that I believed I was to Truth. This journey stripped me down, forced me to confront parts of my inner self, my consciousness, my subjectivity, that I finally had to admit were harming me and all without the understanding of what it is or why it’s unceasing, unending and unrelenting commitment to convincing me of things I do not want to believe were so strong. My subjectivity seems to be one of those who carry a ‘dark passenger’*, or as I now have come to call it, my 'dark alley’. Although I prefer not to use the terms depression and anxiety because I feel they have lost any meaningful insight into portraying what is actually being subjectively experienced (in addition, they have no way of indicating the severity), I shall take a moment and solidify that my ‘dark passenger’ or ‘dark alley’ is, indeed, my battle with both of these mental illnesses. For most of my life, in some form or fashion, I’ve managed to pacify this part of my subjective Self. The part that is convinced I am not enough. The part that tells me I am not enough. The part that shelters down deep and mostly remains a quiet, yet constant whisper. But inevitably, just like every time before, the soft whispers begin to swell, the words become more apparent and much harder to ignore. Eventually, you have no choice but to listen. It becomes the only thing you can hear and so, you go to it. You take that familiar path to the dark alley and begin to venture down… step by step, closer and closer, deeper and deeper, towards that part of you that you repeatedly try so hard to neglect; to fight off. But it never fails. As you have so many times before, you return… again and again… seeking comfort from the uttermost harmful part of what makes you, you. Why? Because it is the only thing you feel sure of, certain of. Everything else? Everything else is temporary.

So I guess it goes without saying I have not enjoyed most of my life. I do not mean that in the selfish or cynical sense. Perhaps a better commentary would be, I have not enjoyed the subjective experience that this Self, my Self, has had. Let me explain… When I replay old memories moment by moment, piece by piece, all I see are tragedies played out like a Shakespearean cliche and this is due to my consciousness’ ability to have subjective experiences; I can recall my past and revisit it time and time again. This is also how I am able to verify and witness a very different Sarah that existed at the start of this journey and how, slowly, I began to lose my parts that I believed made me, Me.

I have never truly understood why I am the way I am. I guess that could be said of anyone, but for me it always seemed like such an odd idea; to be unfamiliar or unknowing as to what or who you are yet live day in and day out as ‘yourself’. What is ‘yourself’? What am I? Who am I? Why am I? I experience feelings, opinions, desires and so on, but for what purpose? What makes me, Me? Why do I think the way that I do and what determines how I act or respond? I struggled with these questions as a child and those struggles brought a lot of frustration and confusion into my adolescence and well throughout my teenage years, culminating in my 20s. To be ‘yourself’ every day, yet never exploring, discovering or able to understand the WHY or HOW just never made any sense to me. I would often wonder, ‘How can you move forward and progress in life if you have no concept of what your purpose is or why you are here?’ It wouldn’t be until years later and well into my adult life before I realized these questions were and will always be a crucial piece in putting together my philosophical puzzle of acceptance as to who I was, who I am and who I will become. 

    I knew growing up I was different. Although not diagnosed until my late teens/early twenties, as I look back now it was clear from childhood I suffered from depression and anxiety. I did not handle situations like most kids. Simple hiccups or bumps in the road would devastate me to the point of being unconsolable resulting in suicidal ideation. I strived for excellence every waking moment, especially in academia, and if I fell even a hair short I would berate myself and fall victim to my ‘dark alley’. My mind was constantly filled with negative self talk and harmful notions that, sadly, were very convincing. Only absolute perfection was acceptable in my eyes and anything short of that was failure. I would make myself believe others thought poorly of me if I made mistakes or showed any signs of incompetence. Although I couldn’t name it at the time, this hidden fight I was battling within my own head that no one else could see was my struggle with mood disorders. Unknowingly, I was allowing it to control my thoughts, my reactions, my decisions, my self-perception, my confidence and even the way I viewed my place in this world. For as long as I can remember, this was my life… and it was excruciating. 

    In life, we all have to make tough decisions, but imagine having to make them while you convince yourself that no matter what choice you make, it will be the wrong one and you will fail. Living in this constant nightmare of never believing you are going to make the right decision and never be good enough wasn’t just imagined, it was my reality. Experiencing these thoughts, mulling over every single option and overthinking every little detail from the moment I awoke to the moment I fell asleep, every… single… day… became exhausting. It seems for most like me, eventually (whether willingly or not} you give up and seek help. You try medication, you try therapy. You go through the motions, pretend to be ‘ok’ and carry on wearing that socially accepted mask of a happy face, but the entire time you know what everyone else is blind to; you haven’t changed, you’re still in pain and suffering, you’ve just become really good at faking it, and it makes sense why. You have had to your entire life. In order to fit in and somewhat function in society you have had to learn and adapt very quickly a mask to wear that deceives all those around you and while most of the time it has done its job, deep down you know the truth… you are different, yet you don’t understand why. So you continue, pill after pill, chair after chair, none of the meds work, none of the therapy works, but dealing with it on your own hasn’t worked either evident by failed suicide attempts… so now what? For me, this is where I began my quintessential ‘quest of self discovery’ and turned to the one place I always felt a small sense of comfort, the world of academia. I began asking more and more questions about what mood disorders were, specifically depression and anxiety, what caused them, what were the signs of someone who had them, so on and so on. These questions led me to several books and articles I found online and soon found myself not only intrigued but flat out obsessed by the pursuit of trying to understand, well, me. In 2015 I felt I was ready to take this quest of mine to the next level and started my graduate degree in the MALA program at Middle Tennessee State University. During my second semester, readings in philosophy introduced me to Rene Descartes and his notion of the later termed mind-body problem. In this single encounter, my pursuit of progress into understanding myself and managing my mental health found a new path that seemed, for the first time ever, hopeful with answers. But life’s trials were not done with me yet, not by a long shot. The next four years would prove to be my own sort of Sisyphus tale, not in the sense of his crimes but in the eternal task of repeatedly rolling my metaphorical boulder up a monumental hill, only to have it roll back down again. 

• I lost my soulmate; not by death but by a realization that we both were better as individuals. I can honestly say it is better to have never loved than lost because experiencing true love and losing it all, for me, was barely survivable. I have never wept so wholly, so profoundly and been so entirely succumb with helplessness then when we hugged our last hug, kissed our last kiss, and through tear-filled eyes, said our last ‘I love you’ before forever vanishing from each others lives. 

• I left a job; completely walked away from it. A job I loved. A job that comes along maybe once in a lifetime. A job where every single day I woke up with a purpose, knowing I had at least somewhat found a reason why I was here, knowing I was helping others who wanted to better themselves but never believed in their own capabilities; but this too was not meant to be. To this day, I still have not been able to recover from this loss. The loss of purpose and meaning my work provided me. Though I continue to so desperately search for it again, I fear I have experienced my ‘one’ for this lifetime.

• I lost my closest friends, all of them. And by lost I mean they all separately but inevitably ventured out into the world and carved out their own little corner of the universe where they determined they belonged. They settled down, began new exciting chapters in their own lives and continued their stories, on new and different paths that sadly our friendships could not survive. Believe me when I say I was and still am happy for each and every one of them. So incredibly happy because I felt I was witnessing good things, truly good things happening to truly good people and experiencing that is something I am grateful to have been apart of, even if it meant I had to stay behind. So… one by one… they left; all of them. Until finally, there was only me… still there, still trying to stay afloat, but growing tired and now more alone than ever. 

    If we think about it, in a sense we are all truly alone. As our perception is that of a changing world, the only true constant seems to be ourselves, thus the Self, this subjectiveness, is what we are left to trust as truth and as the Self is what makes or completes our reality, this, it seems, is all we have with any certainty. All we have is the Self, we are truly alone, and the understanding of this implication became the most debilitatingly raw understanding of truth to my existence. To come to a place of clarity and conclusive understanding that I cannot reason away my own awareness of myself or the isolation of it nor the harshness of accepting that I will be trapped with this Self and subjective experiences for the duration of my life shattered my entire being. Though a journey I knowingly choose to set out on and explore, I had no idea what philosophical, emotional, mental and physical impacts the answers I would find would have on me. 

    So, as this four year journey of exploring consciousness and my inner Self comes to a close in an academic sense, here are my thoughts, writings, research, ramblings and anything else I encountered on the way. My hope is this site helps readers realize we are all fighting inner battles, we are all on a quest searching for something and for some, we are deciding whether or not parts of the Self are worth surrendering to or if, in the end, we will choose to give in and forever stay a resident of the dark alley.

* Goldwyn, T. (2007, October 14). Dexter: An Inconvenient Lie (Season 2, Episode 3). Showtime.