Universal Truth

    Today I was once again confronted by my greatest fear.
    It underlies everything that terrifies me, it undermines my confidence and whatever purpose I have ever found, and it has lived in the back of my mind for nearly 7 years.
    And today I looked at it with the dispassionate observation of someone so used to something morbid, it no longer elicits fear or revulsion from them.
    It has been thus for a good while now. When you live with a monster for as long as I have, it becomes familiar to you. In its familiarity, it becomes a part of you, and you can look upon it as if viewing one of your limbs or a piece of furniture in your house that has always been there.
    I looked at it today, and the questions that it poses, and I believe I have found the answer, albeit within the cradle of other questions, or concerns, that bring their own discord. But it is an answer I can believe with all my being, and in that way, it brings me some peace.
    A universal truth that frees me in part from my own vices, and connects me to the world at the same time.

    I am afraid to not exist.
    I am afraid that nothing will exist - and the speculation that the universe has a lifespan, fragile as scientific knowledge might be in the face of time and new discoveries, confirms that fear as legitimate in its own capacity - and that everything that we are, that we did, will be forever gone.
    This fear has made me sick.
    This fear has caused me pain, some nights it would rend my stomach like a black hole opened up inside of me and I would be kept up at night with the pain and grief. Other times it would trigger such extreme anxiety attacks that I would not be able to stop vomiting for close to 15 minutes, even when there was nothing left inside of me, as if I hoped to purge myself of the fear itself with enough violent convulsions.
    This fear has left me desolate and brittle. It crushed the foundation of my world and I almost went insane from the effort it took to rebuild that foundation from scratch - discarding or repurposing shards of beliefs and ideals and purpose that had fortified me for most o my life. There were times when I would shake with silent screams in the dead of night and wallow in anguish so frigid that it would numb me to all emotion after a time, and the only thing that kept me alive was the tiny spark of my animal instinct to survive. I would pick myself up, feeling spent and dry, allow the small part of me that appreciates dark cynical humor to take over for a moment, and apply myself to the simplest of tasks, just to stay alive.
    Just to keep existing. For all its futility, and for all its fragility, because the most primal, feral part of me, the legacy of my species, derived from the culmination of time and circumstance that created the first life to emerge from the oozing pools of proteins across the precursor to our planet, was telling me to survive; to eat, drink, breathe, move my limbs, satisfy the savage lust or instincts that surfaced in the absence of my humanity, and engage in the fight for life every plant, every creature, everything that is swept up in the process of life, has fought for a span of time so great that I cannot truthfully admit to comprehending it.
    And once I regained my reason and could apply it to the whole of what I am, I realized those instincts were right.

    I have since battled to survive against parts of my own humanity. Indeed, my ability to ask lofty questions and my knowledge of self-awareness often seemed like a curse. This was what truly made me a misanthrope, for beyond my established beliefs that people exercise too much cruelty or, worse, apathy, was the realization that our own unique ability to reason, to fathom, and to explore - our own humanity - has caused most of our suffering throughout our history. If not for my fear of the void, and my own strong instincts, I might have taken my own life just to rid myself of such implications.
    And such implications, as well as many others, stemming most often from this one fear of mine, have changed me immensely.
    It is that change which I have sought to undo for almost as long as this inner war with my fear has gone on.
    And it is this desire I must now renounce in the face of my latest epiphany.

    Not a single thing you can do or say to a person can make you or them return to what you were. Not any revelation of the workings of the universe can return you to where you started, or reverse damage. No act of damage control, by any group or nation, can truly erase the scars of hardship and strife from the slates of our histories.
    No one can go back.
    I cannot find the peace I desire that I once had before this all started; the certainty of my purpose; my unwavering faith in my beliefs, spiritual or otherwise; my hubris the likes of which the young possess who believe they are irreplaceable. These things were mine once, they can never be mine again.
    We cannot go backwards because we cannot unmake what we have wrought. We cannot erase our mark.
    We do leave a mark.

    The consequences of my struggle have not remained isolated to myself; they have effected others, directly or otherwise, and we all effect the world, perhaps even the cosmos. One of the first truths I gleaned when I started this journey of potentially self-destructive enlightenment was that time is a human abstract that we created around...around change. Change, which is the only true constant in the universe, and yet I never realized until now the implications of what that meant. It remained obscured to me for years, perhaps because my own dogged obsession with undoing the damage I caused myself blinded me to it, or perhaps because I was not yet wise or developed enough to appreciate it.
    Or maybe I needed to suffer these experiences to really understand it in more than just an intellectual capacity.
    I must abandon this thing that I have lamented over, because only then can I open my heart to the truth.
    We do exist.
    Our world does exist.
    Our sun exists. It was born from a culmination of gases and plasma reactions.
    Our galaxy does exist. It came to be formed as the gravity from a dead star drew other celestial bodies toward it.
    Our universe does exist. Its origin is a mystery to us, and yet here we are, living inside of it, which we have vague ideas about its nature and continue to speculate on its birth - and its death.

    Everything exists in one form or another. Our corpses serve to feed other life forms and sometimes are transmuted in the fashion only nature itself can perpetrate. Our fetuses are formed from the union of two members of the opposite sex and the offspring carry remnants of both parents - scars of their own, in a manner of speaking.
    Clouds exist, they empty themselves when it rains, the heat from the sun resurrects them from the water. An empty sky is not proof that clouds do not exist, for all one would need to do is glimpse a puddle to know that at a previous tie, they had.
    Everything in nature effects nature itself. What mark I, my race, my planet, will leave is not something I can know, but I do believe there will be one, great or small, for that is the most absolute law of nature, the universal truth.

    That is one less monster I must contend with.