(RE-EMERGE 2023) WHEN EXISTENCE BECOMES PAIN

RE-EMERGE 2023

When Existence Becomes Pain


The first week of 2023 has seen a series of fluctuations in thoughts, emotions, and degree of clarity. etc.
As one of my three resolutions, I made it a commitment to capture my experience in fully fleshed-out words and share it with my world.

I couldn’t settle on a topic to write for the last seven days as my thought pattern kept on changing as I got to the second paragraph, but finally waking up in the middle of the night today it dawned on me what I must write first.
2023 for me and many others in my space is a critical year as it marks the “tentative end” of a 5-year journey turned 7 years others wise called the pursuit of a bachelor's degree in a Federal University in Nigeria. Tentative end because even with the reality of having just a semester left, the possibility of the semester not ending this year is still > 50% based on previous trends.

The last 6 years for me as been more than just pursuing a degree in chemical engineering it’s been a revolutionary period of equipping myself for the unknown future, right from the first day I got my admission letter to study chemical engineering, I've been hunted by one question. "What Next ?”
Don’t get me wrong, having wanted to study medicine and surgery like most science students in my environment I had seen possible futures of what my life could look like as a doctor and even settled on the area of medicine to specialize. But for the first time as a teenager, the career path switch left me in a fix, as I couldn’t see anything ahead.
More details about all this would be shared in a book I’m co-authoring with one of the brilliant minds my paths crossed with.  

Fast forward to the main message behind this write-up, having spent all day indoors resting and thinking about work the next day, I decided to go get a hair cut while on the way, my paths crossed with an old friend, my classmate from secondary school, We could barely exchange greetings because he was already «Jonze» a word we Gen-Z sometimes use to describe someone high on alcohol. 

And then it all started to come back to me I’ve seen him on numerous occasions in this state and based on antecedents and other friends' experience, it was a default state for him.

I couldn’t help but ask myself why? It didn’t take too long to figure it out, there really is one major fundamental reason why one would seek to escape his current reality. When its meaning or essence becomes lost when there is so much uncertainty when there is so much pain. 
The burning sensation in your heart, the loss of interest in anything you once found interesting, the dejected lonely feeling, the deep heavy thoughts that just cause balls of tears to stream down your eyes, the depression, and then the illusion that there really is nothing to look forward to in life kicks in, breeding the final stage, "suicidal thoughts". 
I could tell because it was a path I had previously traveled down myself.

And so it got stuck in my head, "When Existence Becomes Pain" up to the point of jolting me up in the middle of the night, not to work but to think deeply on this subject matter. Hence I made it a duty to come up with the antidote to share with my world. Hopefully, someone out there could use it to Re-Emerge in the year 2023. 

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