Orah Krug, an existential therapist and the director of clinical training at the Existential Humanistic Institute in San Francisco, gave me an example of how existential therapy can help. She had a client who was eating lunch with her daughter when a car crashed right into the room. No one was badly hurt, but for years the client couldn’t let go of her anger at the driver—until Krug helped her realize that she wasn’t just angry at the driver. She was angry that she had no control to stop bad things from happening. “And here’s the place where she got to that deep acknowledgment … We cannot protect ourselves from life’s vicissitudes,” Krug told me. “They just happen. And to pretend that we can is dangerous.”

I tend to ruminate heavily—too heavily—on the existential. I worry constantly that my life isn’t meaningful, that I’m not putting my limited years to good use, that I could be doing more, that I could be more. It’s in between the busy moments—after I finish a task, or say goodbye to a friend, or wake up before my alarm in the dark hours of the morning—that I feel it most: time slipping through my fingers.

I was immediately intrigued when I first heard about existential therapy. But when my editor suggested I actually go to an existential-therapy session myself, I found I was secretly eager to see if it could really help me, as a person and not just as a journalist.

When I stepped into Jane’s small office, I felt like I was entering someone’s home; the floor was carpeted, the lighting warm. After I sat down stiffly in Jane’s rather Freudian chaise, she asked me what I’d like to talk about.

Read: The virtues of isolation

I told her that lately my anxiety about time passing has been getting worse; that I’m in my 20s, and finding myself in the midst of a quarter-life crisis—trying to figure out what makes a meaningful life, debating what I should prioritize, aware that any small decision could change my entire course; that I obsessively scan Wikipedia pages to see how old my favorite writers were when they first published.

I told her how isolated those fears make me feel, even though I know my friends are grappling with similar concerns. And because I was seeing an existential therapist, after all, I let myself really dive into that. “I can’t get around the fact that we’re all trapped in our own heads,” I said. “That I can never really access any one else’s internal experience.”

Jane guided the session gently. She asked clarifying but fairly typical follow-up questions: How long have you felt that way? And are you close to your mother? What about your relationships with friends? But then she’d reel me back to the big-picture questions—some of which caught me off guard, precisely because they were things I think about all the time. “How would you describe your own identity?” she asked at one point. “Not in terms of how other people see you, but in terms of who you feel you are, internally.”