At some point in high school I realized I no longer believed in god. This did not present any real change in my life. Playing video games in my basement and masterbating a more than healthy amount can be done as a Muslim or an Atheist. At least I think it can, I never asked my imam about how much masterbation is allowed in the Quran. A lot, I hope. My transition into atheism was rather easy, my parents didn’t need to know, and outside of asking me to not eat pork, they never imposed any kind of religious ruling on me anyways. Any and all issues I had with my parents were secular.

However, it was during a calculus class when I first entered university that the weight of atheism hit me. Obviously not enjoying what I was doing, I asked myself what’s the point? If there is not eternal afterlife and heavenly bliss, why am I on this earth? Whats the point of everything I am doing? Leave it to calculus to spark an existential crisis.

This is where my love of existential philosophy began. I remember the first book I read on the subject, something along the lines of “Perspectives on the Meaning of Life”, a collection of essays on, well, the meaning of life (an existential classic of course). I first read an essay by Tolstoy -a favourite author of mine- as I was told that he himself went through a similar existential crisis. However my man Tolstoy betrayed me, he turned back to religion to find answers. Damn you Tolstoy.

As such, it was the 20th century French existentialists and my man Nietzsche that gave me some relief. In retrospect, I don’t think I really cared so much for their actual philosophy, but rather that they agreed that one can be an atheist and finding meaning in their life. All I needed to know was these people, all of whom where much smarter than me, thought it was possible. I could go back to watching YouTube and maste…ugh…studying, without much grief.

Of course, like many others, my favourite quickly became Camus. He addressed the issues of meaning with such clarity and force. His opening of the Myth of Sisypthus “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide” felt like he was speaking directly to me. I loved his edgyness. I remember quoting that line to everyone (and I wondered why it took so long for me to find a girlfriend). His ideas where easy to understand, but more importantly, comforting. A life without transcendental meaning can still be a happy one, one filled with one’s own meaning. I didn’t know what my meaning was, but I knew it was possible for me to live a happy life. Thats all I really cared about. I went back to gaming and “studying”.

In 2016 an extremely close friend of mine committed suicide.

It came out of nowhere. I vividly remember that night. I was lying in bed with my then girlfriend, either the second or third time she had stayed over at my house. We were watching top gear as I was (unsuccessfully) attempting to convince her how wonderful of a show it is (I even remember the episode, the one where they made their own motor homes). I got a call from an unknown number. I answered. It was my best friends sister. She told me the news. I thought she was fucking with me. I remember (with great shame) swearing and yelling at her telling her that this is not a funny joke, and she should be ashamed of herself. She assured me it was real. I got up from bed but collapsed right after. My girlfriend, not knowing what to do (not that I blame her) immediately woke up my parents. My mom collapsed as well having known my friend for a decade. My dad immediately hugged me and we cried in one another arms.

Obviously the next few months where not easy for me. Work very graciously gave me as much time off as I needed. I did what I normally did when I was sad, I distracted myself with video games, books, movies, etc.

Well one fateful day I picked up my well-worn copy of the Myth of Sisypthus.

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide”.

Literally as soon as I got to the end of this sentence I had a panic attack. As the kids these days say, I was triggered. Suddenly the prospect of suicide became much much more real. My best friend committed suicide, he was an atheist. The idea that atheism can be connected with suicide, no matter how loosely, was simply petrifying. It’s hard to put into words the emotions I felt reading this one sentence. My stomach dropped, I immediately began crying. I felt the earth that I stood on retreat away from me. I literally felt disorientated. To use a Camusian metaphor, it was like being thrown into a pool for the first time, without any of the fun of a poolparty. It was like trying to swim without knowing what water is.

In short, my life got flipped turned upside down.

Panic attacks aren’t new for me and in retrospect my OCD diagnoses makes a lot of sense. When I was younger and I had a panic attack I would simply go to my mom (for some weird reason my panic attacks would only happen in the summer, always in Turkey, around my mother, I’ll let Freud figure out what that means) and she would very successfully comfort me. So without even thinking I went to my parents. I told them my dilemma. “Life is meaningless, why shouldn’t I kill myself?”. My parents where dumbfounded. They didn’t know what to say. As muslims these existential questions had ready answers for them. Don’t get me wrong, they weren’t offended, just speechless.

For the first time in my life my parents where unable to offer me any comfort, not even a semblance of comfort. My panic attack turned into a full on…well I don’t know what’s higher than a panic attack, but whatever that is. I literally cried until I feel asleep from pure exhaustion. My parents had no answers for me, all they did was hug me and tell me they loved me. It’s funny, I never explicitly told them I was an atheist but they somehow knew that turning to religion wouldn’t be the answer for me. They never once said to me “well the Quran says this…as muslims we believe this…” Regardless, it was the hopelessness and helplessness that made matters so much worse. For the first time in my life, despite being surrounded by people telling me they love me, I felt completely and utterly alone. I felt powerless. Powerless isn’t even the right word. I literally felt like I was put into a Kafka novel, and I really mean literally. I felt like I was now living in a novel and not my own life, “I” was watching “Emre”. I would later learn I was dissociating.

We all agreed that the answer was therapy, and asap.

Of course, like most peoples experience with therapy, it took a while to find a therapist I actually “clicked” with. My first therapist said that feeling anxiety after a close friends suicide was normal. I tried telling her, I’m not really feeling simple anxiety, but something entirely different. I was in a prevailing state of abject horror. Just as Sartre describes I was literally in a constant state of nausea. After every single action I asked myself what the point of my action was.

I was constantly asking myself why I was doing anything.

I was constantly asking myself if there was god or not.

I was constantly making sure I wouldn’t kill myself like my friend because of the answers these questions provided (or rather lack thereof). By constantly, I literally mean constantly, every waking minute of my life was filled with these thoughts, and I was barely sleeping because of it.

Eventually I found a therapist that recognized my issue as being obsessive compulsive disorder.

OCD? I’m not washing my hands or cleaning my room. This is isn’t OCD you PhD having dumbass. This is an existential crisis. Perhaps an extreme one, but an existential crisis nonetheless.

Whelp no apparently it really was OCD. See OCD isn’t some need for cleaning up or washing your hands, well it certainly can manifest in this way, but it’s much more complex than that.

No. Instead it’s having obsessive intrusive thoughts about something, and having compulsions to counteract these intrusive thoughts. These compulsions can be physical, such as washing your hands, but importantly they can just as easily be mental.

Intrusive thought: My hands are dirty

This produces anxiety

Compulsion: wash my hands

This momentarily gets rid of one’s anxiety, therefore reinforcing this behaviour.

Intrusive thought: My hands are still dirty….

This cycle continues.

In extremely simple terms, this is the core of OCD.

My version:

Intrusive thought: what is the meaning of life?

Compulsion: some sort of answer – and my anxiety would momentary go away

Moments later:

Obsession: Life is meaningless, what’s stoping me from killing myself?

Compulsion: some sort of answer. Usually involving google and reassuring myself in some way.

Repeat for hours on end….

My therapist recognized this as a form of “existential OCD” as well as “suicidal OCD”. Both unconventional but not entirely rare forms of OCD. My intrusive thoughts revolved around existential questions, as well as having intrusive thoughts about committing suicide. These intrusive thoughts are different than suicidal ideation. I wasn’t actually suicidal. With intrusive thoughts about suicide, one is usually worried about the prospect that one might commit suicide or rather the acknowledgment that one can commit suicide, its an intrusion that produces anxiety, and typically means suicide is the very last thing you want to do. Suicidal ideation is, well, the ideation of suicide, it’s a welcoming thought, typically an active thought. Again in very simple terms (and it doesn’t always happen this way) suicidal OCD is random, intrusive, anxiety ridden thoughts about suicide. Suicidal ideation is the ideation of, the planning of, or the consideration of suicide.

Suicidal OCD is extremely tricky, because these intrusive thoughts can very easily turn into actual suicidal ideation. One needs to carefully navigate between what is an intrusion and what is ideation. In my case the existential questions went hand in hand with intrusive thoughts about suicide. I wasn’t just worried that life is meaningless, I was worried that my recognition of the meaninglessness of life would result in my suicide.

As such we approached my OCD both through therapy and medication. I was put on a prescription of Zoloft, in which I would eventually be taken to its max dosage (I was told this is normal, OCD responds best too high dosages of anti-depressants), as well as trying various ancillary drugs, eventually landing on adding an old school OCD drug Anaphranil.

The drugs worked well. In fact if I had only taken medication I probably would still have ended up ok. But it was the combination of therapy and medication that completely eliminated my OCD, to the point where I feel like an entirely different person. For the sake of not making this longer than it already is, I’m only going to describe what the therapy is like. There are enough testaments and advice for SSRI’s online. My therapy however was, as far as I know, rather unusual.

The first step of my therapist was too actually convince me I had OCD. I still believed I was just going through a very very severe existential crisis. In retrospect it probably was a combination of the two. It was through the testaments of others with almost identical thought patterns that my therapist was able to start to convince me. A big hiccup was that I didn’t have anything like this before (though I later recognized that my previous “episodes” in Turkey probably weren’t normal). My OCD all came at once after an extremely severe panic attack. But, as my therapist explained, OCD, like many mental illnesses, can be dormant and manifest after periods of high stress in one’s early adult life. As such, my friends suicide likely triggered my dormant OCD (or something along those lines).

So we started “exposure therapy” a type of cognitive behaviour therapy tailored for OCD. As the name implies, the therapy revolves around exposing you to the very intrusive thoughts that give you anxiety. However, the key is to stop the compulsion that comes afterwards. So, let’s say you are deathly afraid of germs, some potential exposure therapy is having dirt rubbed on your hands, and then you are forced to not act on your compulsion, washing your hands. The point of this therapy is to show you that your intrusive thoughts are by themselves meaningless, it is the attention you give them that allow them to fester and produce anxiety. The compulsions offer short term relief but as said before only reenforce the cycle of intrusive thoughts. In a sense exposure therapy is a form of meditation. You’re taught to allow your thoughts to exist without judgment. Theres a stoic saying, you have no power over your first thought, but power over your second, and this is essentially what you are forced to learn. However, you’re not taught to ignore your intrusive thoughts, ignoring is different allowing a thought to exist but without “judgment” (for lack a better word). Perhaps acceptance is putting it better, you accept your thoughts. They exist, they are what they are, doesn’t mean you have to do anything about it. Your intrusive thoughts are meaningless manifestations of anxiety. Anxiety over an exam is normal, too much of it is a bad thing of course, but it comes from a rational and reasonable place. However, anxiety over your clothing not being folded exactly how it needs to be or else your parents will die is…well its less reasonable. The best part is the better you become at exposure therapy, the intrusive thoughts themselves begin to subside. With enough exposure therapy you can get to the point that your OCD essentially vanishes.

What does exposure therapy look like for someone with “existential OCD” and “suicidal OCD”? Before I start, its extremely important to note that this was specifically tailored to me by two people with a PhD in the subject. Do not simply read this and do it yourself, as it is imperative that you are under the guidance of a qualified individual. If my experience sounds at all relevant to what you are going through, please seek therapy.

Well I had to be exposed to my fears. The very core was suicide, but like anything, you have to work up to that. So instead we started with more basic exposure. The idea that life is meaningless.

The next few months of my life essentially became crash courses on existential nihilism. Imagine all the horror of the existentialists but with none of the offsetting Parisian fun. My therapy revolved around reading the various experts on the futility of life: Schopenhauer, Cioran, Becker, various antinatalists, Epicurus, Pascal, etc. My therapist, the demon that he was, would select out-of-context passages from my favourite authors, Dostoevsky, Camus, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, in which they would lament about the meaningless of life. You must imagine sisyphus sad. My favourite authors where being used against me (well in reality they were really being used for me but it certainly didn’t feel that way). Tolstoy’s existential crisis was rubbed in my face, but in his case so was his redemption. See his redemption was religious. The fact that Tolstoy, an author I loved so dearly, a man who I believed to be a genius, had no option but to turn to religion seriously terrified me, and my demon therapist knew that.

The critical part here is I wasn’t allowed to search for the redemption, the affirmation, I was withheld answers. I was put in a state of a controlled but intense anxiety and forced to come to terms with these feelings. I was forced to learn that in one of my life’s great ironies, it was the intrusive thoughts on the meaningless of life that were themselves actually meaningless. It was the intrusive thoughts on the meaningless of life that actually turned my life meaningless.

Now it wasn’t all doom and gloom. My therapist did eventually start introducing existential therapy into my exposure therapy. After a rough session of exposure we would end by discussing how one actually does find meaning in their life. How one affirms their life in the face of the void. He wouldn’t give me answers per-say, but rather teach me how to find my own answers. Or at least something like that.

I was progressing nicely, but remember it wasn’t just existential OCD that was my problem, but rather its connection to my friend’s suicide. So my exposure was taken up a few notches. Again, remember this was being guided by someone who has a PhD in the subject matter. Please do no simply read this and start doing what I was doing.

Whelp things picked up to say the least. I would write literal suicide notes with my therapist, and the cause of the suicide itself would be placed solely on my discovery of existential philosophy. If only you had never read Camus I remember being told. I would vividly imagine my suicide: the tying of the noose, wrapping it around my neck, my father discovering me. At this point I understood the dynamics of exposure therapy and my therapist gave me some leeway in my “homework”, where I would do my own exposure therapy at home, after all I knew what would best trigger me. So I would read about the suicides (or suicide attempts) of various atheists, but only those who’s lives were materially ok as mine was. I made sure to read just enough to allow my imagination to go wild. Let me explain. See at first David Foster Wallace committing suicide terrified me, since his books made it very clear that he was an author in touch with the existential realities of life. My mind therefore made the connection that he committed suicide due to these existential questions. However once I found out he had struggled with depression for his entire life my anxiety subsided. No my minded needed his suicide to be induced purely philosophically. Remember, it was “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide” that triggered all this. So I would imagine the suicide of various people being induced because of these incurable existential questions. I would sit with the feelings these thoughts produced. Sit with them until their power subsided.

In retrospect, I’m not even sure there is such thing as a philosophically induced suicide. None of the major existentialists killed themselves. Sartre’s lifelong vigour was essentially the opposite of a suicide. Camus famously died in a driving accident (maybe he would’ve been more careful had life had meaning?). Sure, Nietzsche was depressed his entire life, and he eventually went insane, but with the amount of physical pain he endured through his various ailments and how alone he was, well I’m amazed that he didn’t commit suicide, and I surely wouldn’t have blamed him. Cioran, the only philosopher who’s philosophy is so depressing that its borderline funny, ironically lived until 84. “If I knew you would be so sad I would’ve aborted you” his mother told him. Schopenhauer, who in my opinion perfected pessimistic philosophy, lived what seemed to be a rather happy life (though he was a certified piece of shit).

I knew that once I was laughing at Cioran I was truly getting better. I remember reading “I long to be free — desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.” and cackling. I knew that when I was getting bored during therapy I was getting better. Is boredom not the opposite of anxiety? Can one really truly be bored and anxious at the same time? Well yeah probably, these days you can anxious doing anything, but let’s move on. I knew that once my fear of my therapy sessions turned into apathy, I was getting better. I began to reread my favourite existentialists, but on their own terms. I wasn’t desperately searching for answers, I was enjoying their outlooks on life and the world. When I would hear about a suicide, I no longer cared whether or not they were an atheist. I no longer questioned if they too had read Camus. I realized that my friend never gave a rats ass about philosophy. Camus didn’t kill him, depression did. Most importantly my vicious intrusive thoughts began to subside. When they did occur, well I knew how to handle them, with apathy.

It took a while. But eventually I got better.

I’m not cured of OCD, and I never will be. I will unfortunately have to always stay on my toes. In fact last summer I had my first post therapy panic attack reading an article about free-will. I found the idea of determinism terrifying (yes I know how weird that sounds). But with therapy I knew exactly how to handle it. My OCD will always be laying dormant in the back of my mind, looking for cracks in my psyche to attack me.

Nietzsche said that if you can find meaning in something, anything is endurable. He regularly described his various aliments and depression as a gift. Now, I genuinely hated when people said that (expect Nietzsche of course since my obsession with him has never been healthy), I always assumed that when someone said this they weren’t speaking in good faith. But no, I understand now. I truly view all of this as a gift. Amor fati and all that. 2016 will likely go down as the most formative year of my life, the year that truly changed me. But I really believe for the better. My OCD forces me to live a healthy life. It forces me to exercise, to eat healthy, and to meditate. Its a demon on my shoulder which ironically forces me to make good decisions. It’s a barometer of how healthy my physical and mental health is. Getting intrusive thoughts? It means something in my life isn’t ok, but nothing I can’t change. I think I’ll take this over having an actual full blown existential crisis when I’m 40. Moreover, the amount of spiritual growth I had because of my therapy and recovery are genuinely indescribable. My parents and I have never been closer. I realized that when they told me they loved me, they meant it in a way that I will never be able to fully comprehend. Lastly, in some sick ironic sense it gave my life meaning. It became a sort mission of mine to try and help others going through similar circumstances. To show that the light at the end of the tunnel exists and it isn’t another train. I’m still not sure how to approach this mission of mine, I’m sure doing a masters in Middle Eastern studies isn’t exactly relevant, but I’m still trying to figure that out.

“Life begins at the other side of despair” Sartre