losing count of my existential crises

ni·hil·ism  /ˈnīəˌlizəm/

Noun The rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless. Extreme skepticism, according to which nothing in the world has a real existence.

Maybe this isn't the right word to describe my thoughts over the past week. I haven't rejected moral principles or been extremely skeptical. I have, however, spent a lot of time thinking about how tiny and insignificant I am, and--by extension--how insignificant the entire human experiment is.

It kind of started with a presentation at school. This presentation set out to explain a bit of local geology but with the Carl Sagan inspired idea that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. To describe the formation of a lake in BC, we needed to start with the Big Bang.

I don't remember enough to go into it in detail but suffice it to say that the universe is unimaginably big. Literally. I reached a point where I couldn't imagine the universe having no edge but I also couldn't imagine an edge. That was the end of my imaginable consciousness. How can something expand if it's already infinite?

Inhale. Exhale.

If you can picture me lying on the cork floor of my school on a Wednesday afternoon, laughing in odd spurts to myself as a classmate whispered, "She's having a breakdown," you will have an accurate depiction of my life last week.

Why am I even writing this? I don't really understand. Really, what is the point of anything? I am a trifling, albeit multicellular and complex organism, living on a rock that is both huge and comparably minuscule, rotating around a ball of gas, that's spinning around a galaxy, that exists among an infinite number of other galaxies, in a universe that never ends.

Suddenly, my life doesn't seem to matter anymore. Or maybe it does matter, despite everything. Or maybe it doesn't matter but it also doesn't matter that it doesn't matter. But no, I think it matters. It matters but then at the same time it doesn't and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.