Grief is The Key That Will Lead You Through an Existential Crisis

I’ll never forget these four words said on my first day of grad school in 2015:

“I weep for you,” he said as his voice choked up.

These were the four words my grad school’s vice president said to my entire cohort on our first day of orientation. 

While most students would be confused or freaked out, I felt relief.

I walked up to him after his speech with tears rolling down my face and said, “Your words spoke to me. How did you know to say that?”

His words hit me like a truck because he acknowledged a process I was going through but didn’t have words for at the time. It’s a process that has been forgotten in modern society and robbed us of a deep treasure.

Before I say more about what that process is, I first need to describe what was going on in my life at that time so you can understand why his words impacted me so deeply.

1. After graduating from college I was lost and deeply depressed for over a year. I was no longer interested in pursuing medicine and had no idea what to do next. I finally made the decision to study counseling psychology because I could not tolerate staying stagnant for another year.

2. I was a devout Christian at the time and my faith in God was colored with shame, guilt, depression, and “oh-woe-is-me-ness.” Where I once was ecstatic about God, I now felt deeply distant and abandoned by God.

3. My grandma was found on her apartment floor after she fainted, fell, and fractured her hip and elbow. She had been unconscious for over 24 hours before my mom found her and took her to the ER. She was discharged to a nursing home a few days before I started grad school. 

These three things give a snapshot of the mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual state I was in when I started my first day of grad school: lost, confused, fearful, depressed, anxious, and worried.

My world felt like it was crumbling at the same time that something new was beginning. With no understanding of how to hold both realities as being true at the same time, I fell into an existential crisis.

The questions I was asking myself sounded like, “Why God am I here when my life is falling apart? Should I really be here when my grandma is still recovering? Have You forsaken me? Am I being lead astray? What is happening?”

The existential crisis I found myself in was like a cloud of black scribbles covering my head. 

Those four words, “I weep for you,” was what finally penetrated through that cloud. It was the first time I felt like someone clearly saw what I was going through. To me his words felt like a recognition of, “I see you. I know what this path will require of you. And I bless you as you walk this path.” 

While there was no way that my school’s VP could have known what I was going through at the time, he did know what process I and my fellow classmates were about to go through in grad school. That process, which modern society has forgotten, is the death and rebirth process. 

He knew that we would all have to go through this death and rebirth process because this grad program was known for taking students through a deconstruction process- both of their spirituality and their psychology. I had no idea this was what I signed up for at the time, I just wanted to become a Christian counselor and help others be free of suffering and know Jesus. This was all about to get deconstructed once I began my 3 years of study at this school.

I won’t go into detail on what my deconstruction process was like because that would take too long to encapsulate in this article. However, I filmed a video about it which you can watch here.

The short version of what happened after those 3 years can be summarized like this:

I went into grad school thinking I wanted to become a Christian counselor and help save others. I graduated still wanting to become a counselor, but I was no longer a Christian (which is incredibly ironic considering my grad school is a Christian school). 

Those 3 years in grad school were some of the most disorienting and healing years of my life. It involved descending into the underworld of my psyche and becoming conscious of my beliefs, my behaviors, why I believed what I believed, and seeing things from a new perspective that completely flipped my understanding of myself, the world, and God. 

If you would have told me from the beginning that my breakthrough and rebirth would first require that I descend into the underworld and go through an ego death, I would have jumped ship. Most people in modern society would have jumped ship as well.

The reality is that modern society struggles to sit with the existential anxiety of death. People all know about the dreaded “mid-life crisis” but treat it like a weird phase of life that you just have to get through like the sponsorship ads that are littered in big podcasts. We want to quickly get to the victory on the other side of the mid-life crisis. We bypass the grieving process and rush toward the seductive illusion of the reinvented self. We love the glow up, but don’t actually grow up. This is why so many people in the world are psychologically immature even though they occupy adult bodies. 

Art by @sakoasko

To truly grow we must embrace the dying off process, just like the snake that sheds its skin, the caterpillar that dissolves into goo, or the seed that must be buried beneath the soil under pressure and in darkness.

The ancient mystics, alchemists, prophets, healers, and shamans knew all about this process. Dying to the familiar known. Gestating in the “not yet.” Like the ancients, my VP knew that the path we felt called to walk required a psychological death before being reborn. He did not intervene in this sacred process. He was there simply to bear witness, honor, and bless us on our journey of meeting ourselves and Life more deeply. 

Being witnessed so deeply gave me the courage to channel all my existential anxiety and grief towards walking the path before me. I would take the next smallest step, no more and no less. All it took was four words to realize that I wasn’t crazy and that I was on the right path despite how terrified and confused I was.

AI modified art by Sarionae

If you currently find yourself in a season of life where you feel you are in this dying off process, I want you to know that you are not crazy. You are in the midst of crossing the threshold between the familiar old that no longer serves you and the uncertainty of the new that is not yet fully here. Perhaps this is why newborns cry. It is a cry of grief that, on one hand, represents our protest against having to leave the comfort, warmth, and safety of our mother’s womb, and on the other hand, represents the cry of life that desires to meet the bright, loud, and foreign world outside of the womb. 

If that’s where you are in this season of your life, I invite you to cry. I encourage you to grieve. I honor and bless your journey of crossing the threshold of death and rebirth. For just like the Phoenix that dies in a blaze of fire only to be reborn from the ashes, so too will you be reborn. Your grief is not an indication of weakness nor a judgment that you’ve done something wrong. Grief is the cry of your soul that acknowledges the pain of leaving what was and the uncertainty of what new life you will step into. Know that even in your grief the tears are cleansing and refining your soul so that you can meet what is before you with courage.

Thank you for taking the time to read.

If you are interested in topics such as:

• Psychospiritual inner work

• Jungian depth psychology + shadow work

• Relationships as a catalyst for growth and evolution

• Existential musings

• Insights on collective consciousness

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Peace,
Roy