The Existential Conflicts of My Youth

Have you ever been in a conflict with someone and watched the words you had no intention of actually saying slip from your lips? You see them just long enough to realize that you have made a huge mistake. Those words that slipped from your lips are going to plummet to the floor and shatter your current world into a million pieces.

If you haven't, try it sometime. It feels like you are watching your own reality show. For a few seconds you are not inhabiting your body. You are not controlling what is coming out of your mouth. You are not censoring the divide between what you think and what you announce to reality. You are in an existential state. You are living beyond your body.

This state gives you the freedom to do or say whatever. You have no superego to punish your id. And for all the good it does your freedom, it destroys something in the process: to put it lightly, your life. Because in that uninhibited state you are not thinking about the ramifications what you say will have on your current situation.

Words fall and lives shatter. Blood boils and fights fly.

I suppose this type of conflict teaches us two things:

1. It is the freedom to express one's inner feelings that tends to kick us in the ass in the end.

2. Sometimes you need to get outside of your head to realize what is going on inside.