Existential crisis makes me ask: Can I ever trust you to love me?

By David McElroy · April 11, 2020

I had my first existential crisis long before I knew what the words meant.

I was a 5-year-old in kindergarten. I remember being alone at the front of our house on Holly Hill Drive in Atlanta. Something in my little brain was trying to figure out my place in the world.

I can’t tell you why. I doubt normal 5-year-olds have such thoughts, but I seriously pondered who I was and whether I mattered. The questions hung heavy on my little heart, because I desperately needed to matter.

Suddenly, I had an answer that somehow made sense to me. I was 5 years old — and there were five people in my family — so that coincidence had to mean something. I must be important.

All of my life, I’ve experienced one crisis of this sort after another. The specific questions change, but they all mean the same thing.

Do I matter? Do I matter to you? Do I belong with you? Are you my home? Can I trust you to love me?

I never felt secure as a child. I understand that now, but I didn’t know enough about what normal love and normal family life felt like to know that the chaos I experienced wasn’t right.

I started asking those questions early, unconsciously at first and then with more and more conscious understanding. At times, I thought I had found security in the answers, but I’ve somehow let anything good slip away from me.

So I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. I can’t find my way home again.

I still want to feel important. I still need to feel as though I have meaning and purpose. I’ve come to call these moments my times of existential crisis because an existential crisis is defined as a time when a person questions whether his life has meaning and purpose and value.

I need to feel as though I’m the best at something which I love. I’m not even certain it’s emotionally healthy to want this, but when I feel this emptiness at such times, I just want something to fill it. I want — I need — to be able to say to you, “I have value because I’m the best at this — and that matters to you.”

I’m good at a lot of things. I’m a good writer. I’m a pretty decent photographer. I’m competent and I can charm my way to getting things done in business settings. I’m smart. I think deeply and connect ideas in original ways. I’m just on the edge of being a good filmmaker. I could come up with a dozen similar things.

But I don’t see myself as the best at any of those things. I don’t feel as though these things are great enough for them to be the special offering I want to make to a woman I love — to be able to bring them to her and say, “This is for you. I made them for you.”

And that lack of having one superlative to offer as a gift — one which would matter to the sort of woman I would love — is causing an existential crisis for me. If I don’t have something about me which is deeply meaningful and desirable — to the specific sort of woman I want — then I have no purpose. I feel as though I have no value. No meaning.

I have a dream. A fantasy, really. It’s the same one which I’ve had since I was a child.

I want someone to love me just for being myself. I want someone to be so moved by my heart and my mind that she loves me for who I am.

I want someone who is capable of allowing her heart to be completely changed by my love — someone who not only can’t live without what I offer, but who desperately wants to be a better and more loving person simply because my love makes her feel something so powerful that all her defenses come down.

I would like to be the world’s best writer. At times, I can be really good, but I’ll never be the best.

I would like to be the world’s best photographer. There are times when I make photos that really move my heart and make me happy, but there will always be photographers with more talent and more experience and more dedication to the craft than I have.

I would like to be the world’s best at a lot of things — but I’m not sure whether that’s because I truly love those things or it’s because I want to buy someone’s love by impressing her. I don’t like asking that question. It makes me uncomfortable, because that’s not the sort of love that would ever last.

The only thing that I’m truly great at is being myself.

It’s hard to even define what that is. I can be pretty great at understanding people. I can see into minds and hearts in ways that I don’t even understand. I know where people are hiding and I usually know why. I can see into the dark sides of people’s hearts and minds — and I can still love them even though I know the ugliness they hide.

Those are the sorts of things I’m pretty great at, but that doesn’t sound like something that’s going to make a great woman — who’s also greatly flawed — love me. And that fear leaves me with these same old existential questions.

Do I matter? Do I matter to you? Do I belong with you? Are you my home? Can I trust you to love me?

So far, the answers to all those questions have been a quiet but resounding no. I don’t matter to someone. There’s no one with whom I belong. There’s no one who is my home. And there’s no one I can trust.

I’ve been looking for a way to answer these questions all my life — and I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Or maybe who I’m looking for.

And so I remain in existential limbo.

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