Is this all there is?

Last month I was dealing with an identity crisis: I didn’t know how to be a woman who still felt young, encased in an older body, and on my own with no-one to share my life. I think I have now come to terms with being my own person, with my individual style and dress sense and the age I am. I’m coming to terms with wrinkles and crepey neck and a body that is no longer tight and fit. Still slim and flexible, but clearly an older woman.

This month I have been thrown into something more profound and cataclysmic: an existential crisis. I have to move from the place that M and I had been living in in Brisbane. It was meant to be a temporary move just until I finished my PhD.  Well , PhD done, and I had been thinking about moving on; getting rid of possessions that no longer serve my needs, including all those things that M and I had purchased in anticipation of our future plans, trips, dreams. I never got around to culling these possession – always on my “to do” list. There seemed plenty of time. But now I have to act fast. I have to cull and sell and pack and move. But I don’t know where to. Nor do I know how to. Every time I think about it I just get overwhelmed and think “I don’t know how to do this on my own.” I panic and my anxiety kicks in and nausea assails me. I feel impotent and fragile. In saner moments I know I can get through this.  I know what I have to do and how.  I just need to get on with it.  Except that I feel so stuck; I seem to be living in a state of perpetual vacillation between “can do” and “can’t do”. Hamstrung by my own inability to get on with it, despite all good intentions and list making each and every morning.

And now, into this frame of confusion and uncertainty has come a thought that is yet unformed but has the potency to unravel me: why? What is the point? I am on my own and I don’t see the point of my ongoing existence. My kids are adults functioning well in the world and negotiating their way with jobs and friends and projects, desires and plans. My parents are very old (my dad turned 98 in February); their time is limited. They have lived the life they wanted to live; did the things they felt brought meaning to their existence and those around them: kids, friends, family. They admirably dealt with all the difficulties life threw at them and soldiered on.

When I consider my future, it isn’t exciting or even interesting. I have no money to indulge in travel or a life of enjoyment or even just getting by.  It would just be a grind: working hard to pay the bills to keep on but barely able to keep up. So, I wonder: to what end? For what?  Why? Why is it necessary for us to keep on keeping on? I think I’ve had enough. I feel too tired to embark on the incumbent hardships of life as a pensioner without means or assets, with nowhere to go and no-one to share with. What is the purpose of life?  This is of course an existential question that many have addressed. For me it is less profound. It just seems somehow futile to keep on keeping on.