The Fucked-Up Symptoms of Your Existential Separation Anxiety

Even though you struggle to keep it to yourself, you have often noted how fucked-up you are. And have you ever noticed how everyone you know turns out to be just as fucked-up, in one way or another, as "you"? Your wife/husband, mother, father, sister, brother, Aunt Ginnie, Uncle Sal, your dumb neighbor Harry, your coworker Jan, your boss Mr. Higgins, your son’s girlfriend and her mother and her mother's mother, society, the world, the cosmos, on and on, ad infinitum, everyone of ‘em…

…all royally fucked-up. 

In fact, just when you meet someone you think might have a handle on his/her “existence”…badabing…nope, fucked up too. Sorry for the crude and crass language here (which just demonstrates how fucked-up I AM) but let’s face it boys and girls, egocentric reality supports nothing more than this assessment easily applied on an ongoing basis.

You can run (which you do everyday, in a million different ways) but you can’t hide.

So why are you trying so hard NOT to be fucked up? Do you really think you can ever be anything BUT fucked-up? Are all your spiritual practices and attempts at purity merely a way to hide “you” from your own fucked-up symptoms? Has it ever really worked for any appreciable length of time? After 20 yrs of your rigidly performed spiritual endeavors, are you really any less fucked up than you were day one? When will you finally be cured?

Fucked-up is nothing more than a symptom of abandonment resulting in a lifelong feeling of “separation anxiety.” It is the universal sense of abandonment that we all experience, but fail to share, because we hide from it. In other words, the ego-self you insist on being “you,” can only sustain its “you-ness” by rigorously keeping itself apart from all the other egos trying to be “them.” It’s not that you were abandoned, it’s just that as an ego-self, you abandoned them and so, they appear to have abandoned YOU. Hahaa!

Separation anxiety is endemic to your very existence and as long as “you” believe you "exist," separation anxiety must be your underlying foundational experience. You have NO choice in this simply because YOU choose it, day after day after day…until eventually you achieve your ultimate goal of complete and total separation or…

..death (what other reason for it?).

Obviously, this leads to a whole spectrum of symptoms, which can be easily categorized as Existential Separation Anxiety. Of course, some people are REALLY fucked up, so much so that they need drugs to hide from their symptoms so they can function in a society where everybody’s fucked up and suffering from the same separation anxiety. Other people need to be locked up, because their fucked-up symptoms are so deadly that they only interfere in your continuing attempts at pretending to NOT be fucked-up. In the post-modern world, you can be fucked-up but only to a point. Beyond that, you need help to keep the world from abandoning you (which is nothing more than you abandoning it).

Ah…but not you! You’ve become expert at hiding your symptoms and don’t need drugs to keep it all under wraps (You meditate it away, LOL!). In fact, you've become so expert at hiding your symptoms that sometimes you actually think that you might NOT be fucked-up at all.

This is actually the worse kind of fucked-up you can be because, unfortunately for "you," those closest to you know that all your spiritual hocus pocus is bullshit. No matter how adept you become at hiding (and some are truly expert indeed), they actually know how fucked-up you really are and, at times, you literally hate them for it (and so, easily abandon them, thereby, further reinforcing your own symptoms). In fact, of all the people in the world, for which you present yourself as symptom free, it’s those who know you the most that you often FEAR the most, simply because they actually know what you really ARE….which is fucked-up.

Well…fuck them, right!?!?

However, there is a part of you that’s NOT fucked-up and that has never abandoned or separated from you. That part knows nothing of the world and the world’s rules of self-development and games of successful symptom relief. That part does not “perceive” and has no use for eyes that “see” (how fucked-up you are). 

This Deeper Spirit has no awareness of your egocentricity and, because of that, the ego ALWAYS feels rejected and abandoned. All your dogged attempts to achieve positive self-esteem and live a productive, "happy" lifestyle in a material world are essentially futile and destined to fail, simply because of this fact alone. The ego can never be anything more than individually fucked-up and feeling abandoned by a part of you that it senses is greater than IT (and, hence, NOT fucked up at all), but that it can never unite with in any way whatsoever. So you may feel your less fucked up than your dumb neighbor Harry, but you’re actually equally fucked up and abandoned.

Your egocentricity virtually assures it.

Contrary to popular belief, egocentric abandonment is a universal experience not exclusive to any particular personality with any specific traumatic life experience. Everybody experiences it on one level or another and experiences it ALL the time. The very nature of an ego-self is to experience the separation anxiety of abandonment. So go ahead and fully accept your deep-seated sense of abandonment and ALL those fucked-up symptoms. Embrace your fucked-up life and engage it fully. As long as you are egocentric, it can never be anything more than fucked-up. So play infinitely in your fucked-up-ness and change the rules form time to time in order to experience all the different modes and means of being fucked-up.

Have fun, Yo!

Separation anxiety can never be cured as long as egocentricity is what defines “you." But the irony of your very existence is that you are only egocentric, BECAUSE you define your “self” as separate and abandoned.


Unfortunately, most of you will read this fucked-up essay and quickly abandon me as being too fucked-up.

But that’s how this game is played…LOL!


Artwork by Karl Perrson - "Self-Portrait"