Son of a Preacher Man

(Originally published at weareprolife.net)

Portrait of the Author as a Young Man

1985: Rural Northeastern Arkansas

When I was 12, I had an… well, I don’t know quite what to call it, but I think of it as an existential crisis. It started as an overwhelming sense of dread whenever we would drive in to our place of work. We ran a crafts business, and I was one of the employees — me, my older brother (17), and our parents. It was just us. We had moved to my mother’s small, rural hometown in northeast Arkansas to launch a business and capitalize on her family’s help in the form of free or cheap housing and office space, not to mention sweat equity partners like my aunt and uncle.

Anyway, every morning we would make the short drive to the shop, and every morning I would feel a sense of overwhelming dread. A sense of neverending doom and dispair that this is it. This is my life. It’s never going to evolve from this into something better. Such was my mental state that when I somehow heard about Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” in response to the philosophical question of whether or not we are real or merely living in someone else’s dream, my brain went absolutely wild. I went from an overwhelming sense of gloom to a full-on panic. Every day, I would question whether my world was real or imagined by someone else, and every day I would come to the unsettling conclusion that I…