It Started With A Bagel
I swear, I was above the influence the whole time
To have an existential crisis is to question if life has any meaning, purpose or value. So basically it’s to freak the fuck out over the unknown. By contemplating over the inevitability of life and oblivion itself, you go through your own panic-stricken personal journey. I just had my first one.
*The scary noise from Law And Order: SVU*
These are their stories.
As a journalist, I learn the best and improve my own writing by reading the stories of others. Whether it be on Obama’s first visit to a Mosque as Commander-In-Chief, how a Florida police officer fell in love with a puppy, or the decoding of sexting buddies, it’s all a learning experience. This was until I went on Buzzfeed and came across the rainbow bagel.
If anyone knows anything about me, they know I love a good bagel. The never-ending pairings that are available with the bagel are unimaginable. Plain. Blueberry. Everything. Wheat. Plain cream cheese. Flavored cream cheese. Salt and pepper. Avocado slices. I’ve seen and ate them all, but the rainbow bagel caught my eye because well, it’s colorful and beautiful and I. Need. IT.
Also, it was 2 a.m. and I was starving.
And so I did what any millennial would do: I screenshot the article, went on Instagram and typed in “The Bagel Store” on the “Places” tab of Instagram and VOILA! The rainbow bagel was there in its beauty on my iPhone 6.
349 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211
That was the address of one of The Bagel Store locations. The rainbow bagel has gone viral and everyone is itching to trek to Brooklyn to buy their own rainbow bagel and obviously take a really arsty photo of it to post to Instagram later. That’s just a fact.
Conveniently, Brooklyn happens to be one of my favorite places in all of America and I’ll be visiting New York twice in March. The thought of Brooklyn made me reminisce on my last trip to the concrete jungle. Arguably one of the most memorable parts of going to New York for me is the use of public transportation.
As a Southern California-native, I’m used to roaming around the streets of Sunset Blvd. and Melrose Ave. with my friends and basking in the glory of Los Angeles, but public transportation is never an option here. So what if there’s traffic on the 405, you get used to it. Sure it’ll take you 35 minutes to go two miles, but you know what, at least your car has an aux cord in it. However, when I’m in New York, I use the public transportation system like a true New Yorker.
On a journalism trip last year, two colleagues and I decided to ditch Manhattan and take the A-train to Brooklyn. It was my first time leaving Manhattan, and although I was nervous, I was excited to visit a different part of New York. We walked around, avoided dog shit at all times, bar hopped (This was exciting for my then 19-year-old self), and had a really memorable lunch at some place I can’t remember the name of. Which is really ironic, but whatever.
Brooklyn had swallowed us whole and we were all smiles, until we realized we were going to be late to our staff dinner in the West Village. As we fast-walked to the nearest subway station, we came across two individuals. They were maybe in their mid-20s and were clearly in a relationship. The girl was a few steps ahead of her significant other and was wiping away tears. As much as I hate to admit it, I’m nosy. I’m a journalist. Obviously I kept tabs on it.
Luckily, they were headed the same direction we were. From what I gathered, the boyfriend had gambled and drank all of their funds away which left them with nothing. No money for rent. No money for food. It was all gone. The girlfriend cried and begged for her boyfriend to stop it. If he loved her, he would stop. They would somehow make ends meet, but he had to stop. He silently nodded in his own dismay, but these two people stuck with me a year later.
It’s now 4 a.m. and there’s nothing I want to know more than if they are okay at this moment in time. Did they break-up? Did she leave him? Did he go to Alcoholics Anonymous? I have a superfluous amount of questions and there’s no way I will ever receive any answers because I don’t know them.
So this is when the existential crisis kicked in. I starting freaking out about how in the grand scheme of things, we are a small spec of dust in comparison to the universe. I felt like the world was closing in on me and I started to have this deep and borderline-obsessive concern about the meaning of life and all of the unanswered questions floating around our world.
Jason Winkler, a Toronto-based psychotherapist, who specializes in existential crisis’ (side-note: WHY JASON? WHY?!) said, “An existential crisis is often relational in nature, meaning that one’s relationship to everything and everyone around them is brought into question. Being-in-the-world is examined closely in an existential crisis and, often, there are no answers to one’s questions. It typically is an experience of feeling completely untethered, existentially alone and lost — even despite one having a wealth of loving friends and family, a successful career and professional reputation, material acquisitions, and religious/spiritual faith.”
Existence is a weird thing! Your dads sperm meets your moms egg and suddenly (9 months later) you show up in the world, naked and afraid. I felt like I was a newborn again, I was afraid. But not naked.
In this haze, I started questioning everything. How am I this compilation of cells, water, organs, tissue? How did humans end up on Earth? What if there are aliens looking for life on different planets? Do they have alien celebrities? Why hasn’t Leonardo DiCaprio won a damn Oscar yet?
I started sending a friend of mine who lives in Brisbane, Australia a chain of messages about how I was debating everything in my life. Luckily, he knows me well enough to still be my friend.
At this point, it was 4:30 a.m. I was still hungry. I was still thinking about the couple from New York. I made a mental note to go to Starbucks and grab a bagel before my meeting that was in three hours. And I felt like the most irrelevant spec of dust in the universe. And I fell asleep still worried about the incomprehensible.
I ended up getting my bagel. Starbucks didn’t have everything bagels so I compromised for a fat-free bagel to get me through the day. I picked at the non-rainbow bagel through my meeting until I told my colleagues and adviser about my journey the night before. They teased me about how stressed I’ve been lately and came to the conclusion that of course, I would have an existential crisis.
Moral of the story: don’t stress out too much because you’ll find your rainbow bagel one day and will end up questioning the universe and its unfathomable mysteries.
