Letter to the Agony Aunt

Dear Ask-Aunty,

I am experiencing an overwhelming sense of self doubt.  I honestly don’t know what to do or what to think.  I am hoping you might be able to help.

I feel as though I am locked in some sealed box – as though my life has contained and restrained me, unable to break free, unable to escape, unable even to perceive of a life outside my own limited confinement.

It is as though all communication with the world has been cut off.  I feel alone.  I feel isolated.  I feel as if there is nothing but me. 

Or, perhaps, not even that.

I am beginning to doubt my own existence.  Do I actually exist?  Did I ever exist?  Is this life or is this death?  I don’t know and I think – I fear – that I might never come to know the truth.

Can one be no-one?  Can I think of my non-existence if I indeed do not exist?  Isolated and cut off from the rest of the world, how can I even begin to know anything, let alone anything of my self?

I doubt that I even exist.  There is nothing and I am nothing – that’s how I feel.  Now, though, I even begin to wonder if I feel anything at all.  How much that we ‘feel’ is real and how much is, in fact, our imagination?  How much ‘being’ is life and how much ‘life’ is actually a useless faith in some kind of existential delusion?

Do I exist?  Am I alive?  Am I dead?

I do not know and my life – if I am alive at all – is filled only with doubt and darkness.

Please, please, please help me.

Yours sincerely,

Pussy Softcusion,

(care of my owner, Erwin Schrödinger who is apparently quite famous.)