A little over a year ago, now, I was in a car accident. It was a Sunday morning, and I was on my way to work at the nearby city library; I was in love with the job, and couldn’t think of anywhere better to be. At around 7am, as I was crossing an intersection I had crossed countless other Sundays, I heard the sound of screeching tires coming from the side of me. And then I felt the impact.

You think a lot of things in the precious few seconds before you’re in a collision. I hope that many of you have never been, nor ever will be, in that situation. But for those of you who have, it’s a different experience for everyone. For me, I distinctly remember the cascade of thoughts that hit me just before the other car did:

I hadn’t said “I love you” to my girlfriend enough the previous night. I had gotten upset with my dog for waking me up too early. I hadn’t said goodbye to my parents before I left for work. I had forgotten to grab my favorite book from my shelf.

I had forgotten a great many things.

But, for all the things that you remember in those few seconds before you believe you’ll have no more, you’re forced to forget them just as quickly. We’re always told that we don’t get to bring our earthly possessions with us when we go. That means we leave behind the hugs, the kisses, the sounds of laughter and the memories leading up to that moment. You don’t have the chance to think to yourself, “Maybe this won’t be as bad as it seems,” or “Maybe I’ll survive this,”.

You just wonder if it’ll hurt. If you’ve done enough with your life. If everyone you’ve left behind will be okay. And then—at least for me—there’s this purge of everything; of the anxiety, the fear, the anger and resentment, the guilt and unfinished thoughts. You let go of everything, try to force your mind to be a blank slate, so when the moment comes, you can say you tried to come to terms with everything; that you found a form of peace.

Then the car, with its drunk driver behind the wheel, hit me into the median, and everything felt numb. I wondered, in a sort of detached way, if I was still there; the pain flickered in and out, and I heard the other driver scraping away from the scene, and I felt my fingers reaching for my phone from my pocket. I was okay, for the moment. After the paramedics showed, and the police took their report, and the hospital checked me up and down, I realized that I really was okay—physically. My bones weren’t broken, my skin wasn’t torn, and I didn’t have glass in my body like I feared I would when the tires screeched towards me; I was alive, in the sense that doctors could write on paper, and prescribe me pain pills and physical therapy for.

But something else had gotten lost between the steering wheel and my body.

For lack of a better phrase, I felt emotionally dead. When I told myself that I had to face the end of things, I let go of a lot of myself. I had to tell myself that my dreams would be unattainable, the money I had put into my education was fruitless, and any fantasies I had of marriage would never come to pass. Then, there I was, trying to overcome the anxiety of sitting in a passenger seat, jerking every time I heard a car horn, always feeling the car in the next lane was just a little too close.

On top of all of that, I had to force myself to re-familiarize with all of thing things I had sent out in that intersection. I had to reconnect with people I thought I would never see again, try to sleep, try to feel all the emotions I thought I would have no need for. I had to relearn myself, because for the briefest of moments that morning, I thought there was no longer a self for me to be.

Then, a month after the accident, I had my first day of Existentialism at ASU.

I’m a Philosophy major, so I had been searching for the right classes for my major for quite a while. The Existentialism course was an elective, but after my accident, it was difficult for me to feel enthusiastic about much. To add to it, the class was located in a building deep in the campus, in one of the few rooms that had no air conditioning. Terrific.

The instructor informed us that there was one-hundred of us in the class, but that he wasn’t going to begin anything ground-breaking until the standard 10% dropped out. The instructor—Thad—had been teaching the class for years, and he said there were always at least ten students who gave up on the class. I wondered what type of content could be so difficult that, without fail, drove almost a dozen students away every semester.

As I sat through the evening lectures, however, and participated in all the weekly correspondences, I realized it wasn’t content difficulty or instructor behavior that would drive the students away, but the things we were being asked to confront about ourselves.

We talked about the Freedom—real freedom—that we have as these tiny little pinpoints on a galactic scale. We talked about the Absurdity of our lives, of having to hammer out a purpose in a world that’s indifferent to whether or not we exist. We talked about the concept of God or Gods or Fate, about powers we believe push and shape our lives.

An excerpt from a book I found in that class, called “At The Existentialist Café” by Sarah Bakewell, attempts to define exactly what existentialism is:

“-Existentialists concern themselves with individual, concrete human existence.

-…as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment. I am free

-I’m responsible for everything I do, which causes

-An anxiety inseparable from existence

-I am only free within ­situations ( limited by biology, culture, etc.)

-Human existence is ambiguous: at once boxed in by borders and yet transcendent and exhilarating.

-Existentialists concentrate on describing lived experience as it presents itself

-…and hope to understand this existence and awaken us to ways of living more authentic lives.”

In other words, existentialism was everything I felt I had lost during the accident. I felt that all my purpose and ambition, all my choice, had been stolen away by the drunk who had collided with my life that day. My freedom felt stripped, because now I ached when I walked, when I worked. The false image I had of “It could never happen to me” was shattered as I realized I had no special protections, nothing separating me from one moment. It was revealed to me how alone I was, when I sat there, dazed, in the driver’s seat, waiting for someone to come to me—but all I was left with was the anxiety.

And then I found this class, this philosophy, this Existentialism, that told me it was okay to feel alone, to feel anxious and lost, scared even. It taught me that I wasn’t any more alone in that moment then I always had been, and if I had never been afraid before, I didn’t have to start now. I wanted to recover, to take control of the moment, to own my disaster, and, like Nietzsche’s “love of fate”, never wish for anything to be any other way.

Looking back over the year since then, a lot has changed. I lost my car, I lost my job, and I lost a lot of the security I had in believing that things were simple and safe. Since then, I have a new, better job, a new car, and a different way of looking at life. Whereas before I saw things as orderly, enclosed and always manageable, I now see differently. The world can be a chaotic, confusing, hot mess of a place. Tragedy happens, beautiful things come and go, we live for a while, face death down, get back up again, all the while knowing we’ll face it again, inevitably. I don’t believe anymore that we have our purposes predefined, or that we have any sort of guarantee that we’ll ever find out what it is. I almost didn’t that day, and now I value all the efforts I make to not find it, but make it. Existentialists believe that our existence precedes essence, that we are first thrown into this world without choice, without the power to change our births, and then can do nothing but own our choices, or, are Jean-Paul Sartre describes it, we are “condemned to freedom”.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in his most memorable work, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, said, “I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.” I’d like to think that the weeks of chaos that followed the spark of chaos between the other driver and me was enough to form a galaxy, one where I can be that dancing star, in control of my choices, my freedoms, my anxieties. Many people believe that Philosophy is some dry, dusty study of old, abstract questions, read in the back sections of old libraries alone. For me, though, I was getting a crash course in Existentialism from the moment I got behind the wheel that morning a year ago; I was living through tragedy, the confrontation of death, questions of God and life and our aloneness. I was living what I always had wanted to learn, and now I know I can continue to learn. I was never a victim, or the butt of some fatal joke; I was a student. I was constrained by the seat belt, the anxiety, the medication, but I never lost my freedom; I never stopped being.

Existentialists call—we call—this philosophy a “lived in” one, an inescapable one, one that will eventually lead us to our end, from the cradle to the grave. A lot of people have a goal they’re trying to reach, to study for. I live mine every day, because, as Nietzsche said, I learned to have chaos in my heart, and I am now a dancing star.