Felt alterations in the life-world
There are moments when the whole world seems to change.
What previously seemed flat, lifeless, or irrelevant suddenly took on substantial meaning. The thing about this is, although the feeling was identical, this was not like actually discovering something meaningful—finding a vocation, starting an important relationship, even a new hobby. What this was was the perception of meaning absent of any actual meaning to back it up—the illusion of a new presence.
I can only reach for the language of personal transformation—religious conversion, falling in love—to express it, but there was no new doctrine, no one there to fall in love with.
Yet, there is still some actual meaning there to be retained. Not the meaning I was perceiving in the world at the time, but the kind of meaning that comes from meta-reflection on what had happened. My attempt to approximate that meaning in words is: the entire world can shift under my feet, and I'm the only one who notices when it does.
Even when it does, I may not still be aware that it's happening. I'm lucky that I had the awareness to notice it at all. Many of us don't. I think perhaps I didn't before, and like an amnesiac in a movie, am unsure of whether I'm recreating something from a past memory or really experiencing it for the first time.
(I've been using a lot of phenomenology concepts throughout this post, so it's time to give an important disclaimer: I am not a phenomenologist. I am not your phenomenologist. I am not qualified to give phenomenology advice over the Internet.)
I am sick now, and the life-world of physical illness is different from waking life in many other ways. Life is slow, constrained, focused on the unpredictable and unforeseeable timeline of recovery. But we've all at least had a cold, and most people have had something much worse than a cold (maybe COVID, maybe the flu, whatever, doesn't matter). The other thing I've been talking about, without naming, is much more rare.
It's lonely on a very existential level to know that I'm one of a select few that have experienced the world this way, and who know that the world can change in a way that's sudden, unchosen, and destabilizing. The ground shifts, then opens up, and out of the great gaping hole comes an immense personal transformation that, when I'm sober and back to reality, registered as a different thing. A diagnosis, not a discovery.