You sit and listen to your TV playing cartoons, as a steady rhythm of rain droplets hit the window. Your eyelids droop as you ruminate about everything and nothing all at once. As the noise in your head become louder than the sounds in the room, a thought drifts across your unfocused brain.
“What happens after I die?”
You ponder this for a moment. What does happen? Is it a void of nothingness for eternity or is it like a pleasant nap? Is there an afterlife, and will you go to the wrong one? Will your loved ones? Is death worse or better than now? How do you know you’re not dead already?
You shift uncomfortably, your body feeling much too small and entrapping. You’re not as at ease as you were before. As you sit up straight, another more striking thought hits you.
“What really is consciousness?”
Is it simply knowing you’re alive? How do you know that you really know you’re alive, and it’s not just a trick from your brain? How do you even know if you genuinely feel anything? Besides, is a child even a person in the eyes of others? Even if you did feel anything, would it be valid?
“Do I feel anything?”
Everything starts to feel quite slow and muddy, and your heart spikes. How do you know if you genuinely feel… anything? You think you feel fear, but do you really or are you just acting how I’m supposed to? If everything is a chemical reaction do you really feel anything at all or are you just acting how others expect you to? You always have felt different after all.
“What am I?”
Your breath is shaky by now, and you consider whether to go to your parents’ bedroom for comfort. Your dad always makes your delusions worse, telling you we’re in a simulation and how that’s okay and such. For now, though, you have to answer the questions you’ve given yourself before you ask even more.

“What happens after you die? “
Well, you suppose there’s no way of really knowing. People have claimed to see the supernatural, so maybe a purgatory-like ghost state? Or maybe heaven and hell really do exist, and God wasn’t as all loving as we’d all hoped? Or maybe it’s really just nothingness.
You do hope it’s not the last one.
Still, the wondering hasn’t ceased your woes. It’s not like hell would be any good. You decide to move onto the next question.
“What really is consciousness?”
Consciousness, to you, is probably the ability to realize that you are alive and all the weight that possesses. But maybe there’s people on a higher plane of us that can recognize life on a more visceral plane than humans. People do say that humans are really conscious, and animals don’t possess sapiency, but how do we know that? Just because they can’t speak a human language doesn’t mean they can’t communicate. Maybe we’re just as conscious as us, and yet we treat them so terribly. Maybe we deserve to be treated terribly if they do too. Slaughtered for meat and such.
So, you get that humans are conscious to other humans, but so are animals to other animals and gods to other gods. But the question of consciousness begets how the question of how we know if we “feel” alive at all.
“Do I feel anything?”
You’d think the near panic attack you just had would answer that, but you still feel a sense of numbness. Everything one does adheres to an expectation others have for them to do, right? You act like yourself, but it feels like yourself is just the image others have of you. You don’t truly know who you are, others just know of your happy childish outwards appearance and not of your deeper thoughts such as this. A 9-year-old can’t ponder thoughts like this, now can they? Well, you guess you’re living proof you can. Still, you’ve ended up at the conclusion that maybe you don’t feel anything, and you’ve always been acting for everyone else, even now.
Well, that isn’t comforting now is it? Still, it’s one less question to ask, and one more question to answer.
“What am I?”
Well, ever since second grade you had insisted you were an alien in a human’s body, but you can’t help but wonder why you were cursed to have such a different brain from everyone else. You know your father says it’s a good thing, it means your soul is old, but it can be cumbersome to live in a world made for someone who isn’t you. This worlds culture is indecipherable to you, and it’s distressing. You can’t help but feel you’re not human. What is a human though? So many are completely different from each other, and you can never truly know what they’re thinking. It’s scary how confusing the people you’re supposed to share a world with are.

During your ministrations, a new thought enters your head.
“Why does it matter?”
You’re going to die no matter what, you’re going to live no matter what, and it’s going to be amongst other humans. Maybe your philosophizing could give you new, easier ways to interact with your world, but it’ll never change the baseline of your problems. It doesn’t matter because you cannot change it.
Yet, your mind is foolish, and you can’t let go of the thoughts that plague you. The cartoons are now the same as the rain as you comb through worries that can never be quelled. Maybe time will bring you wisdom, and you’ll stop worrying over things you cannot control.