## Metadata - Author: [[Eric Jannazzo]] - Full Title:: The Existential Balm of Seeing Yourself as a Verb, Not a Noun - Category:: #🗞️Articles - URL:: https://psyche.co/ideas/the-existential-balm-of-seeing-yourself-as-a-verb-not-a-noun?utm_source=rss-feed - Read date:: [[2025-12-11]] ## Highlights > ‘We are not things that behave, but processes that proceed.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc640pephw476bvx1cfycyyc)) > Watts’s phrasing offered me something radical in its simplicity: the possibility that I wasn’t a solid, separate ‘thing’ at all, but an unfolding, a movement. A happening. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc64115sz6mnnktnkrga1eaj)) > [William James](https://psyche.co/ideas/william-james-was-right-about-our-strange-inner-experiences), who in *The Principles of Psychology* (1890) described living beings not as fixed essences, but as ‘bundles of habits’. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc6420mh7yzddvnneb1nscm2)) > a kind of existential terror. Not about someone else’s death, but about their own vanishing into the void, so total it short-circuits imagination. > This was at the centre of John’s pain. What haunted him as a child continued to haunt him as a grown man, as it does so many of us: being alone, forever, in that lightless room. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc648twmgge6yxkrz2d919ds)) > I’ll often ask what year a client was born. ‘1949,’ they might say. ‘And 1948?’ I’ll ask. ‘How was that?’ Usually this leads to a chuckle, and maybe a hint of relief. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc6499ng4x8y14qbqn9prb6h)) > I thought I was going to disappear like a statue being knocked off a ledge. Now it feels more like I’ll just… stop happening. Like a breeze.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc64aktrtfhepqpmwd2jndrg)) > The language of death can be enormously confusing. ‘Grandma is dead,’ we say. But in fact, no, she is not. Right now, there simply is no Grandma. The sentence collapses. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc64aws85gsdwsp3yx03fqfk)) > We describe people, and therefore think of people, as nouns. ‘Grandma’ is a kind of thing. There is Grandma in her chair, and then she dies. Where did she go? Our premise of object constancy demands we place her somewhere. Heaven, hell, the void. > But Grandma was never a thing. She was a verb the entire time. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc64br1s9a21ykp3xnxa7r7e)) > slowly he began to see that what he feared so greatly was an experience. And that death, in the end, isn’t one. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kc64cmxve3azcfe8gq5qhqmf))