Hey, I will try to be as clear as I can, I guess me writing this post is already an act of huge desperation, so far I've been only searching reddit through, looking for answers, but I've noticed I couldn't satisfy my feeling of deep discomfort and stop spiriling into questions without answers. I know it's a subject that touches science, philosophy and, particularly, meditation, because that's along the insight path that my current form of anxious thoughts started arising. But I am aware that the background problem is just my path of thinking that goes on and on in the same cycle. Maybe someone has got themselves in a similar mind-loop once or at least can give a hint where I should start to untangle (I attend therapy and I take meds, so it's not a matter of starting there - I do what I possible can to put myself back on the way to recovery, it's just being super hard right now, because my problems are getting me into depression).  


The biggest problem is my disappearing sense of agency. Yes, it all started from meditation. It was a practice that was brining me lot of good insight, I would say it was a good accompaniement to my therapy and that was what GAVE ME the feeling of more agency at first. I've been a huge overthinker with anxiety issues, sometimes with depression crippling in, but not for long, because the feeling of "I can" has built my core belief that I could still influence myself and help.   


Long story short, the feeling that I, as some particular solid being, can influence anything, is getting weaker and weaker day by day as I'm thinking about everything. As I got deeper into meditation with Sam Harris's app, I discovered the terms like "no self", "no free will", "non-duality" etc. To notice that all the thoughts come themselves, to notice that there was no "me" as someone who could observe, to discover that I couldn't fully decide on what happens and what I do, was like a cold water thrown in my face, but it didn't trigger my fear and sadness as much as it recently have.  


I've moved to another country and I guess the stress was too big for me to cope, and here my mental obsessions grew bigger, especially as each day I was searching for the answers and didn't leave the philosophically themed subjects in peace. My overthinking didn't help. I still meditated but not as regurarly and not as successfully as in the past. I often couldn't get through the suffering coming from stress. It got me at new different conclusions hard to digest. But the worst ones were rolling around the lack of control, it seems like I couldn't rationally come to terms with the fact that so much was indeed happening behind my concious awareness. From one thought to another, from one scientific reading to another, I understood that the narrative that I tried to put my thoughts through, the narrative of agency, was like lying to myself... I noticed that my reassuring statement "you can influence the way you react" is, on materialist scientific ground, probably false, as if "I" doesn't exist and everything that determines the change and impulse to change is in fact milliards of processes happening. The real buddhist would agree to that and move on and I've been searching answers in meditations, answers to questions that had to stay the way they were. But it seems like I can no longer let it all go and just meditate, and just live my life, with the new narrative that I'm putting myself through, which is "it's all just biology, so you cannot even know what your reaction will be, you cannot know if you will react positively or negatively to your next thought, you cannot know on what next you will focus on". In this way, I at once believe that change is possible, through some cause-effect relation, but also I don't, maybe I'm just afraid there is no change for me... I guess I got in a typical dillema of someone who discovers that they don't have free will, but i keep digging - oh I don't have influence on my thoughts and feelings but I can still notice them and act on them/change my reaction to them... Oh wait... I cannot, because there are milliards of processes that decide! Seems like I'm going crazy on this one and my anxiety got me in some real shit, using my strongest hopes and positive reassurances against me, telling me that if I cannot control anything, then I cannot change, and if I believe I can, it's just my wiring... But this wiring can also change without my control and as I see it happening, my positive feedbacks and the positive patterns were all conneced to the identity building and agency strength. I see that when I modified those patterns with meditation, buddism, science, it flipped back on me in this way... But I don't blame meditation. I know that there is some psychological issue going under, but I just don't know how to solve it. With keeping going and somehow forcing the thought that "I have control" (even when I have hard time admitting that I do? All because of those blurred definitions of "I" and "will" and me trying to be always "on the side of truth"...)? With keeping on meditating through this, hoping that it bring me relief from my no-control-related panic? 

Well, I admit, I don't know how to procceed, because I know what was good for me was the feeling of reaching some shape, some form of a new, better "me", the feeling that I could enjoy life after hard work on my psyche... But again, for me there is no turning back from what meditation has brought me and how I've fitted in the philosophy of "no-self", "everything is a flow". It was comforting to find something SO suited for me like meditation. Yet it was also so dangerous for me to at some moment get "on the dark side" of the coin. 

Has anyone gone through similar problems? How to accept that even at the smallest detail there is no certainity, no agency maybe, but yet keep living and stiving to cope with anxiety and depression, even when not sure what I can do, if I cannot do? Buddhists say to watch and observe, but yeah, there is no one to observe, there is just experience and if the experience all the time throws unpleasantness at me... I don't know how to ignore and just move forward, wthout falling into depression :(