Nietzsche's impact on a young and curious reader: "What does not kill us makes us stronger"

I was introduced to Nietzsche during some of the darkest days of my life. It happened at a time when I was suffering from severe existential depression. I recall so well what happened then.

Reading the first few pages of the Genealogy of Morals felt like a prosaic invitation into a secret cult whose initiation rituals demand of me to put a gun against my head – against the values and norms I was taught since my beginning. As much as his ideas, did his prose take me over and under. I felt like a dinghy floating on the open seas. Not knowing where I was heading, I keeled over, I turned and twisted. Nietzsche's words on the origin of our moral prejudices resounded throughout my personal world. I faced the calmest calms and the heaviest of sea storms. In the end there was nothing inside of me that was left untouched. I felt empty and ready for a new beginning. Ready for a spiritual transformation as I started to realize that the cure for my suffering was always borne deeply inside of me.

What does not kill me... makes me stronger.

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