Fear
content note: physical illness, death, suicide.
one thing about spending enough time fearing death, for whatever reason and reasons that may be, is that one end to it is not removing the originator of that fear — which depending on your psyche or conditions may not always be possible — but learning to not fear death instead.
i basically think anyone who spends enough time in panic over enough years is liable to end up this way. the alternatives are burning to a husk, loss of reality checking, or suicide.
personally still a bit afraid — not so indifferent that i’d go hard for no reason when exercising yesterday, for instance, i give my body what it asks for (fluid movements, light effort, nothing anaerobic), but not so afraid that i won’t do my best to purposefully trigger the new arrhythmia when doing the holter monitor next week, despite risk inherent in inducing one.
i find i keep having to say to myself, if this is all it would take to kill me, then now or in two weeks accidentally say, it really makes no odds. that i have to deploy this regularly to move forward with my days evinces a certain something. and while the uncertainty itself is one degree of unbearable, a kind of assertion that i cannot trust in my self-knowledge, the collective absence of faith from others is another.
if the condition finally gets worse after decades, if everyone’s been telling you it’s false/“Just Anxiety”/psychosomatic/“functional” (given decades of panic disorder etc.), and now it’s enough to be visible, it’s a relief and starts to feel your only ally — the only true thing in all this time. i don’t know if it’s true that the same death i feared and felt daily in my mid-teens until my early 20s is this one, the one now manifesting so physically, or the one that stole a few years away from me from 2016, but on reflection i’ve spent most of the last 22 years actively fearing and feeling death.
an end to this uncertainty and the loneliness within it is not exactly an unwelcome thing in and of itself. we were never promised even one day of the beauty of life, y’know? and i have experienced so much of it, awe-inspiring and terrible and banal. nothing was ever ever promised.