THE WORLD TORN OPEN
How many people know what real fear feels like? How many feel that way on a daily basis? The tightened, burning stomach. The trembling and sweaty hands, the cold feet, aching legs. The wide open eyes and mind. The nervous energy. The sensation of falling, felt anew every few seconds. Maybe it lets up a minute and you think you're beginning to get your feet under you again. Then you fall again. The real fear of losing your mind for good. Of dying or of never being able to die, going crazy and never escaping the way it feels right now, never finding that illusion of calm again. For it does seem like it must be an illusion. The world seems set at right angles. Crazy fracture lines in the sky, running through our architecture, into the ground whence we sprouted half-formed and where we'll end up half-digested. Everything seems like an old-fashioned take on a brand new cosmic panorama threatening to tear open our tiny primate minds and send our thoughts into eddies, our questions spiralling into themselves. Nautilus shells. Golden ratios. Fibonacci sequences. Infinite regression. Mirrors pointed at themselves. Parallel universes and infinite quantum hells. Filing down my teeth, hitting my head against my door. Screaming and crying into my pillow at night, collapsing in the corner of the shower. How many people fight against this most of their lives?
11 comments:
Quite a few people I expect, but not as many as don't, at least in the 1st world. However, as I understand it, it doesn't matter how many other people feel the same way. If it's happening to you and it is scary beyond belief, then no amount of rationalising about where ones fear fits into the universe full of other souls is compensation or solace. Hang in there, dude.
Thank you, Rex. You make lots of sense when you want to. I do appreciate the support. I AM terrified and it's horrific.
Well I guess I'm lucky I don't experience those feelings, so far at any rate. It really does sound awful. Ironically when the picture of the Nautilus opened on my screen it gave me a sense of real excitement. So rare, so beautiful.
I have a friend who suffers such anxiety he likens it to driving at top speed on a wet motorway and the car in front brakes. He says that is what he feels all the time. Makes my panic attacks and depression pale into insignificance.
I've never heard it put quite that way Lorenzo but that is actually a very good description.
I'm on medication now and it helps (though it doesn't prevent it from happening still, just lessens the frequency and sometimes the duration/severity).
Without medication, as I was for the majority of my younger life, I was a complete train wreck and still don't know how I managed to survive, much less function (as much as I do). It's a time I'd rather not think about, honestly.
I suppose all my poems and things are a way to get these feelings out safely amongst friends, as it were. Life is hard enough and it's hard to keep this tremendous and debilitating angst cloaked inside yourself, as I did for so many years.
As much as I complain about technology removing the soul from our lives, in this case it has allowed me to connect to a group of people (you lot) which for some reason (a kind of anonymity?) I can open up to about these things and not feel embarrassed, whereas in real life it is quite hard for me to ever talk about this stuff except for with a few people like my mom.
Thanks all of you.
And yes Maalie, I've always loved the nautilus for it's logarithmic beauty, as well as the cuttlefish for different reasons. We should do a thread about our favorite marine life, or favorite animals of each major phylum, or some such thing. That would be a fun one.
Mmmm Meta, been there done that - sort of.
In my case it was agoraphobic panic attacks.
Years of working extremely hard online in my little upstairs small bedroom / office, seven days a week and twelve - fourteen hours a day combined, probably, with my mother's death two years ago left me with considerable problems facing the outside world.
I could go outside and walk around alright but any, even small, hill gave me vertigo (and I mean small hill / large vertigo and panic).
My doctor just said it was in my mind (which I'd sort of guessed). He didn't think it was age related or related to any changed medical condition and said if it was changing my life he would refer me to a hypnotherapist. I said I'd get back to him.
I too turned to the web (I lived there anyway) and researched such things as fear of flying and the agoraphobia networks. Through them I discovered CBT (cognitive behaviour therapy).
As I'm sure you know, it involves learning techniques for dealing with fear (breathing etc.) and then works by increasing exposure to the thing feared (the phobia) in small stages.
My researches taught me that giving in to the fear would mean the fear would come earlier and be greater next time. Each time I gave in, my world would become smaller and the world outside my safe area would become more scary.
So I set myself lunch break targets to do things that scared me. We have a hill near us called Dunkery Beacon which I had visited many times in the past and loved but which was now completely out of bounds for me.
Believe me, it's not a mountain, but it is the highest point in our area.
Each day from a level point, little by little, I climbed further up the hill until I was panicking and then did my breathing exercises until I was calm again then returned back to work.
Each day, I went a little higher, sometimes only a few yards. To me, each step was scary and you have described better than I can how it felt.
At last, many months later, I reached the top. I was helped by the fact that it was a foggy day and I could hardly see fifty yards ahead let alone how high I was. The next day, it was clear and I had to face the top again and overcome it.
Panic attacks are horrible and you have my sympathy as someone who has experienced them.
Occasionally, I return to the online communities where I learned how to bring myself back to normality and I see those people who have yet to find their way to a happier place.
On these days, I feel very fortunate indeed :-)
Good luck with your search for ways of coping, my friend.
Thanks, Rob, for that very detailed account of your own experiences. I've read about and met and many people with agoraphobia, and the features all seem similar. As horrible as it is, the one thing I can say it has going for it at this point in "our" understanding of the illness is a fairly effective an straightforward means of treatment - CBT and desensitization behavior, as you mentioned. People can overcome their fear of heights, spiders, open spaces, hills, all sorts of things. By no means is it easy and I have a tremendous amount of respect for the people with the courage to undergo such a scary process to regain what they've lost - their normal way of life, which has been sevrely impinged upon by some psychological trauma.
I have some agoraphobia associated with crowds and very open spaces, as I also have become more and more of a hermit as I have aged, retreating from this world I find so incomprehensible and the people I find so kind and yet cruel and alien at the same time. I also (and mainly) suffer from major panic disorder and have from a young age, along with major clinical depression, not that these labels mean anything by themselves, it's just that, interwined as they are, it's been a tremendous struggle for me to even get out of bed, for me to stay out of mental hospitals (I've been in my share and undergone shock therpay, you name it), and for me to lead any kind of a normal life, except for when I was married and had a daughter to love and raise, and that stabilized me quite a bit.
Now I'm back on my own, and for three years have been battling the return of "the big questions." My panic isn't related to a fear of something specific. It's a wide open fear of life; of death; of meaning. It's the search that most everyone takes to find meaning in his or her life writ large upon the inside of my skull, never allowing me to forget it. I simply CANNOT believe in any God without proof or some sort of magical conversion which has not taken place of yet; my mind is too logical for that and I don't believe in fairy tales anymore.
Eastern philosophies (I refuse to call them religions, although many sects of each have become such, unfortunately, by grafting theism/deism or even existing animism or ancestor worship onto what was basically a non-theistic philosophy laid down by Lao Tsu, Siddhartha Gautama, Confucius, and other teachers like these) give me more solace than do the obnoxious and insultingly childish Western monotheistic (Abrahamic) religions. I feel like a grown up legitimately quieting my mind and allowing rationalism, and then eventually silence, to calm my irrational fears. The angst is philosophical, the actual fear physiological, and the treatment (not cure) is something medicinal as well. Meditation, balance, sensory involvement, active involvement in the present moment, compassion toward not only others (still working on that one), but toward myself as well - this feel more natural then reciting prayers from some ancient text to a Being who has never once surfaced in my life or thoughts in any convincing way. Additionally, the doctrine of light AND dark, peace within, natural order, and so on and so on all seem to make sense to a natural animal like me who has after all arisen FROM nature itself and not been molded by clay or anything else supernatural. I'm part of the world, and I always will be, even after I die.
It's this fear of nonexistence though which haunts many people. I've begun to find comfort in thinking about what it was like before I was born (it wasn't like anything, and it certainly wasn't scary), and by the words of Epicurus (I hope): "If I am, then Death is not; If Death is, then I am not. Why should I fear something that cannot exist when I do?" (I'm going by memory here so give me some slack.)
All of this existential anguish in my childhood, adolescent, teens, and then culminating in bad drug trips in my very early twenties, along with genetic predisposition from both sides of my family for severe, disabling depression, pretty much eliminated any chance I'd have at a normal life. Some people believe, as I do, that the line between mental illness and what some would consider genius is a fine one; witness Van Gogh, Kurt Godel, Sylvia Plath, Ian Curtis, and countless others, the huge majority whose names we will never know. I've met some people in institutions who are some of the brightest most artistic and original people I've ever come across, and who are also suicidal and want nothing more than to pack it in.
So it's these things I struggle against, as well as the conditioned fight or flight responses more typical of agoraphobic illness, which keep me in this vicious circle from which it is so hard to break loose. So many people see it as though you're "well" or "ill," but it's so much more complicated than that. My ex-wife never had panic attacls and was rarely ever depressed except for some mild SAD - but she is also an uncreative, uninspired worker bee who will never achieve anything society considers great. To my mind, what is the point of such a person? Then again, what is the point of anything? This is the double-edged sword of intelligence/sight/true knowledge, call it what you will.
Another famous person, could have been Thomas Jefferson, said, "Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy." I think he meant happy in the small-village naive way, the way children are happy. Knowledge and wisdom and big ideas do tend to kill this infantile joy, which sucks pretty hard. But maybe by working unceasingly at all of the tools I've learnt and accumulated over the yeats - CBT, meditation, yoga, progressive relaxation - I can arrive at some sort of peace or grace. Not joy and yet not terror.
Just a state of being in which I feel comfortable within my own skin. That would be enough, I think. It's probably so much more than most people have deep down anyway if they stop all their daily insanity and allow themselves to feel. I think most people ARE scared, to some degree, and ill at ease about existence. It's just a guess on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is where all that excess "fill every moment with something stimulating" behavior comes from. I envy people like Mags who can simply go for a stroll an smell her flowers and feel truly at peace, if indeed she does. That's all I want.
Maalie, if you ever read this:
What desktop resolution do you use on your computer?
Like... 1024x768, 1280x1024
Or if you have a widescreen LCD,
1280x768, 1440x900, 1600x1024
There are lots of other combos. You can find it under "Display Properties" (right-click on your desktop).
Just wondering because I could make you a nice desktop wallpaper pic from that nautilus.
I know how it feels to a point, but not to the extent you do. It's under control most of the time. I still have a bit of agoraphobia, lack of energy and motivation, but I'm better now. Some rules I have to follow: take my medications every day at the same time; engage in conversations with someone on the phone or in person as much as possible. The computer helps when that's not possible; eat regularly since my mood is affected by that; plan something for the day even if it's reading a book or watching a movie; try to not dwell on my problems - if that happens I listen to a visual mediation or Buddhist CD; I have fairly regular sleeping patterns, but that's not hard for me. If I sleep during the day, I have bad dreams usually. If I were having many problems on medications, with regular eating and sleeping, I would call my doctor - possibly needing different meds or talk therapy (something). I hope by living closer we can be of help to each other. Positive thoughts, keeping busy - a few keys. I know you need to vent. I do too, but try to make that a small part of your day. Hope you don't mind some advice - I'm not you, don't have your same thoughts, but I will always try to help. I love you!
Thanks, Mom. I love you too. You're method of dealing with your own anxiety is a good thorough one - perhaps I need to get more structured in mine. I do many of the same things you do but more lackadasically; sometimes when the attack is coming on rather than always just as a matter of course. I agree about the nightmares during the day. Those are the worst. I feel better when I can connect with people, on the computer or even better in person. And I am happy you live closer now as well since we're that much more able to help one another through tough times.
Sometimes I have to get this all out of my head and on paper or on the computer, to see it as an external objective description of what I'm feelings vaguely and without words. Then I can deal with it a bit better or at least know where to start. Otherwise I get overwhelmed before I even get going. Writing down how I'm feeling is important for me; I can't speak for others. I guess it's my way of facing the situation, because words don't go away unless you deliberately delete them, and there's no reason to destroy the truth.
Thanks for reading all my posts - everyone.
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