The Fear

Anxiety can be a very ugly thing. Let me ask you something: Do you know what it's like to be constantly terrified and never know what of? Or what it's like when you fear inevitably killing yourself, but knowing you don't want to die? Have you ever been too scared to go to work? Afraid of breaking down and becoming a basket-weaver?
It's a horrible thing, probably one of the most debilitating feelings a human can endure--or try to, for that matter. The physical aftermath is never fun either.
Imagine never being able to properly eat or sleep. Or days of not being able to go to the bathroom. Or feeling claustrophobic in your own body--slowly suffocating in world that doesn't seem to want you?
Getting the chills yet? Read on. Here's one example of how close to the brink one can actually go while battling a feeling like this.

It all started right before I finally broke out of that relationship. I was finally realizing how miserable I was in the situation and how I felt more useless and unappreciated than I have since I was a friendless old man-child.
It all came to this point where I just had to get away--from everyone and everything. I'd go to work and I felt so claustrophobic being there. I'd go home and sit there feeling like I couldn't breathe, knowing that I just had to get away. I'd hang out with my friends and just always feel like there was somewhere else I should be.
Feelings like this were not uncommon throughout my life--but this was the strongest they'd ever been and the only time I didn't believe I could pull through. The relationship left me feeling like I was just never meant to succeed or find any happiness.
I walked into work one day and my heart was racing. I sat down next to my friend, Jess, who just looked at me and asked if I was okay. I ignored her and took two phone calls. I had to hang up on the customers because it was so impossible to talk. Jess asked again if I was okay. I just looked at her and the most devestating, "No!" fought it's way out before I burst out into tears.
Jess was in shock. She immediately pulled me out for a cigarette and we went outside and talked. All I knew at this point was that I just had to get away--from everything, and soon. I called my friends, Lora and Pat, in Hope Valley and they agreed to take me in for however long it took to get me out of this funk.
I left that very night and stayed out in the boonies, away from everything, for one solid week. It was a hard week. A lot of scary things going through my mind at that point. But being away from the city helped me a good deal. It gave me the time and place to be able to go for long walks and not have to worry about running into anybody along the way. It helped me get back to myself. In those walks in solitude, I dwelled on many aspects of my life that were holding me back and adding to my misery. The problem was, I still didn't see any logical way of pulling myself out or changing any of these elements.
I came back, a little bit better, but still quite low. This is when I started smoking pot again as a temporary fix. It helped, those first few weeks. I shut out the relationship and let it finally just end. I started working extra hours at work and I was selling my little ass off. My paychecks suddenly boosted and I stopped going out or spending money at all.
The fix worked at helping getting my stomach back on actually accepting food. It helped me even sleep. But it magnified my anxiety even more after awhile.
This is where it started to get REALLY scary. I'm sitting in the midst of a week where I'm making more sales at work than I ever have in the year I've been there. My check for the week was going to be five hundred take home. I felt happier than I ever have my whole life.
But it was an odd happiness for me. I was always used to being miserable my whole life. Even in happiness, there was always an element of deeply rooted sadness. In a sick way, I was comforted by the familiarity of this sadness.
Now, all of a sudden, I'm not quite happy, but entirely content, for a prolonged period of time. There was no misery in those two weeks after I returned from Hope Valley. Just content. Things were not exactly as I wanted them to be, but they were improving. It did mess with my mind that I was smoking as much weed as I was. I hadn't smoked at all in two years, and there I was smoking around the clock again.
But hey, it was helping, right?
Almost, but not quite.
I go into work at the tail end of my five hundred dollar week, and I'm sitting in the parking lot a half an hour early. As I sat there, my chest just started tightening, and I suddenly couldn't breathe. The longer I stared at that building, the more I felt something horrible was going to happen if I worked the shift--a supervisor would say the one wrong thing and I'd go postal, or I'd break down and lose myself entirely. I didn't know what exactly, I just knew I absolutely could not go into that building.
So I turned around and started driving home. Halfway there I yelled at myself, "What the hell are you doing? You need the money."
So I turned again and went back to work. As I neared the parking lot, I started freaking out again. So I kept driving and decided to head to my friend Amanda's house instead. I get to her driveway and, again, start yelling at myself because I needed the money and things had been going far too well at work and how stupid it would be for me to let that go to waste.
So I turn around and head back to work again. I got there and went inside. I still had five minutes before I had to be on the phone, and the feeling in my stomach just would NOT go away.
In walking through the door, this only got worse. I walked in and everything seemed surreal. Everything appeared twice as clear as it shold have been, but I felt like I wasn't really there. It felt like my head wasn't even attached to my body, only floating above my body instead. People were talking and their words cut through me like knives. Everything seemed TOO real in a way that just didn't make sense to me.
I looked at my boss and told her I thought I was coming down with a cold because I didn't feel myself, and therefore, I didn't know how much of the shift I would actually stay for. She had no problem with that.
I looked at the clock. Damn! Still five minutes to go. Why was time dragging so much?
I went outside and smoked a cigarette. The feelings inide me only magnified, still not making any sense. I felt like I was going to cry again.
Unable to bear it anymore, I went back in and told my boss I just wasn't feeling myself and I had to leave immediately. She didn't fight me, merely told me to feel better and get some rest.
This is one of the worst examples I can think of to convey just what can go through a person's mind when the anxiety, the panic, finally gets the best of you. For god's sake, I was becoming borderline-agoraphobic! The same guy that could never stand to sit inside the house alone was now terrified of going out or dealing with people at all.
Over the next few weeks, I started going through cycles that made me wonder if I was, in fact, bipolar. I'd be high as a kite for a couple weeks, then I'd crash on the third.
The crashes steadily got worse for me. I suddenly became realy focused on my mortality. Up until a certain point in your life, you disassociate yourself from death. It's like you know you're going to die, you know everyone has to--but you still don't fully believe you actually will. SOMEthing will happen to change the one gaurantee life offers. A vampire will fall madly in love with you, medical science will lengthen our lives, clones--anything and everything just to tell yourself it won't REALLY happen to you.
But there I sat, pondering how set in stone the fact that I was going to die one day actually was. How, now that I was getting older, every breath felt like it was bringing me closer to the last. It wasn't just the dying aspect--but the what happens after aspect as well. It dawned on me that as much of a gaurantee as there is with the fact we die, there is none whatsoever about what happens after the fact. What scared me the most was the possibility presenting itself for the first time in my life: That THIS might all be in vain and there is NOTHING after we go. Just blackness and not even a memory after a few hundred years.
It was out of this that my unhealthy fear of killing myself was borne. All the fear and anxiety ruling me made me feel so helpless. I felt like if I still felt this way twenty years from now, I didn't know what the hell I'd do anymore. This knowledge that if I was any type of imbalanced, I probably couldn't be fixed, and therefore would still feel like this down the line--that's what made me think one day I was going to wake up and realize I couldn't do this anymore and just put a stop to all of this.
What struck me as odd about this very frightening feeling was that I'd wanted to die in the past. THIS was not one of those times. For the first time ever I wanted to live, I wanted to die at a nice ripe old age where none of my muscles work anymore and I'm so blind I can't see my dick and I'm wearing diapers.
And THIS is when I suddenly believe I'll end up killing myself?
All these thoughts just kept magnifying and manifesting into the worst period of my life. It's a terrible thing when you fear going insane and you see it happening more than you don't.
But eventually, and I'm still not sure what exactly spawned this, I did break free of this. It all started while watching the movie "What dreams May Come."
It's a very powerful movie. In the first two minutes I watched, my mind suddenly sprang to life and all these little theories and philosophies suddenly sprang to life within me.
To feel my brain actually kicking in for the first time since high school--it made me feel so alive. I came to a lot of realizations in that day--and the things I realized have stuck with me to this day. I have not crashed since then, and that was two months ago.
On the following page you'll find one of the theories I came up with in that timespan. I'm not sure if it's my spiritual belief system, or just an idea for my next book. All I know is that it started the positive cycle that now has me more productive than I've been in ages and more well-balanced than I can ever remember being.

So read on, and keep an open mind. That's what ideas are for, to offer you different ways of looking at things whether or not you choose to believe in them.
So just click right--ow--NOT THERE!!! Down THERE, stupid!

Just another philosophy . . .
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Diagnosis update. . . .