I don't mean that in a suicidal way. I love my life. I love what happens in it, and I love the people in it. I love my job, my family, and my friends. I love my town and my home. I love my pets. I love everyone's pets, actually. I want all of these things to continue for as long as they can.
But it does. It makes me hate sometimes the actual act of living carried out over days and weeks and months and years. Maybe living isn't the best way to put it. I hate my conscious mind. I hate what my conscious mind does to me. Basically my mind is a TARDIS and my anxiety is the Master who hijacks it and turns it into a paradox machine. There totally aren't any flaws in that analogy, right?
I just needed a little comic relief from this, because I am having a lot of trouble stabilizing myself lately.
When I am by myself, be it in my best friend's basement after she's fallen asleep or staring at the blank white box of this blog before I fill it with words, I am not okay. And people try. They really do. They tell me I'm fine and they listen to me, but they shrug off my fears and continue on with their lives. But I want to shake them and say, "Don't you see? Don't you understand that there could be something wrong with me, that I could be dying? That I could never get married? Never have a daughter and braid her hair? Never go to a bar for a legal drink? Never travel out of the country? Don't you realize that one pain in my head could be the first sign of something that could take everything that I ever planned for myself and throw it out the window just because of a bad gene or because one goddamn cell in my body formed the wrong way? Don't you see how close to dying we all could be?"
But that's not fair. They should never think the way that I do. I would never want anyone I care about to have these feelings because genuinely feeling like you are going to die is far worse than any time I have ever claimed to be depressed or upset or angry or stressed or anything I have ever imagined. It is the most painful thing I have ever felt in my entire life. And I'm not stupid. I know I'll die someday. I just want to die having accomplished the things I always dreamed of. But now, I'm afraid to have dreams at all. I'm afraid of becoming a would-have-been.
I don't understand how anyone likes being human. Being a species intelligent enough to form religion to cope with death and create a moral code, to make machines fly in the sky, to explore other planets and smash atoms together to form elements that don't even exist in nature... being human has not protected me from having a mind that knows better than to turn on itself like this. I look around and I think about dying. I don't understand how people are so fucking lucky that they can have a persistent headache or a pain in their chest and not worry about it. (Unless it's necessary to worry, but everyone else is so good at knowing when it is necessary to worry.) Everyone focuses on the future because they feel like they have one.
And here I am, and I want to indulge in those thoughts too. I do. I could be at an exciting time in my life because the whole world could be ahead of me. I want to think about the degree I may pursue and my future career. I want to think about being a wife and a mother someday and the stupid things I want to do with my family and where I want to get older and what vacations we will take and what kind of house will I buy. But I can't. Every time I do, I start getting achingly sad and scared because I can't shake the feeling that I will die from something before any of that happens. All I want is to look forward to the bright future I have ahead of me, and instead, any real thought I put into it nearly ends in tears because I don't want to die. I just want to have a happy life but all I can imagine is dying before any of it happens. These hypothetical situations, ones that probably won't even actually take place, are the most heartbreaking things that have ever happened to me.
Yet I carry on. I go through the motions. I graduated high school. I'm going to college with a full-ride for the next four years. But I can't even find any point to it anymore. Degrees are for people with a future. Degrees are for people who grow old. I don't know how much longer I can handle thoughts like this because they are tearing at every single good thing I have in my life. Even you. And I absolutely refuse to let it affect you.
And at night, oh god, at night. It's bad at night. I can't even close my eyes to go to sleep without trying to calm myself down. Why? Because I'm absolutely terrified of dying in my sleep. Why on earth is this even an issue? For one - if I have something so wrong with me that I could die in my sleep, not going to sleep isn't going to magically make me live a long life. Also - people don't just die in their sleep for no reason. But this is what I do at night. This is where my mind goes, every night now, without fail, and I am beyond the point of rationalizing with myself. I'm beyond the point of help, I fear.
And all of that, all of that is just with myself. I see death everywhere. It absolutely amazes me I've gone years without losing anyone that I love. All I think about anymore is how many people die in car accidents in a given year or how many people are victims of rape and murder and all of these horrible things that could happen that I can't prevent. I worry when it rains and I know people who are driving. I worry when my friends or parents or boyfriend goes out of town. I worry incessantly, and it is none of these people's faults that they have lives and want to do things and actually live like functional human beings and it is not fair for me to worry like this and make them feel sorry for me or for things that they shouldn't. It's absolutely ridiculous of me to feel any of this. I am genuinely angry with myself for it.
I don't know how I am able to keep myself together. I don't know how I'm going to wait until August 8 to go to a counseling appointment. I never should have let myself go this far without talking to someone. My biggest regret in high school is not sacrificing my pride to talk to a therapist sooner. I could have gotten a handle on this before it got this out of control. Back then, it used to be an annoyance. It used to bother me sometimes at night, and I would go through spells, but it would fade and I could make it day to day. But I'm struggling here and I need help from someone and I just don't know what I'm supposed to do until then.
Despite any external forces, I'm terrified that this might be the worst summer I've ever had.
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