This post talks about severe mental health issues, anxiety, and death. There’s no great revelation in here, and it’s the same concept a lot of professionals would try to hammer home, but it took a specific way of thinking about this for me to feel relief, so maybe it’ll help someone else.
There’s a strong chance I had the worst week of my life just now.
I’ve dealt with pretty bad mental health my whole adult life, but on Wednesday, things took a really bad turn and I suddenly started to become overwhelmed with anxiety. I get a lot of bogus anxiety about random crap, paperwork etc, that generally doesn’t resolve, but it’s not too bad. This time – death, my own death, an image in my own head repeating fractally. The more I try to push it out, the firmer it stays, the more I become obsessed with the before, the moment, the after. Comes with the physical works – sweaty palms, heart flutters, nausea, gross stuff. Crying and screaming into a pillow at 1AM. This repeated every day, bleeding out from the evening into afternoons, mornings, everything.
Now, there are all sorts of logical and philosophical answers to this fear – take your pick from an endless variety. Most of us don’t really understand the process, there are a thousand drugs to help, by definition you cannot experience non-experience, etc. The problem is that an anxious brain is not interested in these things. It panics, it fixates, it tries to perceive and understand something that cannot really be properly anticipated or understood. You can really fall down this forever, as there is no satisfactory result of all the rumination. Memento mori? What’s next, press C to crouch?
Trying to avoid the topic is foolish. Avoidance is a basic function of the anxious brain – and we certainly don’t want it running the show. We do not want to be hyper-vigilant for things we think may upset us, or remind us of this. The best way to think about pink elephants is to try not to think about pink elephants. And the topic of death is omnipresent – most games are about killing or destroying some sort of game entity. Most podcasts are about torturous, tragic, soul-deadening murders. Most of our life is spent in the pursuit or process of mashing up dead or dying things in our own mouth to keep the show running 8 hours more.
This brain is desperately searching for an “OFF” switch, something to make this worry go away. I would have sold all my possessions instantly and went to a monastery if I thought that would be a definitive answer. But this is the most epic and fundamental of all fears – such a switch does not exist, or all the people smarter than us would have found it. Endlessly and fruitlessly searching for it produces a drowning feeling without a drop of water. Anyway, I was freshly out of A&E, playing a botmatch in Call of Duty: Black Ops, as one does, and I came across the following thought.
“So, I’ve had the worst nights of my life, and I’m in the middle of another. It’s still here. But really, this has got to be something like 10% better. I’ll take 10% any day of the week.”
And once I saw it this way, I saw a lot of those 10%s. This is an embarassingly dorky way to put it, but man, a lot of those can be stacked together. Medication and good physical exercise are the first ones any doctor will say, but my anxious brain didn’t want to hear it, because none of them are an off switch. But 10%? Sounds about right. The others, well, take your pick from the expanse of our world. I wanted to throw a shoe at my phone when a well-meaning crisis service gave a list of nourishing activies including “look at r/aww on the Reddit app!” – but that’s probably someone’s 10%, though it’s an existence alien to mine. Put enough together, and well, things aren’t so bad. Put enough together, maybe you can actually get to the baseline of how much a healthy brain worries about death. Never gone, but the right amount.
…
The right amount ought to give us some perspective, and maybe motivate us to make this fleeting blink of an eye better for others and ourselves.