MP: Fear and Death. Wait, for Real?
Yep, for real. This bout of existential musing on the topics of fear and death brought to you by Nezu's crazy brain.
What do you fear? I fear a lot of things, but most of all I fear that I will cease to matter. That the people I care about will cease to care about me. It's strange, because I certainly don't have any indication that that's going to happen, but it's always there. Any hint that a friend might move away, for example, fills me with a kind of panicky sadness that I have to stifle as quickly as possible before they notice. I mean, it's irrational anyway. Someone moving away isn't the same as them no longer wanting my friendship, but that's the fear that gets triggered.
I don't want them to know I'm afraid, though, because then I might appear clingy, and clingyness is a cardinal sin. If there's one sure way to drive people away from you, in my experience, it's to need them.
Wow. Distrustful of others much, Nezu?
But yeah, that's a fear, too. I fear not being self-sufficient. I fear the degree to which I need my friends, because it makes me so vulnerable. It's a huge part of my self-concept that I can take care of myself, and take care of everyone else, too, if it comes to that. To admit need is one of the hardest things in the world for me. Even little things. And when friends come through for me like it was no big deal at all, like when my friend owldolatrous got up at insane-early o-clock to take me to get my MRI last month, it about makes me cry those weird tears you get when someone is nice to you unexpectedly.
Or am I the only one who gets those tears?
And then I feel like kind of a jerk for underestimating my friend. I mean, it's not like he's giving me a kidney (to steal a turn of phrase I once heard him use) by driving me to an early appointment, and certainly I'd do the same for him in a heartbeat and with no sense of it being a big deal at all. It makes me aware that I don't trust him, somehow, and I know I have no reason for that mistrust but my own scars left over from childhood abandonments.
Taking another dimension, I also fear fear. Late one night when sleep was elusive I was thinking about whether or not I feared death, and I realized that it's meaningless to fear death, because death itself is unknowable. But I definitely fear dying in terror. When my brain is running away with me in the wee hours of the morning, when I'm half-dozing and almost asleep, I sometimes wake up to a full cardio-workout racing heart and trembling muscles, because in my half-sleep I've shifted, caused the mattress to tremble, and think it's an earthquake.
Why is an earthquake so scary? I've lived through dozens, almost all of them small things that disturb a few items on shelves and do little else. But I also lived through the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, and then people died. And I was a geology major for a little while, once upon a time. I know for certain that where I live is highly geologically unstable, and overdue for a large-scale earthquake that could be ten times bigger than the Loma Prieta quake.
I also know that millions of people live here, building standards here are some of the most stringent in the world, and while I might lose property, and will definitely have to deal with chaos, the likelihood is I'd survive even the coming "big one."
But something about the idea of being trapped in a collapsed building terrifies me like nothing else. That, or crashing on an airplane. Falling to my death. I don't fear the death itself so much as the terror that would accompany it. I think, anyway. Sometimes I wish I didn't have quite such a vivid imagination.
Of course I also don't want to die. I have so much I want to do yet. So much life waiting for me. So I fear death in the sense that I dread the fact that there will be, at some point, an end. As a religious person I ought to have faith in the cycles of death and rebirth. That ought to be enough for me. And yet somehow the longer I'm alive, the more I cling to life, the more I realize there is more life than I can grasp. And the greedier I become to have as much life as possible.
I'm not really going anywhere with this, by the way, if you're wondering when I'm going to get to my point. There isn't one. I'm just feeling a little crazy and a little lonely, and decided I'd write the crazy down for a change instead of just drowning it out with other stuff. That said, maybe I should put on some clothes, go down to the gym, and try to drown it out.
What do you fear? I fear a lot of things, but most of all I fear that I will cease to matter. That the people I care about will cease to care about me. It's strange, because I certainly don't have any indication that that's going to happen, but it's always there. Any hint that a friend might move away, for example, fills me with a kind of panicky sadness that I have to stifle as quickly as possible before they notice. I mean, it's irrational anyway. Someone moving away isn't the same as them no longer wanting my friendship, but that's the fear that gets triggered.
I don't want them to know I'm afraid, though, because then I might appear clingy, and clingyness is a cardinal sin. If there's one sure way to drive people away from you, in my experience, it's to need them.
Wow. Distrustful of others much, Nezu?
But yeah, that's a fear, too. I fear not being self-sufficient. I fear the degree to which I need my friends, because it makes me so vulnerable. It's a huge part of my self-concept that I can take care of myself, and take care of everyone else, too, if it comes to that. To admit need is one of the hardest things in the world for me. Even little things. And when friends come through for me like it was no big deal at all, like when my friend owldolatrous got up at insane-early o-clock to take me to get my MRI last month, it about makes me cry those weird tears you get when someone is nice to you unexpectedly.
Or am I the only one who gets those tears?
And then I feel like kind of a jerk for underestimating my friend. I mean, it's not like he's giving me a kidney (to steal a turn of phrase I once heard him use) by driving me to an early appointment, and certainly I'd do the same for him in a heartbeat and with no sense of it being a big deal at all. It makes me aware that I don't trust him, somehow, and I know I have no reason for that mistrust but my own scars left over from childhood abandonments.
Taking another dimension, I also fear fear. Late one night when sleep was elusive I was thinking about whether or not I feared death, and I realized that it's meaningless to fear death, because death itself is unknowable. But I definitely fear dying in terror. When my brain is running away with me in the wee hours of the morning, when I'm half-dozing and almost asleep, I sometimes wake up to a full cardio-workout racing heart and trembling muscles, because in my half-sleep I've shifted, caused the mattress to tremble, and think it's an earthquake.
Why is an earthquake so scary? I've lived through dozens, almost all of them small things that disturb a few items on shelves and do little else. But I also lived through the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, and then people died. And I was a geology major for a little while, once upon a time. I know for certain that where I live is highly geologically unstable, and overdue for a large-scale earthquake that could be ten times bigger than the Loma Prieta quake.
I also know that millions of people live here, building standards here are some of the most stringent in the world, and while I might lose property, and will definitely have to deal with chaos, the likelihood is I'd survive even the coming "big one."
But something about the idea of being trapped in a collapsed building terrifies me like nothing else. That, or crashing on an airplane. Falling to my death. I don't fear the death itself so much as the terror that would accompany it. I think, anyway. Sometimes I wish I didn't have quite such a vivid imagination.
Of course I also don't want to die. I have so much I want to do yet. So much life waiting for me. So I fear death in the sense that I dread the fact that there will be, at some point, an end. As a religious person I ought to have faith in the cycles of death and rebirth. That ought to be enough for me. And yet somehow the longer I'm alive, the more I cling to life, the more I realize there is more life than I can grasp. And the greedier I become to have as much life as possible.
I'm not really going anywhere with this, by the way, if you're wondering when I'm going to get to my point. There isn't one. I'm just feeling a little crazy and a little lonely, and decided I'd write the crazy down for a change instead of just drowning it out with other stuff. That said, maybe I should put on some clothes, go down to the gym, and try to drown it out.