(no subject)
Can you imagine if you had been in a coma and woke up? I have been thinking about this because I am not sure if the world is changing faster and more drastically, or if it is staying the same but we are just paying attention to things differently.
I am on vacation and I want to figure out some sort of plan to make my life better. It's not really bad, but I am in a rut and I'm anxious (or something.) So I want to index my anxieties to try to figure it out. I have always had hypochondria. I think it might be a big part of the reason I am so skinny. It's a fear that eating is going to make me sick in some way. When I see a news headline or a commercial about diabetes, for instance, I tend to panic and become irrational about it. There is no family history of it for me, and I avoid the foods and things that cause it, and I am surely not overweight, but none of that stuff matters when I am worried about it. That kind of thing makes me lose my appetite, and it happens so often that it has become a habit, or at least it has exacerbated the habitual lack of appetite. Right now, I am not in the throes of any particular worry, but I really don't know whether I feel hungry or not. I know that I ought to be, and I suspect that I am hungry, but it doesn't seem like it would feel good to eat.
I wonder about whether this is an eating disorder. Everything we learn in popular culture and school about eating disorders is that it means you have an unrealistic view of your body in relation to some standardized expectation. I don't have anything like that. Sometimes it's a lack of appetite that seems to result from worry about illness. But I think the lack can be brought about by anxiety in a more general sense. I can be worried about so many things. I can't bear to watch the news on television because every story can send me into a fit of anxiety over what could go wrong, what could fall apart. And as I wrote in my last entry, the web might be even worse, but it seems to foreground social interactions and relationships so much that I can't avoid it so easily.
I am anxious about evil, and news headlines often trigger me because of this. I wonder, is it worse if people are knowingly and intentionally evil, or mistakenly evil while intending to be virtuous, or evil because they are not sane? When bad news is reported, I am disturbed by it in such a way that I don't get how it is so common to just watch the news every night when you are eating dinner. And often, any of these possibilities are plausible as an explanation, and I want to come to terms with the fact that we live in a world where there is evil, but all of these possibilities are frightening... it's as if my impulse is to understand the story by appeal to reason, but I end up looking at reason as something that is value-neutral, so it just makes it worse.
Sanity makes me feel anxious, because anyone could lose it. You could develop Alzheimer's disease, you could get a concussion and end up with dementia. On the other hand, who really knows how sanity is lost? It's scary to think about if you have chronic worry. The worry becomes a feedback loop - an irrational fear about becoming irrational.
I am probably going to need to talk about these things to someone. I think there must be some way to solve my worry. I am going to work on this.
I am on vacation and I want to figure out some sort of plan to make my life better. It's not really bad, but I am in a rut and I'm anxious (or something.) So I want to index my anxieties to try to figure it out. I have always had hypochondria. I think it might be a big part of the reason I am so skinny. It's a fear that eating is going to make me sick in some way. When I see a news headline or a commercial about diabetes, for instance, I tend to panic and become irrational about it. There is no family history of it for me, and I avoid the foods and things that cause it, and I am surely not overweight, but none of that stuff matters when I am worried about it. That kind of thing makes me lose my appetite, and it happens so often that it has become a habit, or at least it has exacerbated the habitual lack of appetite. Right now, I am not in the throes of any particular worry, but I really don't know whether I feel hungry or not. I know that I ought to be, and I suspect that I am hungry, but it doesn't seem like it would feel good to eat.
I wonder about whether this is an eating disorder. Everything we learn in popular culture and school about eating disorders is that it means you have an unrealistic view of your body in relation to some standardized expectation. I don't have anything like that. Sometimes it's a lack of appetite that seems to result from worry about illness. But I think the lack can be brought about by anxiety in a more general sense. I can be worried about so many things. I can't bear to watch the news on television because every story can send me into a fit of anxiety over what could go wrong, what could fall apart. And as I wrote in my last entry, the web might be even worse, but it seems to foreground social interactions and relationships so much that I can't avoid it so easily.
I am anxious about evil, and news headlines often trigger me because of this. I wonder, is it worse if people are knowingly and intentionally evil, or mistakenly evil while intending to be virtuous, or evil because they are not sane? When bad news is reported, I am disturbed by it in such a way that I don't get how it is so common to just watch the news every night when you are eating dinner. And often, any of these possibilities are plausible as an explanation, and I want to come to terms with the fact that we live in a world where there is evil, but all of these possibilities are frightening... it's as if my impulse is to understand the story by appeal to reason, but I end up looking at reason as something that is value-neutral, so it just makes it worse.
Sanity makes me feel anxious, because anyone could lose it. You could develop Alzheimer's disease, you could get a concussion and end up with dementia. On the other hand, who really knows how sanity is lost? It's scary to think about if you have chronic worry. The worry becomes a feedback loop - an irrational fear about becoming irrational.
I am probably going to need to talk about these things to someone. I think there must be some way to solve my worry. I am going to work on this.