Life has become a lot more painful lately.
Case in point, what happened last night when I got out of bed to go out to the living room to watch stuff with Le Gang.
I immediately became very dizzy. And not the relatively safe, harmless kind of dizzy either. It was more like the head swimming, nausea inducing, headache causing lind of dizziness you’d get after s severe blow to the head.
My life is so fun.
Oh, and I was seeing those damned dots everywhere too. Like someone had just taken a photo with a flash.
At first, I tried to just go ahead and get ready to go watch stuff. But that barely lasted a minute before I realized I was way too sick and dizzy to do so.
So I staggered over to slump into this fucking computer chair.
Luckily, this time I didn’t miss.
Then I sat there for a little while just trying to hold myself together and make some kind of sense of my predicament and hopefully not barf.
Spoiler alert : I didn’t barf.
Eventually I remembered that the last attack like this had been caused by my being dehydrated. So when Joe and Julian poked their heads into my room to see what was up with me, I knew what I needed : a tall glass of water.
Which I drank in less than a minute.
Yup. I was dehydrated all right.
Then came a brief but intense sweaty period called me as my body caught up with all the perspiration it had been too dry to do.
Then the fever broke and I cooled off and felt SO much better.
I was then able to join my friends.
More after the break.
Stop trying to escape!
Ironically, this is a topic I’ve been meaning to examine for a long time but kept putting off. In fact, even right now, the bad part of my mind is panicking and trying to make me stop writing about this in favour of something more diary-like.
And you know what that means.
We’ve hit paydirt!
Been thinking a lot about escapism lately., and what a terrible disease it can be.
Because an escapist like me is always looking for the exits. No matter what the situation is, even if it’s quite wonderful, part of us is ready to bolt out the door and head for the hills at any moment.
This leads to a life of constant stress. The escapist can never truly relax because the paranoid weasel at the center of their brain is convinced that the moment you relax they are going to GET you.
Who’s going to get you and what they are planning to do to you when they GET you is unspecified and unknown. It lies beyond the upper limit of fear, where all our most powerful invisible demons and nameless dreads live.
This gives it direct access to the most primitive and powerful parts of our minds. Parts like the reptile brain and the amygdala. Parts that, for very good evolutionary reasons, have the power to bypass reason entirely and put our instincts in control.
Just the thing for generating blind, unreasoning fear that actively suppresses your ability to stop and ask yourself what you’re afraid of.
Because then you’d realize there’s nothing there. Whatever originated the fear is long gone and you’ve been running from the shadows in your own mind all this time.
Because when you are busy panicking and fleeing, you don’t have time to ask whether what you fleeing even real? In fact, if you dig deep enough, you will find that you are running from the fear itself.
That’s how phobias and compulsions work. If there’s a street in your location where you got mugged, the first time you pass it again, it’s the memory that triggers the panic.
But after that, it’s the memory of another terrible thing that happened to you that is associated with that place : your previous panic attack.
And that pattern repeats and reinforces itself till it saturates your mind.
Oh right. I started out talking about escapism, didn’t I?
Looks like I have escaped talking about it again!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.