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Please note: This entry has nothing whatsoever to do with delusional disorders, but I really liked the title and wanted to go ahead and use it.
Dammit.
I could just sit and say the word dammit over and over like 1000 times and not
at all get the sense that it's an unreasonable thing to do. It doesn't help, or even make me feel any better, but it does seem like the thing that I should be doing. Sometimes I just feel anxiety for no reason at all, and I expect that amazingly bad things will happen like rocks will start falling from the sky or I'll spontaneously burst into flames. Sometimes I try to imagine the absolutely worst thing that could ever possibly happen to me, and then I start to wish that it would just go on and happen already so that I could get on with the rest of my life. Then I realize how monumentally stupid a thing that is to wish for, and then I start to think that maybe I'm getting to be just that stupid because my brain is shutting down, or shrinking or something, and then I panic again because maybe this is the absolute worst thing that could possibly happen to me. But then I think, hey, this is not so bad after all, and I go back to sleep.
And I sleep for days and days and I dream wondrous dreams. In my dreams I'm walking in the sand, and I look back over my footprints, and the footprints of my flying purple monkey friends. I notice that, over the course of my life, the flying purple monkeys are always with me, except in times of trouble, where I only see one set of footprints. I ask them, "Friends, why do you abandon me in my times of need?" and then Pepe, King of the Flying Purple Monkeys, says to me "Dear, dear child! We would never abandon you, specially in your times of need! It was when you needest us most that we carried you." And I point out to Pepe that I can totally tell the difference between my own footprints and the footprints of Flying Purple Monkeys. He just laughs and flies away, flinging his purple crap at me as he goes. Then I wake up.
Dammit dammit dammit.
I know other people who have anxiety and panic like a million times worse than me. They'll just be sitting there and all the sudden freak out and hyperventilate or start screaming or whatever. Kind of like how a cat will be sitting in the middle of the floor of the living room and then just suddenly fly off under a chair or into another room, for absolutely no reason, like they think something is chasing them, or they see an invisible mouse. In old-timey days folks would have seen that and said that cats must be seeing ghosts that we can't see, and even though I totally do not believe in ghosts, I can totally totally see how all those old-timey folks would think that cats could see them.
Because cats are so weird. This must be kind of like anxiety and I wonder if we could test anti-anxiety medication by setting a cat in the middle of a living room and timing how long it takes to freak out. I think I have a bright future ahead of me in preclinical pharmacology.
Cats though are like some of those people who have anxiety for no reason at all. Like, a regular person might have anxiety over a death or a new baby or whatever, and then they go talk to other folks who've had babies or lost loved ones, and then maybe they feel a little better. But for weird anxiety people,all you can really say is "Get over it," or "Just chill out."
I'm not really sure, but I don't think this helps.
I don't have an anxiety disorder, it's just a big change going on, and they say that this is a natural part of the grieving process. It doesn't feel natural, though, or at least as much as to say that intense, searing pain is a natural part of the "Being Burned Alive" process.
I don't know why they say it's a process, anyway. That makes it sound like cheese. But it's not just something you do anymore; now it's all a process you go through, and it's all broken down and categorized.
(Note: It seems to me I spent most of my formative years in Catholic schools being taught that God made us all different, and most of my young adult years reading psychology that says we're all exactly the same. We all grieve the same way and react the same way to certain things, and that's why the police can tell you how a criminal beats his dog by the trail of Cheeto crumbs he left at a rape scene. There seem to be very little variation in behavior patterns, because if there were they could never break down and categorize things like this. On the other hand, what the hell do I know?)
Anyway, I don't remember all the stages of grief, but I do know that denial is one of the very first ones. Unfortunately, I seem to have worked through all my denial. I say it's unfortunate because it was a really nice place to be, where you don't feel any pain. Denial is kind of like an anesthetic that the surgeon gives you to numb you up right before he cuts open your chest. The difference is that anesthetics usually don't wear off 15 minutes into the operation.
After denial somewhere comes what they call bargaining, which is not exactly what it sounds like. It sounds like a yard sale where you bicker over the price of a tacky floor lamp. The reality is that, if it is a yard sale, it's more like one where you have to buy all the crap in the yard; bargaining is just you thinking you can set your own price for it.
Also mixed in there is anger and depression, which is harder to recognize of course in people who are mostly angry and depressed all the time anyway. And then acceptance, which might be the easiest to understand but also seems to suck the most. Someone once said that what you grieve is not so much the past you lost, but the future you'll never have. I think it was Kierkegaard. Either him, or Pepe, the Flying Purple Monkey King.
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