You know what has terrified me? To not exist. To wake up one day and know I am old and to be afraid. To watch people I love struggle with the same thing.
Things that terrify me. My therapist asked me if I had ever been terrified in my life. I often have very vivid, very real dreams. I am usually being chased and I am fearing death. But not in the abstract. Its that raw terror you feel when you take a misstep on the stairs and it feels like you are going to fall. That moment, it wakes us up. Sometimes is like my entire night is spent like that, I’ll wake up and go right back into the dream. I feel terrified.
My therapist asked if I had ever been terrified like that not in a dream. Nothing immediately came to mind. I can’t recall a trauma that made me feel that raw fear. I thought, maybe, when I spent that week in jail. I was terrified, but surprisingly not for the reason I should have been terrified. You know that time, when my face was pressed against a drain in the shower. I remember feeling this terror there, but not when I was being hurt physically. It was when I had time, seemingly endless time. I became terrified.
It feels like the same terror I remember growing up. I cannot remember being a person before 7/8th grade. Does that make sense? I know intellectually things happened but I don’t remember experiencing those things. The moments that have stuck even vaguely do not feel like they happened to me.
The one thing I can remember is growing up terrified. Terrified of death. There I said it. It makes other people uncomfortable when I bring it up. No one ever wants to have a real conversation about death. But being back in my childhood room, its been happening more and more. I used to imagine what it was to not exist and become so afraid I had to sometimes sleep in my parents room because it was the only way to fall asleep. I feel like everyone goes through life trying to forget we are all going to die. The only thing all humans are entitled to is death.
I am also afraid of being old and having never resolved these feelings. I hear you boomer, when you say it happens in a blink of an eye. But I do not want to wake up one day and know I am old, that I have few years ahead of me. It seems like most people never stop and really process or they hold onto beliefs that make the reality more tolerable.
I want to believe. I want to believe all my friends who died are not just gone. Its easier to process other people’s deaths when you can believe they are not really gone. I want to believe that my grandparents are somewhere together. I want to believe for my mother who wants to believe. I want to believe for my father who, like me, cannot really believe. My father who has spent his entire life working hard and now he is 65 and having to face is own mortality. I think he is drinking me. That is what has terrified me since I was a child. I remember my father telling me about death, that he is afraid of death. I know if he feels even a sliver of what I feel then he too is terrified. I need us to find a spiritual path, to delude ourself with belief or resolve ourselves to reality.
I need my father to deal with his own death so I can someday deal with me. This overwhelming fear is not something I can abide forever. Sometimes I wonder if I can get through life like other people. It feels harder for me to have my brain gloss over this stark reality than other people.
Sometimes I feel the need to write because it is the only thing that can make this real. It is the only way I know what I know reflects something in the world. It is the great equalizer and the great destroyer of humanity. No one wants to acknowledge it.