So I first thought it was important not to capitalize the title of this blogpost 'cause, well, no-one wants to see a whole load of DEATH on their Monday evening (even though that's how you may be feeling on your Monday morning), nor on their Wednesday morning (which is when I'm writing this post for you all).
This post isn't about dealing with death or my reaction/coping techniques with deaths i have personally faced in my life, which, in 20 years, I'm glad is a very, very small number. It is instead just a little bit of me talking about my reaction to *my own* death at various stages throughout my life.
YES, I AM GOING TO DIE SOME DAY and for me to really sit and think about this fact is a truly, truly fucking terrifying thing to me. Actually even as I'm writing this my heart is beating super fast and I'm probably on the verge of a panic attack (I have to make a work call later today though too so
it's probably just that that I don't like).
When I was little I used to have the same dream over and over again and, even when it wasn't this specific dream and just something similar, every night I would wake up crying and call for my Mum. This dream usually involved some sort of situation in which I was going to die and it was always extremely dramatic. This went on for quite a while until I was about ten years old maybe, I can't exactly remember but I know that it happened a LOT.
My Mum used to go out when I was a kid and would often get a babysitter to look after us. On one of these nights, when I was maybe ten or eleven, I decided to read 'Vicky Angel'. This is a Jacqueline Wilson children's book if you didn't already know, I was a HUGE fan of Wilson's books as a kid but this one just totally freaked me out. The basic storyline is a girl (her name escapes me) loses her best friend Vicky in a car/road accident and it tells of how she copes with her death. I'm not sure what made me cry or freak out so hard, whether it was the death part or the coping part or just the book's themes collectively but I cried so hard my Mum had to come home to make sure I wasn't going to go into full-on break-down mode. (Thanks Jacqueline, for the mental scarring).
I used to go out with a boy who I often used to talk to about this subject yet I was always met with the ol' "I'm not afraid of death, it's inevitable" typical dickhead response. Not that you're a dickhead if you aren't afraid of death but I hate talking about this subject when the person I'm talking to thinks the correct way of dealing with it is to tell me death is inevitable. I know that. That's the problem.
What made me write this post is that yesterday or the day before I was sat watching tv and then all of a sudden just started to think of how I'm going to grow old and die one day and I can't stop it. I didn't just think about it but I *really* sat on it for a few minutes to the point where I totally phased out and had to physically snap myself out of it (this tends to happen quite often). Getting like that is sort of like when you say a word over and over again until it doesn't sound like a word any more. That's what I always do, until death seems like such a real prospect that it could never ever possibly be real or it could never happen to me.
What I have worked out is that I basically have major FOMO, with anything in life, fear of missing out hits me hard and dying is like an extreme version of FOMO just without any way of getting around it. This phobia sounds very trivial because everybody is eventually met with their own death *some*day but death anxiety is just absolutely bloody awful. It's like being in a Saw game, having a ticking timer right beside you as you're about to be met with your worst fear whilst enduring some kind of trap that likens to life and yes I just turned Saw into an allegory for life.
All I'm going to do is bury my head in the sand and hope that, when I get to be an old woman, I hope death doesn't scare me half as much because I'm content with everything I've done in my however-many-years-I've-spent-on-this-earth.
Here is something I found online whilst researching this topic, it describes all the different kinds of death anxiety.
(thanks for sticking and reading)
xxrachelen
All I'm going to do is bury my head in the sand and hope that, when I get to be an old woman, I hope death doesn't scare me half as much because I'm content with everything I've done in my however-many-years-I've-spent-on-this-earth.
Here is something I found online whilst researching this topic, it describes all the different kinds of death anxiety.
(thanks for sticking and reading)
xxrachelen
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