Those of you who know me very, very well – well, really only my husband knows me well enough to have discovered this about me – know that I am apt to diagnose all manner of illnesses based purely on the medical education I’ve received via MSN Health and Today Show segments. My husband found particularly amusing my assertion that diabetes is passed down primarily by female relatives. And on more than one occasion, my diagnoses have proved profoundly off-base. But I care not.
In the spirit of avoiding costly therapy and mind-altering, libidio killing drugs, I’ve been working to diagnose this terrible bout of anxiety I’ve been suffering from and denying for far too long. And it seems that once you figure out what’s wrong with yourself, you can start working on a cure, n’est-ce pas? So here’s what I’ve come up with:
It has become blindingly apparent that I have a phobic personality. And I’ve decided that I suffer from three main phobias:
1.) Thanatophobia/Necrophobia: fear of one’s own death.
2.) Gerontophobia: fear of growing old (also defined as “hatred or fear of the elderly,” which I find kind of hilarious).
3.) Agoraphobia: an anxiety disorder related to the fear of being in public places. Also related to my fear of Wal-Mart, particularly the ones in North Texas on Sunday afternoons.
The fear of death has been plagueing me for almost two years now, and the thing that set it all off was quite unexpected. I was 23 at the time, and I went to an amazingly fun party and was feelingly unusually young and attractive. And for some reason, it suddenly hit me that it wouldn’t last forever – the good times, the ridiculous consumption of alcohol, my unwrinkled skin and ability to get away with a shockingly short skirt – it would all be over one day.
But what am I REALLY afraid of? The unknown of the Great Beyond? Absolutely. It plagues me that if there’s nothing after this life, what’s the point of anything? I was raised in a Christian church (a pentacostal church – that’s a whole other story) and was taught to believe the standard heaven/hell concept: we die, we go to some semi-transparent cloudy place a few lightyears away, we’re judged for all the s***t we did in life, and then you get to stay and hang with Ghandi or you get rejected and they send you a bit further south. But the thing is, if you get to stay, the Christian idea of heaven doesn’t sound like too much fun. You get to pray all day, every day, and everything is perfect. And for me, it’s the naughty, imperfect stuff that makes life so fun. In the words of Frederick Nietzshe, “In heaven, all of the interesting people are missing.”
So it stands to reason that my thanatophobia is directly related to my gerontophobia. The obvious reason for my fear of growing old is that doing so means that death is imminent. Well, more imminent than it has been for the first part of your life. And then of course there are the standard reasons: loss of memory, loss of spouse, loss of teeth, loss of bowel control, loss of good looks, freedom, driver’s license, friends, etc. Senility will sneak in like a slow and methodical thief, stealing pieces of you here and there until one day you don’t recognize your own face in the mirror. I guess that’s the one redeeming quality of dementia – it takes you down in a dreary haze so thick you have no sense of what’s happening, and then you’re gone.
Goodness, I’m depressing myself.
The rational part of my brain knows that there is no need to worry about these things. First off, they’re inevitable. And they’re inevitable for everyone. The universe isn’t singling me out. We’re all going to grow old and die. I want to believe like the old man talking on “Dark Side of the Moon.” Why should I be afraid of dying? We all have to go someday. And despite my disdain for the Christian teachings I was immersed in as a child, a few choice verses have stuck with me, most notably “Don’t worry about tomorrow, tomorrow will worry about itself” (or something to that effect; I put it in red because I think Jesus said that; and while we’re on the subject, please note that if I’m ever widely quoted in a religious text, I would like my words to be in pink). But no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to reason with myself, and there is a dark cloud of crippling fear perpetually residing in my head. I feel powerless against it.
Now, the agoraphobia is something I might succesfully conquer one day. I believe my case is relatively mild. Not so mild that I can function in the manner of person without agoraphobia, but not so severe that I can’t set one fabulously stilettoed foot out the door. My condition is definitely worsened when I have to go out in public toute seule. For example, if I’m in a busy place buying a sandwich or a cup of coffee, and someone is standing behind me in line, my heart starts beating faster and I start breathing hard and I have a very strong and hard-to-resist urge to run out of there screaming. I never have, of course, which is how I know my case is mild. But I see that everyone else in those situations could care less, and they go about their business with an ease and confidence that I can only dream of. They don’t care about anyone around them, and I think that’s why I get so wildly out of sorts when I’m in that setting. I hate being surrounded by single-minded gluttons – you know who I’m talking about. The lady with her king-sized Eddie Bauer stroller and matching screeching toddler in line at Starbucks. The well-fed sorority girls splitting a double-fudge-espresso brownie. ANYONE standing in line for theater food at the movies. And foreigners – don’t get me started on foreigners, especially Europeans, with their weird shoes and dumbfounded, open-mouthed grins. Ha! You got me. I’m a judgemental stereotyper of all those around me. I think this phobia is rooted in my distaste for people in general. They all make me very uncomfortable. There’s a good chance that you make me very uncomfortable.
I’m just a snob when it comes to the people I let into my life. I’ll never be the sort of person who can blindly make friends with anyone. Am I lonely? Occasionally. But I thoroughly enjoy the company of myself, and when I do spend times with friends, I am deeply content and unburdened by the symptoms of shallow friendships: small talk, petty jealousies, feigned enthusiasm for the goings-on in their uninteresting lives, the excessive consumption of alcohol requisite at boring dinner parties. Nothing is worse for your liver than bad friends.
I must say, we artsy types are cursed with being painfully introspective. But what would the world be without Lolita, the Mona Lisa, A Streetcar Named Desire, and the countless other embodiments of the angsty comraderie between man and our right to revel in our humanness and challenge the universe. It’s an instinct which we cannot help. The dog barks, the bird flies south, and the girl invariably questions all.
