Hi, I'm Tom, I'm here to talk to you about death...
Seriously. After last night, deep in thought, withdrawn from the external world as if in a trance, I finally got to the root cause of my anxiety and neurosis. It's basically this - If I refuse to live, I can't die. Remove myself from the equation by making things as easy, comfortable and non-confrontational as possible and there's no way I'll snuff it whenever my time comes. No amount of reading has ever touched upon this before, although without it I probably would've never even bothered asking the question. And there's a hypothesis to go with it, which I have also tested, quite literally without my conscious knowledge.
About two years ago, I underwent a hernia operation. I had withdrawn from my friends, family, everyone. I even put my girlfriend at the time through absolute hell, and I regret that to this day. She deserved better. That aside, I harbored an irrational yet very "real" fear of death, even though the risk of the operation was minimal. I took that insignificant risk and magnified it to ludicrous proportions. I stopped living, so how could I die? Needless to say, I survived the treatment.
For weeks afterward, I was feeling fantastic. Despite sitting on a couch, immobile for 10 or so hours a day and eating mush, I was quite possibly having peak experiences listening to new records and watching old episodes of Black Books. It was bizzare. But why?
When I gained enough strength to walk again, I was talking to strangers fearlessly, taking risks i'd have otherwise shied away from and became the life of the party. I thought I'd cheated death somehow - that I'd slipped under the anaesthetic and woke up in some fantastic dimension where pain could not befall me and the rigors of life had been ground up and thrown away. I was peaceful, calm and loving. Then, as reality and irrationality caught up with me, I more or less returned to old habits again. Live inside a protective web of denial, forgetfulness and abstraction, and reality can't ever catch up with me.
Now I'm conscious of this fact, Its time for the heavy lifting to begin.
