My journey through pain - 7. Chapter 7 - Alarm

Something bad is going to happen soon and you can’t stop it. You’re in danger! Watch out, it’s going to take your life away from you, it’s going to destroy it. It’s something horrible and it’s coming. It’s coming NOW!

Today in the afternoon I had a very sharp episode where the thoughts above would spear through my mind every few minutes. While the episode was going on, rational thinking was no good. I would just jerk upright in my seat as each wave hit. I was in danger and I couldn’t do anything to stop it! It’s a horrible sensation to have when it’s real. It is also horrible when it is not. I tried to stop the train of thought in its tracks, to analyze it like my doctor told me to do. At first I failed miserably. I was watching an episode of The Office to try and distract myself, but despite the fact that I love the show I could not bring myself to laugh even once. On the contrary, somebody would say something or I would see something which would trigger the alarm in my brain once again. Watch out. Something very bad is going to happen. Has happened. Will happen. You can’t do anything. It’s going to hurt so very much.

The thing that gave the bad thoughts teeth was that just now I am faced with uncertainty about my future on a number of fronts. It generates a lot of anxiety to think that I am not fully in control of my future, but I fought the waves of catastrophic thinking and as the show was ending, I managed to find the chink in the armor of my foe. I kept on fighting, on telling myself to analyze the doomsday thinking. Was it rational? No. Okay, there may be hard times ahead, but I don’t know that for sure. Yes, I may not be fully in control of my future right at this moment, but then again who is? Was I ever in full control? No. It was just an illusion of control, as a course of my life is dictated by far too many factors, many of which I cannot even direct, foresee, or stop. What is happening is that right this moment I know for sure that some of those factors exist, and the illusion of control I had previously is forced to vanish. So okay, I’m not in control of every external factor around me. But I can be in control of how I deal with it.

I can spend the next month obsessing about uncertainties, or I can use the next month to build strength inside me to face whatever the future might bring, good or bad. This sudden alarm that explodes in my brain is not a normal thing. I should not accept it as such and give in to the panic and the cold chills it generates every time it attacks me. There is no danger to me at the moment. I am not in immediate danger. And I am not defenseless. I can drag on these bad thoughts out of the dark recesses where they like to hide and into the light of reason. In my case, I did so by calling someone close to me and going over the structure of the screaming alarm in my head. It took several tries, but right now I have managed to calm down. I have always been prone to imagining the worst, and those neural pathways are not the ones I wish to cultivate any further. Instead of thinking that I will face the worst possible outcome, I should entertain the hope that I will encounter the best one, while preparing for whatever comes. Some small measure of forethought is always useful, but in my case forethought and worry have become warped into this maddening ball of barbed wire that bounces around in my skull, shredding every single thought pattern it crashes into. But it doesn’t have to be this way. If I analyze the root of my alarm, I will find it to be not grounded in reality, but in my distorted imagination of what reality might be like.

So no, I am not in immediate danger. I will not give in to this crippling alarm and freeze in my tracks like a rabbit who goes tharn, paralyzed as the snake winds around its windpipe. I am not a rabbit. I am human being, and I have the help of other human beings around me. I can use reason to defeat animal fear. I can reshape my thoughts and lead them into new pathways, which will become stronger the more I use them. I can literally rewire my brain’s synaptic architecture just by thinking differently. It might take a few tries, I may fail most of the time of the beginning even. It doesn’t matter. With professional help and supporting network around me, I can unlearn my bad mental habits and learn good ones. Eventually, these shrill alarms will stop stabbing at me with their icy-hot blades and go back into the smoke from whence they came. After all, today I fought and regained a measure of my calm, proof that it can be done. Each subsequent battle can only get easier as I get to know my foe even better. And one day, I will have triumphed. Whatever form triumph might take.