Reply #9: Fear of Life [View All]

[RoyGBiv]

The responses to this thread have been interesting to me. This is a subject that is basically taboo in my family, and most of my friends don't know how to discuss it. But, it's something that has been with me since I was very young.

I've realized recently that what I had long thought was an extreme fear of death is actually more like a fear of life, or more specifically, a fear of survival. This may sound weird, but when I was about 7 or 8 I saw the movie When Worlds Collide and for months afterward had vivid and terrifying nightmares about the world being all but destroyed by a meteor impact. It wasn't just the movie; I'd had an interest in science since I could read, and I'd already at that time read about meteor impacts and one of the theories about what had caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The troubling thing about the dreams was that I survived, and I was alone, and suffering. I was always hungry, searching for food, having to fight and kill just to live, and there was no one else there that I loved or that cared one whit for me.

It never struck me at the time that this is what frightened me: living through an apocalyptic event. I also grew up with the fear of nuclear holocaust, saw the move The Day After and had those fears intensified. Again, this fell into the realm of fear of survival, but I took it at the time as fear of death.

I have an irrational fear of starvation. In manifests itself with my not being able to eat the last cookie, or the last piece of bread, or the last slice of cheese. Many things have contributed to this, including periods of extreme poverty and my mother, the classic pessimist, making jokes about our condition in an attempt to cheer me up, but without her realizing it, actually causing my fears to deepen.

As I said, I saw all this as a fear of death, because I hadn't analyzed it. But I was forced to recently when I found myself in the midst of my first ever period of extended unemployment. I feel panic on a daily basis, and it's not caused by the fear of dying, but the fear of being forced to live through extreme privation. And it's more the fear of the unknown since I'm not actually to that point yet and never have been. This leads to suicidal thoughts, which one would think would be devoid of survivalist fears, but they're not ... what if it goes wrong, what if that bullet just leaves me extremely brain damaged, and my mother and daughter are left caring for me and wondering why with me able to witness their pain. It got very confusing.

I'm not afraid to die. I don't want to die because I have some sort of eternal sense of hope that it will get better. But, I am afraid of surviving the horror of some awful event that I cannot overcome and cannot forsee.

Hope that made some degree of sense.