MARK MORGAN
A sudden and terrifying jolt through my body wakes me up, like stepping into a cold shower.
It always begins the same.
I should be accustomed to it by now given how often it occurs, but it never fails to surprise me—my eyes fly open, and the familiar dread hits fast and furious—pure fear and panic. In that moment I know, not wonder, but know, I am going to die.
My doctor has told me that I have some—a little—panic disorder, which sounds like being told you are a little pregnant. But I assume that it is his way of breaking the news to me. I can now add this to my other wonderful awards, which include generalized anxiety, obsession/compulsion, and depression.
A delightful combination.
As soon as I have finally managed to calm myself down after waking up in a sweat and believe I’m not actually dying, the anxiety rears its ugly head to remind me—once again—why I really should in fact be scared shitless. All of the past and future, along with the day’s activities, run through my head: what I didn’t get done, what I need to do. I turn and toss several times—vain attempts to fall back to sleep.
But the worries persist.
The damage done.
BOOM!
By a certain point I am completely aware of how long I have been worrying, and then that becomes my greatest worry: that I worry too much. Welcome OCD, I knew you were in here somewhere. And that worry is the black-hole worst of all. The calculus equation for which there is no solution. None.
By this time, the hamster wheel that is my brain has built up a good amount of momentum. Here’s the drill:
The covers come off and on, off and on, half a dozen times. Maybe more. I know what’s coming next and I don’t want to feel it. I don’t want to deal with it. I go to the bathroom and splash water on my face, I turn on the TV and go online. But it’s unavoidable. The pit in my stomach and lump in my throat both show up, right on time, side by yes, fucking side. They are nothing if not dependable.
I cannot seem to lessen the sadness, the depression.
I wonder: Am I addicted to thinking?
I read about that somewhere.
If that’s the case, it’s quite unfortunate—hugely unfortunate—because my drug of choice is with me every moment of every day, and every night, day in and day out. It’s me. What—or better yet, who—wakes me up at night is me. And it doesn’t matter what problem, worry, or concern is going on in my life at that moment.
It’s all interchangeable.
My brain will chew on it, stew on it, simmer, mull it over, roll it around, and pull it apart like taffy. It will have anticipated the outcome. And 99 times out of 100, it will have predicted the worst—it is programmed to scare itself shitless. Even when the outcome proves the inverse to be true in real life: that 99 percent of the things I worry about never actually occur, never come to fruition, never manifest—the program never learns from the exercise. Never. It never adjusts itself to the real-life end result, like a data-gathering, self-learning computer algorithm would do.
And funnily enough, I am obviously aware of all of this.
Of the deficiency.
Of the same exact virus in my operating system.
I’m writing about it right now.
Mark knows this.
I know this.
I.
Know.
This.
This is a fact, a truth. There is no disputing it. But my brain will not cooperate. It won’t register the information properly, or won’t accept it. Maybe it doesn’t want to. Either way, it just doesn’t stick. Compute. And just like a merry-go-round, I will know all of this when I go to sleep tonight.
Knowing that my mind is not me.
Knowing that my thoughts are not me.
That my fears are not me.
And then a sudden and terrifying jolt running through my body will wake me up.
And again, it begins.