[anna2468]

I'm not sure what I'm experiencing but I'm very frightened.
For the last couple months my anxiety has been the worst it's ever been. I've struggled with anxiety and depression for years, but this is something else.
I can feel somewhat normal most of the time, but occasionally I'll be consumed with a feeling of total separation from reality. It’s really hard to explain.
So for example, tonight: I was laying in bed trying to fall asleep and I could not stop thinking about how horrible being alive is and how horrible it is that I’ll have to be alive for a long time. I opened my laptop and tried to watch a happy show to bring me out of it, but it seemed pointless. The jokes and smiles and happy music seem foreign, and almost mocking.
I feel completely divorced from humanity, in the sense that everyone seems fine with being alive, while I’m afraid of it.
When I get in this state, it’s almost as if I’ve stumbled into a horror movie. I start to wonder if I’m existing in a hell-like reality that is only meant to make me suffer.

This is incredibly hard to explain and I don’t think I’m doing it justice. Basically, when this happens, I become consumed with the idea that I shouldn’t keep going. My physical body feels like a prison. No amount of soft pillows and blankets can make my body feel comfortable.
Being safe and warm in my own bedroom feels just as terrifying as walking out into the cold night with no shoes or coat. All I can do is take my sleep meds and hope to feel better when I wake up.

This feels like the beginning of the end. This feels like the first steps into total madness. I don’t know what’s going on with me. Can anyone relate to this, even a little bit?

[Unrigged64072835]

Hi Anna, and welcome to PC!

When I was having bad anxiety I would have panic about being alive, but it was more like the whole world was unrealistic and I was the only person in a bubble apart from the world.

Have you seen a psychiatrist for an anti-anxiety med? Or a therapist? Maybe challenging your thoughts would help.

[amicus_curiae]

Your first post - welcome.

Yes, I’ve had similar feelings. My theory about anxiety/panic attacks is that they are a kind of existential crisis caused by the fear of nothingness, of death. I think that the horror that you feel in re being alive and your probability of being alive for a long while might actually be the universal fear of death; the very opposite of what you’re able to express.

“Total separation from reality.” Yes, absolutely. That’s death, isn’t it? The final separation from reality? I’m afraid that I’m quite the Freud revisionist, sorry. I believe that you’re experiencing a kind of living death as a kind of revolution against that final exit that we all fear.

***My words echo thus, in your mind - TSE***

[mote.of.soul]

Hi anna2468, welcome. Yes, I can relate to this quite a bit, you described it very well. Today I said to myself while looking back on the awfulness of it all, maybe I went mad or maybe I am mad. I definitely don't live in the same world as a lot of people, too, that's for real. Yes, it's a version of a hell.

Hang in there and keep trying to find your way out like me. Don't lose the hope.

[dwfieldjr]

Hi Anna welcome to pc I use to have really bad anxiety kind of like yours.

I went to see a cbt therapist and she helped clear a lot of my bad thoughts up.

Do you have insurance? If so you should call them to find a in network therapist and psychiatrist.

Best of luck!

[cool09]

I've had depression, anxiety and detachment the last 40 years. Anxiety can cause derealization like you don't feel real or you're living in a movie or you're outside of yourself.

[Porsche91120]

I feel like this a lot too.....

[AnnaBettina]

You're weird...a similar kind of weirdness hit me recently when I was in my 50s. Grew up in the Bible Belt. Not saying there isn't "something"
about our "essence" which transcends death as I believed for yrs and yrs,
but for whatever reason I awoke one day and suddenly confronted the possibility that this is it. That our physical rots,
decays, and we enter a pure state of nothingness.
Death of all, physical, ego, all we are. As has happened to the billions...and billions...of other human animals who have lived on this earth,
now billions (grasp it) of yrs old. Wow.
That said, when I think what an extremely profound experience we're all having--my God, we're in space, for one thing,
on a damn planet rotating!--yeah,
well, anything is possible and I remind myself not to let my limited human animal eyes get focused on only what it can see...like the grave...what we can't see might be just be angels sitting on a cloud. Who knows when there are universes within universes and dimensions our human animal senses can't perceive (heck, we can't even hear the tones that dogs and cats and other animals can hear right here in this dimension!)
Anything is possible my friend.

PS...Remember, you, me, he, she...we are all animal in pants so best not to get too big for our pants is what I learned along the way.

Originally Posted by amicus_curiae

Your first post - welcome.

Yes, I’ve had similar feelings. My theory about anxiety/panic attacks is that they are a kind of existential crisis caused by the fear of nothingness, of death. I think that the horror that you feel in re being alive and your probability of being alive for a long while might actually be the universal fear of death; the very opposite of what you’re able to express.

“Total separation from reality.” Yes, absolutely. That’s death, isn’t it? The final separation from reality? I’m afraid that I’m quite the Freud revisionist, sorry. I believe that you’re experiencing a kind of living death as a kind of revolution against that final exit that we all fear.

***My words echo thus, in your mind - TSE***

[AnnaBettina]

This is what gets me...considering life, that we're out here on this planet in space, live for a brief while and then disintegrate (not to mention all the hideous other stuff that is a part of this planet)...well, the sane thing is to have anxiety, no? At least for the overwhelming majority of us, that is.
The "crazy" thing is psychiatry, psychology, the minister, the guy down the street saying this anxiety is nuts. What?

Here's what I think may be happening...

Evolution has set up the brain chemicals in such a way that we have can have Super Bowls and think about designer jeans and etc. while we're living this reality of being on planet in space, being in a real sci fi movie. Brain chemicals set up to make us not care that we're going to disintegrate in relatively short time, for example (relative when one considers that the earth is billions....billions...!...of years old).

For those of us with anxiety, though, those "fairy tale"
brain chemicals (good for survival of the species) setup get messed up and some of can then see the gremlin on the airplane wing (remember that Twilight Zone episode?). So, we have to survive and for most of us that means trying to get our brain chemicals back to that "Stepford Wives" kinda sorta deal via usually inadequate pharm drugs.

Some call it an existential crisis. Sh**, if so, why did it happen to me? Why couldn't I have stayed in the same "How nice" mode I was in when I read Becker back in my college days...why did I 40 yrs later suddenly without warning get what he was saying? Ignorance is indeed bliss.

Originally Posted by mote.of.soul

Hi anna2468, welcome. Yes, I can relate to this quite a bit, you described it very well. Today I said to myself while looking back on the awfulness of it all, maybe I went mad or maybe I am mad. I definitely don't live in the same world as a lot of people, too, that's for real. Yes, it's a version of a hell.

Hang in there and keep trying to find your way out like me. Don't lose the hope.

[AnnaBettina]

I didn't welcome you...I didn't reach my hand out, so to speak, across the wide internet and offer it to you. Inexcusable. Especially after you said how frightened you are. Guess I was focused on my own terror...we humans do have a tendency to focus on self...largely why there is so much terror in the world. And terror this is...even the Terror Management Theory.

I can't offer you anything, but perhaps this is very big, that I understand how you sometimes feel that this is a horror movie. I tend to think it is, oh some good things scattering the bad, but largely a horror movie...Super Bowls and yet unspeakable things being done to the guy down the street, in the next country, wherever, and yet we holler and have a "good time" at young guys knocking each other in the head enough in some cases to cause brain damage that doesn't show up until later in life. Human beings...no one is wrapped too tight...guess on some level, even when so repressed, most are freaked out.

So I offer my hand as someone who gets it. And maybe in the process we'll learn how to live a good life in the midst all this madness. Ideally, we'll learn without some drug the animal in pants guy/girl has made in a lab and doesn't know exactly how that drug affects the brain. If not, we'll try to find the meds which can help us to be inured to this wild sci fi movie we're living. Whatever the case, we'll find a way...to paraphrase, hope springs eternal in the heart of the menopausal woman (who once wasa secular nun and here I am with my life paradigms no longer cutting the mustard, so to speak...very hard, an understatement).

A warm hand to you across the Internet, Anna.

Originally Posted by anna2468

I'm not sure what I'm experiencing but I'm very frightened.
For the last couple months my anxiety has been the worst it's ever been. I've struggled with anxiety and depression for years, but this is something else.
I can feel somewhat normal most of the time, but occasionally I'll be consumed with a feeling of total separation from reality. It’s really hard to explain.
So for example, tonight: I was laying in bed trying to fall asleep and I could not stop thinking about how horrible being alive is and how horrible it is that I’ll have to be alive for a long time. I opened my laptop and tried to watch a happy show to bring me out of it, but it seemed pointless. The jokes and smiles and happy music seem foreign, and almost mocking.
I feel completely divorced from humanity, in the sense that everyone seems fine with being alive, while I’m afraid of it.
When I get in this state, it’s almost as if I’ve stumbled into a horror movie. I start to wonder if I’m existing in a hell-like reality that is only meant to make me suffer.

This is incredibly hard to explain and I don’t think I’m doing it justice. Basically, when this happens, I become consumed with the idea that I shouldn’t keep going. My physical body feels like a prison. No amount of soft pillows and blankets can make my body feel comfortable.
Being safe and warm in my own bedroom feels just as terrifying as walking out into the cold night with no shoes or coat. All I can do is take my sleep meds and hope to feel better when I wake up.

This feels like the beginning of the end. This feels like the first steps into total madness. I don’t know what’s going on with me. Can anyone relate to this, even a little bit?

[AnnaBettina]

PS...I was the grocery early this morn and was talking to a checker there. She mentioned Jean Paul Sartre and that started it all about what I call this "existential" depression/terror thing. She understood and gave me, in hindsight what I now see as very good advice..."Don't think too much."

Maybe this was Tolstoy's problem, too. He found that the poor and working class were more happy and hopeful than he. Perhaps that's because they had to focus every minute of every day on getting food to eat...doesn't give much time to think on these terrifying existential thoughts.

Something I also do is to try, try, to keep focus on the fact that we have an animal brain and animal senses, an animal brain trying to understand life in this most profound universe. We animals in pants aren't even near the periphery of understanding. By keeping my focus there, I don't get stuck on what the limited human eyes can see...that there is no doubt much more than we know. Even life after death, that there is no complete nothingness of us, of the people we love, of humanity in general, when the physical dies. I keep the focus on...anything is possible in this universe composed of multiple universes. So, no longer practicing Catholicism, I still look up and then within.

Originally Posted by AnnaBettina

I didn't welcome you...I didn't reach my hand out, so to speak, across the wide internet and offer it to you. Inexcusable. Especially after you said how frightened you are. Guess I was focused on my own terror...we humans do have a tendency to focus on self...largely why there is so much terror in the world. And terror this is...even the Terror Management Theory.

I can't offer you anything, but perhaps this is very big, that I understand how you sometimes feel that this is a horror movie. I tend to think it is, oh some good things scattering the bad, but largely a horror movie...Super Bowls and yet unspeakable things being done to the guy down the street, in the next country, wherever, and yet we holler and have a "good time" at young guys knocking each other in the head enough in some cases to cause brain damage that doesn't show up until later in life. Human beings...no one is wrapped too tight...guess on some level, even when so repressed, most are freaked out.

So I offer my hand as someone who gets it. And maybe in the process we'll learn how to live a good life in the midst all this madness. Ideally, we'll learn without some drug the animal in pants guy/girl has made in a lab and doesn't know exactly how that drug affects the brain. If not, we'll try to find the meds which can help us to be inured to this wild sci fi movie we're living. Whatever the case, we'll find a way...to paraphrase, hope springs eternal in the heart of the menopausal woman (who once wasa secular nun and here I am with my life paradigms no longer cutting the mustard, so to speak...very hard, an understatement).

A warm hand to you across the Internet, Anna.

[clydeblack]

Have you tried reading work by "existentialists"? It's a branch of philosophy. Camu's "Myth of Sisyphus" and Kierkegaard's "The Sickness Unto Death" might help you.

[AnnaBettina]

Hi...I guess this response is for the first Anna.
Me, the second Anna (bettina) haven't read those in yrs.
Didn't mean too much to me then 'coz back then I didn't see as clearly as I do now the gremlin on the airplane wing. For you younger folks,
I'll try to find a link to this Rod Serling Twilight Zone episode.

Btw, what's your story, Clydeblack? Since this is a club of sorts,
maybe all of us can stick together and help each other (as we're stuck here on this planet Earth, rotating in space...which doesn't seem to blow most "normal" folks away...I think they're crazy .
Bye my friend.

Originally Posted by clydeblack

Have you tried reading work by "existentialists"? It's a branch of philosophy. Camu's "Myth of Sisyphus" and Kierkegaard's "The Sickness Unto Death" might help you.

[AnnaBettina]

Gremlin on the airplane wing...

I remember reading one guy's theory of his depression...that he could see life as it is (that is, as it appears to the limited human animal eyes...even the belated Stephen Hawkings was an animal in pants, big-brained but still an animal), that most people are in such heavy duty denial but he no longer is for whatever reason (my theory...that the arrangement of brain chemicals nature has put into the human animal and which makes us blind so to speak becomes altered...so animal in pants in the lab tries to make an ersatz copy of the original...very ersatz .

So I don't really see a gremlin, anywhere for that matter, but I do see what he was saying and I liked it.

Originally Posted by AnnaBettina

Hi...I guess this response is for the first Anna.
Me, the second Anna (bettina) haven't read those in yrs.
Didn't mean too much to me then 'coz back then I didn't see as clearly as I do now the gremlin on the airplane wing. For you younger folks,
I'll try to find a link to this Rod Serling Twilight Zone episode.

Btw, what's your story, Clydeblack? Since this is a club of sorts,
maybe all of us can stick together and help each other (as we're stuck here on this planet Earth, rotating in space...which doesn't seem to blow most "normal" folks away...I think they're crazy .
Bye my friend.

[FallDuskTrain]

Originally Posted by anna2468

I'm not sure what I'm experiencing but I'm very frightened.
For the last couple months my anxiety has been the worst it's ever been. I've struggled with anxiety and depression for years, but this is something else.
I can feel somewhat normal most of the time, but occasionally I'll be consumed with a feeling of total separation from reality. It’s really hard to explain.
So for example, tonight: I was laying in bed trying to fall asleep and I could not stop thinking about how horrible being alive is and how horrible it is that I’ll have to be alive for a long time. I opened my laptop and tried to watch a happy show to bring me out of it, but it seemed pointless. The jokes and smiles and happy music seem foreign, and almost mocking.
I feel completely divorced from humanity, in the sense that everyone seems fine with being alive, while I’m afraid of it.
When I get in this state, it’s almost as if I’ve stumbled into a horror movie. I start to wonder if I’m existing in a hell-like reality that is only meant to make me suffer.

This is incredibly hard to explain and I don’t think I’m doing it justice. Basically, when this happens, I become consumed with the idea that I shouldn’t keep going. My physical body feels like a prison. No amount of soft pillows and blankets can make my body feel comfortable.
Being safe and warm in my own bedroom feels just as terrifying as walking out into the cold night with no shoes or coat. All I can do is take my sleep meds and hope to feel better when I wake up.

This feels like the beginning of the end. This feels like the first steps into total madness. I don’t know what’s going on with me. Can anyone relate to this, even a little bit?

Hey Anna;

I think you described it very well. Please know that you are not alone in this. May I ask about your life style/routine? In other words, what kind of tools do you have in place in dealing with your MI? For instance, do you exercise, do you work, do you have friends and family, do you have a therapist, take meds? etc.

[cool09]

I've suffered from this for 40 years. It may be derealization where you can't feel yourself, feel unreal and you feel like you're living in a movie. Also known as "detachment". It is common with anxiety. I'm trying to get help for it now. It gets in the way of everything I do.

[clydeblack]

Originally Posted by AnnaBettina

Hi...I guess this response is for the first Anna.
Me, the second Anna (bettina) haven't read those in yrs.
Didn't mean too much to me then 'coz back then I didn't see as clearly as I do now the gremlin on the airplane wing. For you younger folks,
I'll try to find a link to this Rod Serling Twilight Zone episode.

Btw, what's your story, Clydeblack? Since this is a club of sorts,
maybe all of us can stick together and help each other (as we're stuck here on this planet Earth, rotating in space...which doesn't seem to blow most "normal" folks away...I think they're crazy .
Bye my friend.

Hi! I had an event happen a year and a half ago that put me in a constant state of dissociation. Discovering these authors almost put my life into context haha. So I really understand where you're coming from. It's a strange state to be in. Thanks for asking! This forum feels so supportive.

[AnnaBettina]

You sound like a good guy, ClydeBlack (but what I do know, nuttin'). Young, probably, young enough to be my son. The son, though, can help the mother and vice versa.

I've had quite a few events in my 60 yrs...suicide, personal illness, drowning, car crash and much more. I went forward with each...you know, I had my "story" (strong Christian beliefs) to help make sense of it all. Then in my 50s, quite suddenly the "story" didn't suffice any more. I had no terra firma. So here I am one of the crazy characters--all are crazy characters--running around here on planet earth and trying to find a way when my life paradigms suddenly no longer work. Talk about an adjustment reaction.

So, hold my hand all you young folks and the mother in me will hold yours...in this crazy life on planet earth.

Will read what you suggested later this week and perhaps they will help me to find my own way, not a way that most people here in the Bible Belt will understand.

Thank you, my friend

Originally Posted by clydeblack

Hi! I had an event happen a year and a half ago that put me in a constant state of dissociation. Discovering these authors almost put my life into context haha. So I really understand where you're coming from. It's a strange state to be in. Thanks for asking! This forum feels so supportive.