Fear of fear

Silence. So deafening it was unbearable. Like a static, that buzzed all around me. I lifted my right arm, and it felt light as air. Staring blankly into it, I turned it around.

“It’s perfectly ok, man”, I told myself. “Perhaps this is what happens.”

Beside me, Anna sat in his characteristic nonchalance, laughing at the inimitable Chandler. Oh my god, I loved Chandler and yet, I just wasn’t able to laugh at his jokes. This was wrong. This was no fun.

Standing up, I paced to the washroom and the whole world around seemed to swing, and stir. I could hear voices, but it all felt so distant to me. I was in a completely different world… in a dream perhaps. Yes, ofcourse it was a dream, nothing else. Better still, I now knew it was a dream.

Splashing water across my face, sounds and sights flooded my senses, and that’s when I knew this was not a dream. This was real… so real, it was starting to scare me.

“Abe Anna! Do you feel kinda strange too?”, I asked, trying to keep my voice stable, not betraying the fear welling up, churning my insides.

“Yeah… a bit”, he replied and went back to Friends. What consolation was that anyway… that guy was a fucking pro!

Depersonalization involves the persistent or a current experience of feeling detached, as if one was an outside observer of one’s mental processes or body.

I tried to sleep it off… Anna suggested I do that, and then everything would be back to normal. Yes, I liked normal. I loved normal. In fact, I would have done anything to just be normal again. But sleep would not come to me. I had dreams though… terrible nightmares that I was stuck in my body, that I was floating above it and watching myself lie below, writhing in some unseen pain.

I got up in a jerk, and felt my throat closing down. I gulped down a whole bottle of water and I still felt thirsty. I put my palm on my neck, trying to find out if my heart was racing… I was sure this was how a heart attack felt like. But surprisingly, my pulse seemed normal, fine.

And then a thought struck me… perhaps, time had slowed down for me. Yes, that was possible. I could feel every nerve in my body go into overdrive, as a plethora of stimuli flooded me. Every breath I took, every ruffle of the bedsheet below me, the creaking of the fan, the whispering voices outside of a close friend, worried as hell what was happening to me… I could feel everything in slow-motion, only 10 times more intense and vivid.

It is like living in some kind of horrific perpetual dream state.

Like your worst dream put before you, and put into an infinite loop that refused to end. Every second felt like years of hardship and torture. And I knew as a matter of fact, that there were thousands of seconds still left to endure.

“Dude, everything is going to be fine… just let it pass”, Anna and others tried to console. Why on earth were they not able to see that I was dying? I thought I would be trapped inside my own body… like a mosquito inside amber, which others could stare at and be amused. I could see the disappointed shake of my father’s head, my mother’s heart-wrenching wails as she shook my lifeless body, while I tried to scream, to tell her I was alive, inside.

“I should never have taken these things, yaar. I was so stupid… why did I ever want to take it? Oh god, please save me. I will never, ever again have this wretched thing”, I could not stop myself muttering meaningless gobbledygook.

I felt like crying… I think I did. I could see people standing worried around me, trying to dissolve the tension with some terrible jokes, the “mujhe chadi nahi hai” among prominence. I laughed with them, when that horrible feeling of loneliness would cripple me and I would fall silent again.

I didn’t know what it was. Was this what they called a “bad trip”? Was I having a momentary instance of depersonalization? I didn’t have the slightest idea… All I knew, was that I was fucked.

It was 1 pm the next day when I woke up. My head still buzzed, and I remembered every moment of the night, as clear as I had watched the horribly-directed movie myself. I knew I heard the cheer when four of my friends carried me to the bathrooms, as I relatively stabilized after 3-4 hours of blabbering and clumsy theatrics. I still felt my lips curve into a smile, as I looked around proudly at the only asset that I gained from my 4 years there… my friends.

The experience, abhorrent that it was and one I would never like to repeat, did teach me a thing or two. It made me realize what mattered in my life, and what I was willing to sacrifice for it. I also found out that what I fear most in my life… is fear itself. They have even got a term for it. Phobophobia.

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