What would you say is the overriding feeling of your days? Do you wake up happy and slurp your coffee with a silly smile on your face? Do you wake up indifferent, kind of blah, but not terribla blah, just your average “here-comes-another-day” sort of blah…nothing to look foward to but nothing to fear either. Do you wake up in a cold sweat, thinking “what fresh hell will this day bring?” - if I may borrow a bit from Dorothy Parker.
My overriding feeling is one of anxiety. Let me define it more precisely. I have experienced three kinds of anxiety in my life:
a) the “jitters” - this is the physial kind, as in exam jitters, or interview jitters, or first date jitters. Your mouth is dry, your palms sweat (always a nasty problem if you need to offer a firm handshake at an interview), you run to the bathroom a lot and your stomach is tied up in knots. You may even throw up if the jitters get really bad. Yes, I have experiened this type of anxiety - we all have. The difference is that I sometimes get it when there is no interview, no date, no exam. Still, this state of nervousness is something I can deal with
b) the “panic attack” - this is some nasty shit. Think jitters to the power of ten. Your breathing is shallow and fast, your heart is pounding in your chest and you have a profound sense of doom: you are certain something awful is about to happen - a heart attack or a sudden collapse. The panic attack is basically your fear of death but distilled to deliver maximum voltage. It’s incapacitating, and unlike the jitters, most true panic attacks cannot be controlled without medication. If you end up in the emergency room, they’ll first hook you up to an EKG and give you sublingual nitroglycerin. If you ARE having an actual heart attack the nitro will relieve your symptoms, your sweating, your sense of impending doom. The EKG will show an irregualrity and you’ll learn your panic attack was warranted: you *were* possibly going to die. But this is rare. Much more likely, all the nitroglycerin will do is give you a blistering flush and the EKG will be fine (though your pulse may be through the roof). In that case the good nurse will give you a shot of 2 mg Ativan. Voila! Your panic will ebb off instantly and your first thought will not be about death but about a ham sandwich. You will also have to supress an urge to French-kiss the nurse who just “saved your life”. Panic attacks can recur, of course, so once the Ativan wears off, you’ll probably still be feeling jumpy. You’ll need to take that up with your shrink. People who have had more than one panic attacks all have shrinks, trust me. Just like people with frequent stomach issues have gastroenterologists who make them submit to frequent colonoscopies ($$$)
c) the “permanent forboding” type of anxiety. That would be the thing I wake up with and go to sleep with. It’s an odd, nagging feeling that your life, your world, your very existence, your “being in the universe” (to borrow fro Jean Paul Sartre’s philosophical vocabulary) is…what’s the word? Not-the-way-it-should-be. It’s derailed. It’s sick. It’s plain wrong on every level. This is a feeling, remember! It doesn’t necessarily reflect reality. It’s the anxiety of confusion and dislocation. Imagine you go to sleep in your bed one night and wake up in, say, Hungary. No forewarning, no explanation. I love everything about Hungary, just using it as an example. “People are strange - when you’re a stranger - faces look ugly - when you’re alone” The language is devillishly difficult. But mainly - you have no idea when, or if, you’ll be allowed to get back home. You adjust as best you can, you learn to love goulash and to say “harom deci” (“three deciliters” - a single serving) when ordering red wine but you never lose your homesickness and the sense that things are not what they should be. That is the foreboding, the derailment.
“Gregor Samsa awoke from feverish dreams to find he’s been transformed into a giant insect” Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Of course, plenty of writers before me described the feeling - mainly the French existentialists like Sartre and Camus, but also Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and others. Most likely I’m afflicted with this ongoing anxiety because after all, I am an exile - even though I write, read and think in English with what they call “native facility”
And now I find that I have been joined by millions of others in my daily plight. The horrific psy-op we have all endured, courtesy of our CCP-indoctrinated public health officials and governments (“I admire the Chinese dictatorship”, as per that colorful-sock-wearing evil clown, Justin Trudeau) has implanted in many of us - the ones who aren’t asleep - that same sense of foreboding and helplessness. Suicides, drug addiction, depression prescription medication - all are at unprecedented highs. We have been de-stabilized, uprooted turned upside down, gaslit and threatened. For three years we were all bullied and browbeaten by the kapos who ran our giant mental concentration camps: masks on our faces, mewling slogans like “staying apart is being together” “your vaccination saves my life” and the rest of their psycho-terror. So I am now not alone in my 24/7 sense of dread. It doesn’t make me feel any better.
Hold your head up, take deep breaths, love your family, love your dog (my dog is my OG shrink), take long walks and most of all do everything in your power to not let the bastards win. When we make them accountable and when they are forced to stop the gaslighting (judging by the new CDC boss appointment it won’t be any time soon) - we will right the ship, put the derailed train back on track and our collective anxiety will subside. I am sure of it
TRUTH SHALL PREVAIL
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