Existential Fear + PTSD = Cheetos

From as early in my life as I can remember, I’ve been afraid. Afraid of death, pain, loss, the unknown, the endings of things I like or the beginnings of things I don’t like. Rejection. Sustained discomfort. Threat of war or civil unrest. Climate change. Various apocalyptical probabilities. The deep vulnerability inherent to being human has created vistas of existential fear in me.  Still, it wasn’t until my body collided with concrete and metal, my right hand was torn off, thigh torn open, pelvis crushed, and more that I realized exactly how vulnerable we all are. The body is a fragile, fragile thing. It’s a pile of bones; a piece of meat.

Their cheeks were too red—the genderless workers in the old timey movie theater standing stiff behind the concession counter in the lobby. I walked up and saw, displayed all in a row on shelves behind their head, objects whose wetness and redness confused me. But then I knew, and of course! Hunks of raw meat took the place of popcorn and candy. In the time I was away, everything had changed.

            “I’ll have that one,” I said, pointing. The genderless worker pulled wax paper from a roll and grabbed my hunk of meat, half wrapping it, then handing it to me. A bit of its juice spilled over the edges of the paper and onto my hand. As I walked into the theater to take my seat, I inspected my meat more closely. It wasn’t completely raw, more like extra rare. I sat down among others in their seats eating their choice cuts. As I waited for the movie to start, I felt a tickle of anticipation, and I took my first bite. I would sit there and watch the movie while consuming my hunk of meat.

            This was the hallucination—the waking dream I had while meditating for three days, eight to ten hours each day, with my arms held up in varying positions for durations of an hour at a time. I’ve cited this waking dream multiple times to friends and each time I’m delighted by the symbolism. Our bodies are simple pieces of meat. This soul/this ghost/this consciousness/this witness—it’s literally consuming that rare serving.

Greg Mania, the author of Born to be Public, wrote an essay about existential dread that I deeply relate to. A fellow prize-winning recipient of PTSD, he encourages us to succumb to the crushing anxiety and fear available to us each day, to “embrace your inner sickly Victorian woman. Drape a thick wool blanket over your lap and ask a friend to carry you into the garden, where you can wistfully stare off into the distance for an indeterminate amount of time.”

Mania also writes of a romantic heartbreak he suffered. The aftermath of it caused him to wall off for a while, not willing to be vulnerable. I’ve done this, too, both romantically and physically. For example, the vehicle I drove after my accident was the equivalent of a military tank. In it, I felt impossibly safe. Unwilling to be vulnerable, this was the only option for me.

The paradox is: we go to great lengths to protect ourselves against vulnerability while simultaneously desiring to have some of that vulnerability exploited. We want our boundaries breached. We want to be entered, penetrated, filled. And the more walled off we are emotionally, the less satisfying the physical experience. The less pleasurable. It’s only when the emotional stakes are high, and my very beating heart is on the line, ready to be broken, that I get the uppermost level of pleasure and fulfillment from giving myself in this way. Maybe you can relate.

After my accident, I had panic attacks. The impact of flesh with concrete and metal implanted the trigger for my periodic falls into bottomless panic. The smallest things would scare me—the disapproval of an employer after making a mistake at work, the fear of not knowing the future. The trigger would get pulled, plunging me into an abyss so dark and deep, I was certain I would die. The effect was purely physiological, a function of my body and its memory. This combined with my usual underlying fear proved such impossible a way to exist, I sought out professional help.

I found a woman who invited me to try Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Being a scientist, I asked many questions. The salient point to emerge from these conversations was sensory motor or somatic memory processes. In the last few decades, research has shown that memories are not merely affected by the body but produced by and stored in the body. Motion and perception play key roles. What occurred to me is this: if the body autonomously remembers, the body autonomously thinks.

The myriad connections between the brain (an organ among organs) and the rest of the body make the exact mechanism of thought and memory impossible to delineate, but the fact remains that these are not exclusive to the brain. And my small body, which is technically mostly water, is not something new, created from nothing. The water carried inside my skin is the water my grandmother carried and poured into my mother, which she poured into me.

It’s an ancient, ancestral water carrying as many memories, pains, joys, traumas, mundanity, and upheavals as it holds individual atoms, roughly 7 x 10²⁷ of them (that’s a seven with twenty-seven zeroes; or three whole orders of magnitude greater than seven million). The therapist said, when she invited me to imagine my safe place, “Don’t make it something inside time and space as we know it. It can be in the clouds, on another planet, anywhere at all.”

But, bound as imagination is with memory, my safe place was in time and space. Or, perhaps, bounded as this body is with water, in time and water.

Within my three EMDR sessions, I imagined my safe place. A place set apart from land, surrounded by water. Not just any water, but the vast, blue-gray ocean—a body so big and so old, the range of what it holds is millions of times larger than that of my small body, its relatively small range. The place was made primarily of windows, letting in the light and the soft sounds water makes, but it was covered, dry, and warm. Ultimate comfort and safety were inside of it, and this was where I placed my body as I sat and re-lived every detail of the time when it was ripped apart. I needed the ocean surrounding me, sinking my thoughts and memories in its own, dissolving my fears, healing my wounds, capsizing this vessel, this body, this water I carry.

The EMDR worked. My panic attacks mostly subsided. But still, I feel the abyss of existential dread looming near, like how it feels to stand near the edge of the Grand Canyon. There is a gravity to it, and it pulls on you. Whenever I feel the reality of how unsafe my body is in this fast-moving world, with all its hard surfaces, the combination is hard to bear.

These vulnerable shells, these bodies, they are not bivalves. They have no spiney hinged shells to protect the soft, wet insides. We are all one second and one inch away from losing our minds, losing our abilities, losing control and even the illusion of control. All this loss will happen in due time. It is promised.

Do you want to know the secret?

Come closer, and I’ll tell you.

This vulnerability that lays itself bare at the beginnings and the endings of these finite bodies? We are always (and in all ways) just as vulnerable. All the way through the middle. These hard shells fashioned from thoughts and pride and misguided beliefs during the prime years of our bodies — they aren’t real. These binaries we have invented — the toothy, spiny bivalve housings; the sparkling creatures of the depths — they are but illusions. They are as vapor.

The only thing left to do is soothe ourselves. Turn on a hypnotically engaging show on Netflix and escape into it while eating baked Cheetos. Or, as Greg Mania suggests way more altruistically in his aforementioned essay, “find other ways to contribute to my community in a meaningful and impactful way.” Yes, getting out of my head by being of service to someone else is a better way to distract myself from it all. This way, I can be selfless while also being selfish. Win, win.

All good things, and bad, must come to an end. The tyranny of unrelenting change is that it pummels me with loss and simultaneously sweeps all hardship away. It’s the ultimate paradox in a world filled with paradoxes: Time is the biggest curse and the biggest gift. Time is cannibalistic. Time is the great neutralizer of all pain. The question of whether some immortal ghost version of me that exists before and after me, that can travel outside of me, and that watches my life play out through my eyes — that has me on the edge of my seat. I want the answer to be yes, and I have had so many experiences in my life that seem to suggest this as a reality.

And yet.

On my right arm, on the underside of my forearm, there is a neat seam from wrist to elbow wherein titanium rods replace bones and connect my severed hand back to the soft tissues keeping it alive. The skin of this re-attached hand is thinner and more fragile, easily cut or rubbed off. Perhaps it’s a compromised blood supply, or merely the life drained from the skin when it was separated from its source. The shape of the hand, too, is different. My palm is narrower, the muscles in it less defined. Nevertheless, it functions. It senses. A hand resurrected from death, total numbness, complete paralysis. Facilitated by the interventions of the best medical technology, talents, and minds, my body worked its magic and repaired. Skin grew back together and closed. Nerves regenerated or forged new pathways.

With the conditions optimized, my body did what nearly all bodies do unprompted: it healed. The seam on that underside of my forearm has always reminded me of a power line, subtly curved as though from gravity, as though with the slight weight of birds. Birds perched, at rest yet alert and ready. Their whole countenance vibrating with the imminence of liftoff, of flight. Skyward, up, up, and gone

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