I guess this is why some seek religion. It provides answers for why we’re not just cold shells… for why our emotions aren’t just involuntary responses to our sensory input. It’s somewhat comforting I guess, to think that we’re not just temporary pieces of meat, here for who knows what reason… to just take in experience… then to fade out. I’d love some of that reassurance sometimes… but I don’t think religion is where I will find it. I know that religion is just as manmade as any of our other philosophies.

I just want to be me. I don’t even know what that is. Why the fuck do I have to think about this shit? Why am I so prone to trying to answer unanswerable questions?

Being an Adult is so fucking overrated. At least when I was a kid, I didn’t have this shit to worry about. Youth brings purity of emotion… purity of thought. Once you get older, you get tainted. Tainted by fear of death… tainted by fear of purgatory… tainted by fear of fear. Even with the shitty youth I had, I could find happiness in things like video games and other fun pursuits. These days though, I’m so concerned with making a living, and bringing meaning to this seemingly pointless existance, that I have a really hard time being happy.

I can’t help but think that I need to do something important with this life… but I can’t figure out what. I’ve got college and a lifetime of experience backing me, but I’m working in a job that doesn’t make a truly positive impact on the world… nor does it make me happy, educated, or fulfilled.

But I mean, even if I do get a fun job, will it make an impact? Probably not.

George Carlin, that fucker, had it right. Us humans are a pretentious breed. We think it’s so important that we survive… and that animals survive… and that life survives. I’m just so plagued by the fact that we just won’t survive. We can’t. Not forever. Everything, as far as we can tell, is finite. All of this causes paradox in my feeble human brain. That causes fear. I hate being full of fear. I want to be happy. I want to be full of love. I want to spread that love. I want to help reduce other people’s suffering. Why can’t I do that? Why is life so fucking hard?

And on top of it all, if I’m just a fucking soulless, flawed, organic computer, why do I have these fucked up emotions and fears?

… is with doctors shrugging off panic attacks as something that can’t be treated aside from with mind altering pharmecutical drugs? Did they ever think that MAYBE…. JUST MAYBE…. they’re the body’s way of telling you there’s something wrong? The whole medical community seems to work off the premise that the human body is just flawed in certain areas, and when we get pains and shit we should just ignore them… UNLESS OF COURSE they’re in very specific areas.

So yah. No XRay. No other tests. I’ve gotta wait a month to see if this shit’s still bugging me. And when that time comes, if I’ve still got this shit going on, I’m pretty sure my doctor will just shrug it off again.

I fucking hate the medical community some times.

But I do have that fear. And I have it because I’ve been getting strange symptoms… symptoms that are being written off by most who hear about them as caused solely by anxiety, stress, or hypochondria. They don’t think there’s any imminent danger to my health or well being because they’re not in my skin. If they were, they’d be concerned too. 

Now, granted, I realize this shit could be all in my head, and part of me hopes to hell it is… if that’s the case, I probably need counseling… however… whatever is causing all of this… I want to know for sure. I want empirical evidence either for, or to the contrary. This means I want to be tested. Tested for whatever the fuck could be going on. I want to be xrayed, checked for parasites, checked for heart issues, ulcers, cancer, whatever the fuck it is that could be giving me the physiological symptoms I’ve been experiencing. 

And if it turns out that all that shit is null and void… I’ll be fine. 

For the meantime, I’m trying to just live my life as if everything is ok. The sensations in my back keep distracting me though.

Note: The spell checker seems to think “ok” should be capitalized. Screw you, spell check. (it also thinks xrayed isn’t a word)

I’ve got a huge fucking fear of death. I’m an agnostic secular humanist, not quite an atheist… but I like to be rational about things. I don’t know if there’s an afterlife, and I don’t believe there is any way TO know if there’s an afterlife. I believe there is some sort of creative force in the universe, but I don’t know if it’s inherently conscious. Part of me believes that the universe’s consciousness is manifest in life as we know it.

This is all fine and well until I consider my own consciousness. I’m, for all intent and purpose, trapped in this mortal human body. And recently, within the past few months, I’ve had some strange bodily symptoms that I’ve never had before. I’ve had chest pains on both sides, stomach pains (the actual stomach, not the intestines), strange headaches (some of which feel like a tightness at the top of my skull), and a numbness (and sometimes pain) on the left side of my back. I’ve gone to the doctor and gotten some blood + urine tests done… (over two months ago now… fucking shitty medical system)… I’m going to hopefully get some revealing results in a few days. I fear they won’t show anything, and the doctor will shrug off my concerns (and symptoms) as nothing more than hypochondria, depression, or anxiety. And for all I know, they may be nothing. But I hadn’t experienced any of this bodily shit until earlier this year.

I’m in my late 20s, and although that seems young, for me it’s getting pretty far into my life. I only recently graduated college as it took me quite a while to finish highschool, and college took an extra year. This is less a result of my abilities, and more a result of my inability to focus on tasks. I’m sure it would get diagnosed as ADD if I brought it up with my doctor, but I tried Ritalin in highschool, and it was far too mind altering and addictive for my liking. I’m looking for a way to tackle it naturally… but my new found health problems have distracted me. 

This brings me to the reason I’ve started this blog. I feel, at the very least, I need to get out my frustrations towards existance, before I don’t have a chance to. It’s anonymous because what matters isn’t who I am… what matters is what I’m saying.

I spent my entire childhood being told how gifted I was… how I could take on the world with my abilities… by parents and teachers were constantly letting me know I had the ability to change the world; I’m not so sure of that these days. Unfortunately, they were also consistently disappointed with my apparent lack of drive. You see, aside from my focus issues, I hadn’t yet acquired that trademark fear of death that plagues adults. I was untainted by that as a child. In fact, I was untainted by it until my highschool years. One day when smoking some pot at a random stranger’s house. I went through what people tend to know as “ego death” … where my consciousness got so fucked up I thought I was the universe… and that I was dying. Lets not dwell on the “pot’s not supposed to do that” topic please, it’s an old and pointless conversational fixation.

Thus was born my panic disorder. Was I real? Was I dreaming existance? Was I god? Was I the devil? Was I dead? …. these questions and more plagued me for quite some time… years actually… until I managed to come to a realization that these unanswerable questions were pointless to try to answer, and I’d best ignore them, or end up wasting what limited life I did have. This worked for quite some time… and I managed to get a life… literally… I went to college… got a girlfriend… got an apartment… and finally, a decent paying job. 

Now, the job… that’s where things really started to go downhill again. I mean, sure I understand that I need to give back to society… but for fuck’s sake… 8 hours a day is a long fucking time to give. Not to mention that by the time I get back home every day, I’m drained, and don’t have energy to work on my many personal projects. These personal projects mean the world to me… they are my raison d’etre because they represent my creativity, and my message to the world.

And I don’t have time for them. 

No fucking time, and no fucking drive. And no focus. I’m fucking cursed. AND NOW… I feel my life is threatened by the imperfections of human health. 

If I were to die tomorrow, I would feel quite fucking ripped off by life. That’s where I stand right now… I’m so frustrated with my situation, it sickens me. What happened to me making a difference in the world? What happened to me having a job I loved? What happened to “Follow your dreams?”

I’ve followed them as far as society lets me presuming I conform to it’s backward ideals. I’ve followed them as far as I can whilst maintaining a reasonable semblance of financial security. I’ve followed them as far as I can in this hick town I live in. 

An aside: I live in a small, remote city that’s half a day’s drive from anything larger than it. My girlfriend lives here, which is probably the only reason I haven’t left it yet. I love her, and I wish she would leave with me to somewhere more promising, where I could get a career that would allow me to follow my dreams a bit more easily. This shouldn’t be an aside really, as it’s probably the root of my current conundrum, but if my health wasn’t a concern, I wouldn’t really care if I had to stay here a few more years. Fuck that… yes I would. Love is so complicated.

Either way… that being said… life isn’t fucking fair. I don’t want to break my love’s heart by taking off for my own selfish intentions… but at the same time, I feel it’s imperative to my being that I be true to myself and follow my own path in life. WHY THE FUCK AM I FORCED TO MAKE THIS COMPROMISE?

And the pain in my back gets stronger.