Fear

It is a weird thing to realise that you have been afraid for a long while, without the usual feelings of constant fear. It isn't the same feeling as being on the edge of a cliff, or standing in the middle of a busy road. It feels kind of normal.

There is a quote from Bilbo in The Fellowship of the Ring which I think describes the feeling:

I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.

He probably says it in the movie too. It is a bloody good quote.

I am going to talk about some fears I have had over the last couple of years, and then finish with something I no longer fear. It is probably too personal, but at this point, I say fuck it, let’s just go all in.

This year has been busy. Probably more so than at any other year in my life so far. I have had this continuous need and desire to always be doing something. I spoke last year about the silence that exists everywhere after a major life change. This year, I think I have been doing so much that there hasn’t even been time to notice that there has been background white noise all along. No time to rot, no time to notice.

When I get into it, I think I am terrified of fading away into nothing. That if I don’t make the most of the time I have, if I don’t do more, then it would have been for nothing. I’m not sure what the "it" is in that. Maybe life, maybe life after death, maybe the time of the people who saved me, or the time of everyone else.

I am haunted by the fact that I almost died, and it would all just end, the lights would go out and everything I’ve known, seen, or loved, would fade into nothing. God knows I bring it up all the time with everyone. Having heart problems has become me. So it’s not just that I fear I could fade into nothing. It’s that even if I don’t, and I keep on going and moving, I will still transition into a different person no matter what.

I sold a lot of my stuff on eBay recently. My brain has been nagging at me to get rid of a lot of it for a couple of years now, so it wasn’t made out of a split-second decision. I have felt this need to reduce and simplify the things around me.

Pretty much everything that’s gone is of no real importance. It just...I don’t know if it’s true for you too, but over the years I have accumulated quite a lot of what I will call “stuff”. Random pieces of you. Video games, toys, clothes, tech, books, photos, paper. “Stuff”. So, when we decided to have some work done in the attic office room and everything needed clearing out, it felt like there would be no better time than now. Most of it had lived in boxes or away in a drawer untouched for years anyway.

“The things we have are made to be used” is an ideal I try to live by. It is one of the strongest held beliefs I have, which is funny if you look at how much stuff I own that I don’t use. It is something I believe can be applied to almost everything that makes you, you. The things you own. The skills you possess. Your personality and experience. Your body. To keep these things to yourself, or to leave them unused feels like a misuse of them. Why own a games console you never use? Why keep clothes you are never going to wear? Why have a body if you’re not going to use it?

I am writing this in an intentionally dour and hyperbolic way. The long and short of it is I wanted to boil down myself, and my belongings, to just the things I want to keep. Hopefully, I will use them. All of this is with the view that maybe one day, I can reduce it further to just the things I need rather than want. The things I got rid of weren't serving me or their purpose.

I get scared that like the heart problems, the things I leave behind will be the things that people will remember me for. I can’t imagine anything worse than someone going through my stuff after I die and going “He did love his GameBoy!”. I don’t feel connected to it. I want my legacy to mean more than plastic in a landfill and platitudes of my life post-heart surgery.

Something I want more than anything is to be a parent. Before everything happened, it was an “it’ll happen soon when we are ready”. But I was given 3 weeks from getting married to having heart problems. There was no time to make plans. Barely enough time to finish the leftover cake. I have this fear that with the bad luck that has already happened in the last 2 years, I will just have this one last piece to top it off, and I will never get the opportunity to be a parent. I feel like we shouldn’t have waited. But we could also never have known what would happen. And who knows, it might never have been any different with that extra 6 months of trying.

Part of why I kept a lot of the stuff was so that in the future, I could share it with somebody new. Brand new fresh eyes straight out of the box, getting a glance on how I used to live, the things I was into. Someone to share myself with. But with that idea becoming distant, so too does the meaning of “stuff”.

I fear that if it doesn’t happen, I will never decide to stop.

There was a moment a few months ago when I realised I couldn’t remember someone’s name who I had spoken to frequently for years. That the random knowledge retrieval embedded in everyone’s brains was just breaking down in front of me. It’s funny how you don’t realise you have forgotten something like that until you’re already in the situation of having to remember their name. There is no on-demand error correction.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I then forgot my colleague's name that I realised this might be a problem. It all kind of spiralled out from there. I have spoken to the doctor about my memory, but they were unconcerned. I also wrote about my memory last year. In that post, I said it was getting better. In reality, I think it’s got so much worse that it’s going to start to become a problem if it keeps on going.

As part of trying to always be busy, I have been to quite a few gigs this year. Bands I have listened to for years, I am unable to recall their lyrics off the top of my head, which never used to be a problem. The hand reaches into my brain to rummage around the bag of words, and it comes back empty.

It’s just so different from how it used to be. If it was always like this I don’t think I would mind. I used to be able to remember conversations I had years ago. Now I forget something important you just said to me. I was looking at your face and lips, and I still forgot it 30 seconds after you said it. The only chance I have is to go away after the conversation and repeat it over to myself. Sometimes I forget what I said as I’m talking which is harrowing. I start off making a point or relaying a story, and completely lose track of where I am.

Maybe it’s aging. “He’s just getting old!”. But this doesn’t feel like what someone describes as “being forgetful” as you get older. If it is, then I don’t know how we have got this far.

I don’t know what I will do if it keeps getting worse.

I have a fear about this blog. I write some poorly thought out and hastily written posts about my personal life and then post them on the internet. I share them with the people I know from all areas of my life because, for some reason in my new mindset, I like sharing everything about myself with you.

I fear that it makes people think less of me because they know my flaws in greater detail than my strength. I am a good person, and I contain multitudes. But you read these posts and I am a whiny asshole. All I do is talk about depressing stuff and repeat myself over and over about my heart surgery.

There is this weird knowledge that you may have read this, while I know very little about you. This is rarely the case. Plenty of people have been kind enough to share themselves with me and be as honest as I think I am. But occasionally it will come up with someone I know nothing about, and I just have to sit there knowing you have read a blog post about my memory issues and how much I wish I smoked.

Writing these posts is something I enjoy. It's unfortunate I need to keep getting over the fear of its existence every time I decide to publish one. It has become a vital part of my drawn-out healing process, where my physical body is as good as it’s going to get, but my mind has a long way to go.

I will always recommend that you do this if you feel like there are things on your mind that you just want to talk about. Whether it’s in a public blog, a private journal, or just a message you send someone, you should do it. My door is always open, as are the doors of all your loved ones.

Catharsis can be found in solidifying words that describe how we’re getting on. I am just trying to ignore the fear I have of putting it publicly on the internet. And hey, there are a lot of things I write that I never publish. Imagine how whiny the posts are which I’m not willing to share with even the people I hold closest. But even those, every word of those texts still gives me something worthwhile.

This should be rounded out by talking about something I no longer fear: my body.

It’s a strange one. As a nerdy, awkward teenager the one thing I hated most in the world other than just myself was my body. I hated how it looked, I hated how it acted, I could see nothing good in it.

Despite now having a torso covered in scars big and small, it isn’t even something that crosses my mind anymore. Maybe it’s the prolonged sessions spent being watched over and poked by medical professionals, or maybe it’s just getting older, but I just don’t care at all anymore.

I remember a few years ago being embarrassed to get into my trunks and go swimming in a Peak District plunge pool with a friend. A few months ago I spent 4 hours at a spa with my body's skin on display, scars and all, with no issue.

It’s funny sometimes how things work out. If anything, I am grateful for my body in a lot of ways. If my heart had never exploded, I would never have had the gusto to be a better person, and I would never have gone out of my way to talk to new people, and understand the old ones better.

We become different people.