Thoughts on Hypochondria

When I was eight or nine, I was terrified of aliens. Whitley Strieber’s Communion was out — I’m not actually sure when it came out, but it somehow became a big topic of discussion with my dad and his friends at the time, and I always listened to my dad and his friends. They thought it was silly, ridiculous. I laughed too, because it seemed like the cool thing to do. But I started to see inhuman faces with big round eyes when I tried to go to sleep at night, told myself they weren’t there, I was being stupid, but secretly was convinced that any night now I was going to find myself unable to move, frozen, staring into those eyes, and taken up to some weird sterile spaceship place where these freaky guys (yes of course, they were gendered, though I didn’t see that as significant at the time) would do painful and unspeakable things to my inert body. I couldn’t think of anything more terrible than that.

A bit later, when I was maybe ten or eleven, I read The Hot Zone, Richard Preston’s account of a strain of monkey Ebola that goes airborne at a research facility in Reston, Virginia. The book explains how certain hemorrhagic fevers can cause your body to LIQUIFY FROM THE INSIDE. I couldn’t get enough of this. I read Virus Hunters of the CDC, had fun fact-checking the movie Outbreak (that map — the one that has the made-up virus consuming the US in like 24 hours: hilarious), thought I would maybe become a microbiologist but more realistically wanted to play one on TV. The fixation turned dark, though. Once a friend’s cat bit me, and after my dad made a quip asking if I noticed “if the cat had red eyes,” I waited out the incubation period for Marburg virus, convinced I had been infected. This made absolutely no logical sense as a kid in Toledo, Ohio; and I knew that; and I still waited out the incubation, unable to think about just about anything else. That was right around the time my mom moved me away from my dad, from Toledo to what I saw as middle-of-nowhere rural Virginia.

When I was dropped off at my grandparents’ house — almost every other weekend before the big move, as they lived close by — I would spend hours sitting on the second floor landing reading back issues of Reader’s Digest. I loved their disease-of-the-week articles. I would read about some rare kind of lung cancer or brain tumor or muscular dystrophy, eat it up like sponge cake, then spend the rest of the week monitoring my body for a cough or a headache or a twitch.

As I grew up, my fears became more sophisticated, nuanced, even realistic: I feared STDs, totally debilitating forms of mental illness. Cancer has always been a big theme. I was that person in college and grad school running to the doctor all the time with a weird twinge in my neck or something and being told it’s nothing and saying ARE YOU SURE and then being told yes, again, you’re fine, and then calling my dad to tell him “another clean bill of health, I’m in excellent health ha HA,” as if he might have thought that was not the case, because really I was talking to myself.

Of course, I was not fine.

A few years ago, while I was working with a writing partner on a modernized adaptation of Three Sisters, I started waking up with pains in my chest. They would be sharp, and on the left-ish, and would often be accompanied by shortness of breath. This kept happening. Every morning. Then it started to happen during the day. At my bartending job. It was getting in the way of my work. I was sure it was anxiety, but I could not bring myself to go to a doctor because I was equally sure I was dying. Actually though, it didn’t matter whether or not I was technically dying because I felt I couldn’t continue to live that way.

But hey here I am.

(and yes I saw a doctor and yes they were anxiety attacks and no I was not dying but yes I deal with these fears every day and now doctors scare the shit out of me.)

So this pandemic has been an opportunity to explore my worst and most constant fears. Hypochondria, and perhaps even my anxiety disorder in general, is a symptom of a life full of instability and rejection interspersed with moments of great joy. An artist’s life is always hard to navigate, but as a child of people who see themselves as failed artists — and also simply as a woman — I think I have internalized the messaging that I would have to be perfect to be worthy of the things I want in life: love, success, artistic fulfillment, financial stability. I mean if you’re going to die next week or next year, you can stop worrying about all that.

You would think that someone who has thought this much and this hard about death and disease throughout her life would cower and wilt under these circumstances, but strangely, precisely that experience prepared me to barrel through the worst. Sometimes, being able to imagine the worst case scenario can become your greatest protection.

The longer this catastrophe continues, and the more I see the lids blowing off the culture Tupperware that have kept many of us gasping for air, I very much want to live. Or rather, I very much want to allow for the possibility that I will, for a very long time. Or even if I don’t, I’m finding that it might be possible to turn off the death voices, even when they’re screaming in my ear? Whatever. Am just excited to see what’s next.