Look. I’ve been there.
Frequent doctor’s visits. Reassurance from friends and relatives. Sleepless nights marred with racing hearts and thoughts. Googling your symptoms from here to Timbuktu.
It’s a pain. And the internet agrees: having health anxiety is like creating conspiracy theories about yourself. A pain in your jaw? It could be a cavity! Headache? It could be brain cancer! Stools looking a little darker than the last time you went to the bathroom? That’s gotta be celiac disease!
It’s the kind of creative energy that would make Stephen King blush.
This is the point where we shift gears and give it credit: whether you can accept it or not, our anxiety is a gift.
Now, of course, most other forms of anxiety are relatively treatable. Whether it’s social phobia (fear of social situations), agoraphobia (fear of certain settings and places), or even coulrophobia (fear of clowns), the good news is that these forms of anxiety are easy to treat. Why? Because they are external triggers; they are triggers that can be confronted or avoided. The thing about nuestro thing—that pesky health anxiety that bubbles in our gut—is that it’s an internal trigger.
See, the reality is, we simply cannot escape our own bodies. There are numerous books, movies and TV shows about what a joy it would be to escape our weak, ailing bodies and jump into something better. Think of the Twilight Zone episode “The Trade-Ins,” written by Rod Serling, where an old man transfers his mind into a younger body in hopes of preserving his marriage. Or, for a more recent example, Self/Less, a 2015 sci-fi film also about an old man who transfers his consciousness into a younger body. Isn’t it funny how a creative imagination and the existential dread over our corporeal prisons seem to transfer?
A long time ago, our ancestors probably didn’t worry about this kind of stuff. They were driven by God or country or warfare to keep going, to thrive, to express themselves. Unfortunately, or rather, fortunately, a lot of us do not have these outlets to conjure our creative exploits. The 21st century has a whole army of us choreographing our potential demise at the behest of modern medicine and the hyper-speed information highway known as the internet. Once again, it is so clear that what can be seen as a form of OCD is simply our minds doing what it’s driven to do: find a problem and come up with a solution.
I wanted to fix things
From my own personal experience, my health anxiety sprouted from my youth. From the day I was born, my mother was afflicted with ulcerative colitis. This debilitating disease often left my mother, who was the breadwinner of our house, bedridden and unable to live a normal life.
Instead of an alarm clock, the sounds of my mother vomiting while loaded up with nausea, or on the toilet in pain, woke me up. While my mother rested in bed, I would sit by her and leaf through a giant book on medical conditions that someone had given her. How urgent I was to learn, to find answers, to tease into the world a cure for my mother’s condition. It never occurred to me, as a kid with a sprouting imagination, that I would grow up to obsess over my own condition. As far as I knew, I simply wanted to help her, just as I wanted to grow up with the ability to help others.
Then, I grew up. I spent a large part of my teenage years worrying about things in the hopes that a doctor would clear me and that awesome wave of relief could wash over me. Sure, I was still creative, writing poetry and doodling on the margins of my notebooks as daydreams swept me out of the here and now, but I was also obsessed: I wanted to fix things as soon as I caught wind of them.
As a boyfriend, I wanted to fix my partners instead of loving them for who they were or simply allowing them to take care of themselves. Instead of supporting my ex-girlfriend who lived with bipolar disorder, I would send her article after article on the promise of some nutrient that could ease her mood swings. I was a cruel, impatient boy with a paradoxical heart of gold, but I also hated myself. Instead of embracing my creativity in a healthy way, I hunched over myself and picked at every hint of something wrong. I wasn’t living, I was dead set on surviving (and just barely, at that).
Crossed wires
It wasn’t until recently, as I have weaned off my soul-numbing antidepressants, that I have come to that crucial epiphany. I wasn’t cursed, I was gifted; I just had to weaponize what I had as a form of creation rather than self-destruction. I shouldn’t have run away from what made me a valuable person. I shouldn’t have tried to numb that which would make a certain writer from Portland, Maine blush.
There is nothing wrong with us. The wires are simply crossed.
Remember. I am not here to tell you how you should manage your health anxiety. There are plenty of great doctors, nutritionists and specialists who can tell you about the wonders of meditation or relaxation techniques. All I ask is that instead of beating yourself up over what you perceive as a disease or some metaphysical curse, you reframe it as a side effect of being a brilliant thinker who is capable of so much more than those elaborate scenarios you came up with yourself.
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imagen 1: ThePixelman; imagen 2: Carlotta Silvestrini; imagen 3: Stefan Keller
