Hypochondriac

I was lying in bed a few weeks ago when a dull but persistent ache blossomed in my chest. An isolated symptom and nothing to be concerned about, certainly; nothing but the creaks and groans of a body lived in.

Of course, my mind does not deal in logic.

It’s happening, I thought. This is it. I am at death’s door. How will my mom know I want peonies at my funeral? Within minutes and with the help of modern technology (read: WebMD), I had diagnosed myself, at 21 years old, with heart failure. I began making arrangements for my looming departure from this mortal sojourn.

The pain was gone the next morning, and I forgot completely about it. I learned two things from this experience: 1) WebMD is not my friend, and 2) I should probably let my mom know I want peonies at my funeral.

The significance of this incident lies not in the isolation of it. On the contrary, the significance of this incident lies in the fact that it is a completely insignificant and recurring incident in a network of mental illness symptoms.

Over the years, I have convinced myself of a myriad of diseases lurking beneath my skin--epilepsy when I was eight, meningitis when I was 13, brain cancer last week. These have all been relatively unfounded assumptions based on mild, sporadic, and ultimately meaningless symptoms. I twist the occasional headache or fatigue into terminal illness. My own mortality is not a foreign concept to me; I often am convinced that I am dying in one way or another.

I knew the phrases “chemical imbalance,” “Fluoxetine,” and “hypochondria” before I lost all my baby teeth. My dad is a physician, and medical terminology had a place set at the dinner table. This was for better or for worse. On one hand, his medical background allowed him to catch on quickly to what was happening in my brain; on the other hand, I was far too aware of obscure illnesses for an eight year old and further fueled my own anxieties.

Hypochondria has been just a single manifestation of my anxiety disorder. It’s been 13 years now of a near-constant war being waged in my own head. All logic, truth, and rationale arm themselves against a barrage of “what ifs,” and funnily enough, the good guys don’t always win. I have watched in horror as anxiety guts my relationships and my sanity, leaving the blood on my hands and the carnage on my conscience.

Mental illness works quietly in your peripheral vision. You see its shadow, you know something is not quite right, but you can’t quite bring it into focus. It creeps just outside of your consciousness. The invisible illness leaves no visible bumps or marks, just a black hole in the mind. Nothing but a lack of matter.

I think my subconscious knew something was wrong far before I became aware of it. Misfires in the brain sent out distress signals to healthy skin and bone, desperately trying to assign the feeling of “wrongness” to something, anything. In truth, what I thought were failures in my body were faulty mechanisms in my own mind. The paranoia wasn’t about the illness; it was the illness.

They say awareness is the first step. I don’t know who “they” are, but I have a bone to pick with them. Thirteen years of awareness and I still hardly know what I’m doing. I often think I am too aware--too aware of my body, my thoughts, the world around me. They say awareness is the first step, but what do you do when awareness is part of the problem?