What It's Like To Lose Yourself, Piece By Piece

Every day is a new disaster. Each week brings some new challenge. Months go by with tragedy rolling into fresh tragedy and you wonder how it's possible for so many bad things to happen to one person. You're not sure you'll live to see another year if it keeps up like this. Your life is made up of one setback after another. It's not something anyone can truly understand if they have not lived it.

Your brain can't take this kind of repeated stress. Worry over specifics morphs into worry over everything, anxiety a suffocating blanket that smothers you until you want to cry out, make it stop, I can't breathe under the weight of this. Anxiety causes your brain to see everything as a threat and assume the worst outcome always. Every niggling feeling in your chest is a heart attack. Every headache is a brain tumour. Every mole is a melanoma. It's exhausting to live like this. We're not programmed for it. All you can hope for is the ensuing depression to make you want to sleep, to spend as much time as you can in a place where you're not like this, where the unrelenting doom brewing inside you will not manifest. It's the worst when you wake up. Because there's a moment, however fleeting, where you forget that you are who you are and that everything is in ruins. And then you remember. It's enough to make you choke. 

Depression is endemic in people with chronic illness. It's not hard to see why. You're trapped in a body that betrays you constantly. You take your fistful of pills, you endure the infusions and injections and blood tests and hospital stays and still it seems to make no difference. You become your problems. Your illness suffuses your identity and the hopelessness of your struggle turns you bitter and angry. If you're lucky you'll know when to withdraw from people before you completely exhaust their goodwill towards you. There's only so many times you can break plans with people and complain while you turn into a shell of your former self. Gradually you stop hearing from them, at about the same rate you withdraw. It's not like you can even blame them. Nobody wants to invite negativity into their life. Who wants to haul an oar on a sinking ship? By getting close to people, I'm only ensuring they will go through pain, a lot of it, watching me die and being helpless to assist me in any way. And so it goes until you're alone and it's just you and your problems that have no solutions. Still you struggle on. Your reward for not killing yourself today is getting the chance to not kill yourself again tomorrow. The irony is not lost on you.

Bit by bit, my body is failing. Each relapse of my incurable degenerative neurological illness takes something from me. Always there is pain. Some days, and they are getting more frequent, my legs don't want to obey me. You sit inside all day, watching the sunset through the window. Remembering when you used to chase it, vowing you'd never lose it. And now you see it go down at one remove, watching it leave you behind. And you wonder how many more you're going to see. Will you know the last one when it happens? I just hope it's beautiful.