Thursday, December 6, 2012

Hypochondria is overrated

So it's dawned on me recently that I'm a hypochondriac. Sad but true. I see a red mark on my skin, probably from my bra, I immediately think it's skin cancer. I have a canker sore on my tongue. Cancer. I'm pooing dark pink (because I've eaten beets but I only found that out later and in the moment thought my insides were coming out through my butt hole). Must be colon cancer.

The worst possible thing I can do is look that shit up on the Internet. So I do. And it doesn't help. It only feeds into my mania and exacerbates the whole situation. I know they're trying to provide people with useful information but I think it's doing more harm than good to list various symptoms that could indicate any number of ailments on the Internet. Because we are somehow programmed to download the worst possible scenario into our brains and convince ourselves that's our fate.

There's no logic to it, no reasoning. Just this overwhelming sense that our very survival is being threatened, assailed constantly with inexplicable bumps, bruises, marks and strange-looking poo.

I've vowed in the New Year to try and calm the f*ck down, you know, go with the flow. Every time I get any of these minor incidents checked out by a doctor, they turn out to be nothing. I should really learn to take a hint. All this time wasted being worried. Why?

Worry has to be the most useless emotion ever. It doesn't solve anything. It has no healing power. If anything, it just makes things worse because it puts your mind and body under stress. So why do we worry so much? About everything?

Are we so aware of life's fragility that we can't just ease into the flow of our lives? Is it the uncertainty? The not knowing when that final moment will come so we keep tripping ourselves up in the meantime? I get unusually obsessive about my health when I'm happy or under stress. I know, go figure.

If things get too good, if I feel I'm too content, then I have this strange compulsion to find some tiny little bodily flaw (a freckle, a cramp, a dull ache) and, with the amazing power of my imagination, turn it into something potentially fatal. Life is too short to be doing that kind of shit.

Why can't I just BE happy, or just BE stressed without a fabricated doomsday health prognosis hanging over me? I know resolutions don't usually work but I find this one particularly important: go with the flow. Stop fighting life. Because before you know it, it'll be over and you'll have spent most of it worrying about the end instead of actually living.