Despair, Part I

I went to the gym a lot in 2018 despite many setbacks. I don't know what really motivated me. Maybe I thought that exercise would help solve my reproductive problems. Maybe I was intuitively easing stress. Whatever it was, I kept going back, even if it meant I walked a 1.2 pace or less. Even if it was small kine embarrassing to be walking so slowly that I wasn't even breaking a sweat. I went.

Sometimes it was scary. I was scared. I was so light-headed and out of breath that I thought I would pass out. A few times I actually did swoon. I had to get off the treadmill at that point and maybe apply some Breathe, drink some water. In those moments, I'd sometimes wonder if I were actually already dead and experiencing a dream of myself.

This was not a fanciful notion. It was not an existential contemplation. It was not a thought exercise. It was a true question: Am I dead and is this just a dream?

And I would think about that as I snail-paced my way through thirty minutes of "cardio." I would think about ways I could prove my status as a living or dead being. How would I know and would I want to know? Would it even make a difference? Could I just pinch myself? That seemed unlikely.

I envisioned my body abandoned somewhere as my consciousness fled. What if I'd actually fainted while on the treadmill and it flung my body to the ground and people were even now surrounding me, checking for signs of life? How would I know? What if it had happened sooner-- this morning before work, for example, or maybe I'd never even woken up from sleep overnight? How would I know? Would it ever end?

It hadn't occurred to me then, but maybe something was wrong. Maybe suspecting I might be dead or unconscious somewhere meant that I was going through something terrifying, menacing, and exhausting and it was taking a toll on my psyche. I hadn't even thought about what I was thinking about. I didn't analyze myself. And maybe there was one question that I'd been too afraid to ask, one that I cannot even bring myself to type, one that I have tried to type at least twice and deleted both times.

Whenever I write about this, I am always inclined to justify everything. "Chronic illness made me do it" sort of thing. But I'll just leave this here as a note to the cosmos, for all eyes to read and interpret and judge. I'm always judging myself, anyway. I don't know when I'll ever be free of my cruel inner voices. So you can think of this as a big "fuck you." As me sticking my middle finger at those voices.