ashe dryden

I tend to not discuss more personal things here, but I needed to get all of this out. I don't intend for this to turn into some sort of philosophical/religious debate.

I've been pulling myself back a bit from things lately and disconnecting. A lot of people have noticed it and I hope it isn't something that is being taken personally. I consider myself to be a pretty optimistic person (obnoxiously so, to some), but I seem to have hit some sort of wall of depression that has left me a little... broken.

This past week my friend Amy's dad passed away, my grandfather has been in and out of the hospital, Boone's grandmother is seeming increasingly frail, and the news hasn't been able to pull itself away from the 6 teenagers that were killed in two car accidents here in southeastern Wisconsin.

And I am suddenly absolutely obsessed with my own mortality.

The other night I had so many nightmares in which I died that I cried myself dry. I was terrified to fall back asleep and being awake just meant thinking more about it.

I'm sure I am not the first person to be terrified of dying. I don't think that I am coming to some great philosophical realisation about the whole ordeal. I am just plain scared.

It's funny - I have spent all of my life thinking of my time as infinite and myself as untouchable. I mean, we all do it to a certain point - it is always someone else that gets in the car accident, some faceless child in Africa that dies of small pox, someone else that dies in a house fire.

Not only that, but I have been wishing my time away - wishing I were old enough to cross the street by myself, wishing I were old enough to drive, wishing I were out of school already, wishing it were just Friday so I could sleep in and not have to deal with this inane work.

Now it has finally hit me. I will die. All of the people I know and love will die. One day they'll go to sleep and they won't wake up.

I'm not so afraid of what people will think of me once I am gone or how they will regard how I lived my life. It is that sudden end to things that has crept into the corners of my mind. Everytime my thoughts wander a little from what I am doing I think about the fact that one day everything will stop for me. Being as obsessively scientific as I am - researching, collecting and compiling information, knowing every possible outcome - not being able to hold on to some tangible data on what happens when the heart monitor at the hospital finally sighs it's last syncopated beat is too much for me to handle.

I can't listen to the news anymore. I turn it off everytime I hear it come on. I just can't cope with hearing all of that stuff anymore. I used to have so much hope for everything - for things we could do to change the way things are. Now all I can think about are all of those people that no one will ever have the chance to help and at least I was lucky enough to be born into a country where the life expectancy for women is beyond our years of highest fertility. There are people who haven't or won't make it to even my age.

And here I am - crying, the blood pulsing through my ears - thinking about the fact that I may have possibly reached the halfway mark in my life. It's selfish and it's stupid and it's pointless to dwell on it too long, but all manner of rationalization doesn't change how I am feeling right now.

Everything I do I double think - do I really want to spend part of my finite time - the time I could have spent thinking about how amazing it is to be in love or enjoying my friends or playing with my cats - cleaning the bathroom or bitching about the price of gas or spending 10 hours a day at a job? Am I wasting what I have? Do I fully appreciate anything?