Hypochondreadjacent

When I was a child I always hoped that I had cancer. It honestly could have been any illness, but cancer was the first thing I would think of. I also wondered whether or not I was autistic or had something similar to Down syndrome; that maybe everyone was way smarter than me but just pretending to make me feel better.

I’m not a hypochondriac, I think that's important to clarify, it's inappropriate to misappropriate mental illness for common experiences. The word itself is a joy to read, and my experience as a serial worrier feels adjacent to the core meaning of the word. As someone who suffers from depression, I can’t tell you how often I find people tossed, thrown in the spiral of self-hate by a break in their favourite tv shows.

In general, from my day-to-day experiences, I figured that something was wrong with me; I felt off but I couldn’t figure it out. But if I had an illness, then I could be cured, or at least managed, but no turning point ever came in my health or intellegance - I was just doomed to limp through life.

My imagination always came with this double-edged sharpness; on the one hand, I am endlessly creative, but on the other hand, I am endlessly negative. A bump in my mouth was never just a bump, it was a tumour that would threaten to tear itself out of my face; my mom was never just late home at night, she surely had been murdered - her body never to be found.

It was an unhealthy obsession with what could be; obviously, the chance that someone you love is going to die is never zero, but the majority of the time it won’t happen. Same with illnesses the fact of the matter was, I always could have cancer... or a parasite or a vestigial twin. And surely that was what was causing my stupidity, my clumsiness, my sadness.

I would concoct horrific waking nightmares where aches in my body suggested I had been drugged and violated with no memory of the event. Violations that I had no proof of, and yet an ever-present inkling

Movies like The Matrix or Nightmare on Elm Street always terrified me, as I never could be entirely sure if my reality was indeed true, or whether my suffering was doomed to continue eternally, spurned on by a cruel god; which is in part why I am not particularly religious.

In all my delusions, Ironically, the actual answers to my questions were often those that I was the least likely to believe in - although I didn’t truely believe in any of my thoughts -, I did have illnesses, but they were mental rather than physical. There's a lot of inherent information about myself that I often just choose to outright ignore throughout my life; obvious signs of depression and ADHD that I ignored completely. What is strange to me is that I don’t really have a good reason as to why I was so adamant my illness had to be physical, that the reality I was living in had to be any different from what it was.

I still have these delusions from time to time, they’ll likely follow me to the grave. It's upsetting but understandable - they were an influence on how I look at the world, an extension of the creative eye that guides my writing. To denounce the horror intrinsically to my mind, that negativity would also be to lose the different ways I am able to construct reality around what I experience.

I don’t know... I just wish I slept better I guess.