I´m glad to hear you enjoy our conversations!
I think that a fear of abandonment is definitely something that can trigger my sickness. When I worry that someone I`m waiting for might not show up, for example, I get slightly panicky straight away. I feel sick in so many (as far as I can tell) unrelated situations, though, that fear of abandonment is probably not the only aspect.
The last few days have been really strange. First of all, the good news is that I made some progress focusing not on my nausea, but on the accompanying feelings, and that this tends to alleviate the nausea symptoms. Those feelings, however, are causing some disruption. Thursday night I was out with my SO and her mum. At some point I felt a sense of danger, like knowing I was on the brink of another nausea attack. "Okay, what´s
really going on?" I asked, and as I dwelt on that I realized that I was feeling really, really low and depressed. These feelings were almost unreal. I had and have no idea how they are connected to my life. They did not refer to anything that I could think of. It was different from the kind of depression which I can easily feel, like "Meh. I don´t want to go to college. I´ll never get a job anyway. I hate my life." Part of me wanted to hide alone in my bed at home, and part of me dreaded going home alone. My mum is on holiday, so I´d be really alone, and I get awfully paranoid and anxious when I´m alone at home at night. Yes, and the third part thought that I was probably just being a drama queen, or drunk, or that at least for some reason these feelings weren´t real or significant.
I did go home alone, though. And when I had almost reached my house, suddenly everything seemed creepy, but in a way like: I stare at a wall, or a bike, and just freeze, like a deer caught in the headlights. The thing I stare at seems to be really scary, for no reason at all. I´m barely even seeing it, it´s more like my eyes are glued to something. There are shivers going down my back, and my neck and shoulders are tense, and something strange is happening in my head. It´s like a rapid, random cascade of fragments. I couldn´t even tell if these fragments are thoughts, feelings, pictures, voices or memories. Often this is accompanied by a distinct sense of familiarity, like it all pointed to something I knew all too well, but I can´t access it. At the same time, I feel silly, like I´m allowing this to happen, like it wanted it to happen. Nonetheless, though, it takes a lot of effort to tear myself loose and make myself move again.
Being in this state of mind, it took me ages to unlock my door. Even though I was so absorbed, I jumped at every sound. I felt like I was about to be attacked, like something was going to jump at me. I was starting to feel weepy. Then I finally entered our flat and I closed the door behind me, and immediately I froze again. I stared down the hall into the living room, my eyes glued to the window frame. I felt absolute terror, for no reason at all. It wasn´t even the fear that somebody could attack me. I was at a point where I would have welcomed another human being as company, no matter who. I was clinging to the door frame, and I heard myself wailing and crying. It is not like I couldn´t help it, it was more like I was signaling something, like I was pleading. On some level I still felt like I was in control and like I could have stopped at any time. Not the fear, but me acting "stupid". It´s like some part of me is bent on making me feel bad about myself. I was detached from my little nervous breakdown, though, at least to some degree, because there was still a voice in my head analyzing what was happening to me and formulating this post. Thank goodness crisis doesn´t impact my ability to think in foreign languages!
Another reason why my crisis seems fake to me. Even though I know it isn´t fake.
I staggered into the kitchen at some point, and, trying to calm myself down, I looked out of the window. In a lot of other houses, the lights were still on. I decided to say that to myself aloud, as an attempt to ground myself a little. "Look, so many lights!" I heard myself say, and it came out in the voice of a sad, tired child. I managed to climb into bed, lock the door to my room, get on the Internet, phone my SO - and say nothing about what had happened. I wouldn´t have known how to describe it. These activities calmed me down, though. I went to sleep like it was a completely normal night.
The next evening I was alone at home again. I could sense the freezing and the fragment thing starting to happen again (though without the terror), but after a while I managed to snap out of it. I was starting to feel unreal, scared and lonely, so I had the brilliant idea to turn on the radio. It was nothing like a normal evening, though. Most of the time I did not even
feel scared, but I acted scared. After dinner I sat in my room, trying to get something done, not getting anything done, and at some point I realized I was 1) all the time bracing myself for the possibility that at any moment someone might grab my neck and 2) listening intently for any kind of noise that suggested somebody might be sneaking up the stairs. The stairs are right across from my room. Often I spend minutes staring at the stairs without even realizing it, in this same deer in the headlights fashion. I wouldn´t have dared turn on the radio now. Any kind of distraction might have led to me missing the decisive moment when the "intruder" would come out of his hiding place. On a detached, unconcerned level I wondered what use would be the three seconds warning this would give me. What would I do, after all? I only want those three seconds in order to curl up into a ball and close my eyes.
Right now everything seems mostly back to normal. And what happened? Exactly.
This evening I felt sick again.
You asked what I think might happen if I went to a doctor. Many of the things I described above I described the first time today. In order to profit from seeing a doctor, I must be able to describe these things to him, and make it very clear to him that they did happen and that they are not a one time thing and that they are important. But these are things I myself am heavily conflicted about, or you could also say: in denial. Now from my experience doctors tend to side with that denial, maybe because they want to reassure me ("It´s nothing uncommon, nothing deep and serious, you can get it under control."). But I don´t want to be reassured. I feel like I´ve never been able to make it clear to anybody that there is something fundamentally not okay with me. And fighting this fight isn´t easy when not even all of your self is on your own side.
It is one of those moments when I realize once again how important it is to write here, and practice describing what happens to me, and making it real. It is very different from just writing in my diary, so thank you for listening!