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fufarawI have a non-adversarial view of and relationship with death. As a small child, I bought into the "normal" fear of death as taught and performed by my parents, teachers, and others, to whom I looked for direction. I must have been eight, maybe nine, when I realized it was a performance, one expected of me, and stopped doing that, stopped thinking about it, stopped expecting, simply was still and took a long, personal look at death as a concept and not a threat, a punishment, or a horrible fate.
I mentioned before that life unfiltered has always been too bright, too loud, too immediate for me to be comfortable. I've sought buffers--solitude, music, reading, meditation, introspection--to insulate me from the loudest, brightest, most abrasive parts of life. I've stood in the shadows on the fringes of the bright arena where people were going about making friends, having adventures, buying clothes and exclaiming over each other's new shoes, new car, new house, observing with some interest but feeling no wistful tug to join in, to be one of "them."
Since childhood, the fringes, the shadows, were safer, far more comfortable, and quite intense enough. When forced, by school, by work, to spend significant time in the company of others, or in space where I was forced to interact, I tried to compensate by visualization (safe space, empty space, a sunlit meadow full of nothing more than grass and butterflies), by music, if permitted, that made my coworkers moan in boredom. I wasn't yet able to articulate about the nineteen squirrels in my head that never stopped running, talking, laughing, arguing, all at the same time and each about different subjects with little or no relation to each other.
It wasn't until adulthood and research into ADD, MB personality types, and Aspberger's that things became clearer. But since childhood, I've been holding the world at bay on one hand, and seeking, through visualization, through meditation, and other methods, a source of peace, the cessation of sensory input, even oblivion, on the other. Death hasn't seemed threatening for a very long time. It's been a quiet, present refuge, never actively beckoning*, just always reassuringly there. I have no fear of it.
I do, on the other hand, have a tremendous horror of the process of dying. I hate pain. After some study, I accept that pain has its uses and that some people invite the experience of pain for release of emotional or physical or sexual tension. That applied judiciously, consciously, pain can liberate and exalt some people. I am not one of those people. I also deal poorly with change. My experience has always been, nothing stays the same, and nothing ever really changes for the better. So the transition from life to death does scare me, quite a bit. But once across that threshold, death holds no terror for me. I almost look forward to it, as a reward for persisting. But I made promises, having had honest discussion with nearest and dearest. And I keep my word.
But death doesn't hold the same horror for me that it might for other people. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. But it does feel like it makes me less relatable, somehow.
*just to reassure anyone who might be concerned
I mentioned before that life unfiltered has always been too bright, too loud, too immediate for me to be comfortable. I've sought buffers--solitude, music, reading, meditation, introspection--to insulate me from the loudest, brightest, most abrasive parts of life. I've stood in the shadows on the fringes of the bright arena where people were going about making friends, having adventures, buying clothes and exclaiming over each other's new shoes, new car, new house, observing with some interest but feeling no wistful tug to join in, to be one of "them."
Since childhood, the fringes, the shadows, were safer, far more comfortable, and quite intense enough. When forced, by school, by work, to spend significant time in the company of others, or in space where I was forced to interact, I tried to compensate by visualization (safe space, empty space, a sunlit meadow full of nothing more than grass and butterflies), by music, if permitted, that made my coworkers moan in boredom. I wasn't yet able to articulate about the nineteen squirrels in my head that never stopped running, talking, laughing, arguing, all at the same time and each about different subjects with little or no relation to each other.
It wasn't until adulthood and research into ADD, MB personality types, and Aspberger's that things became clearer. But since childhood, I've been holding the world at bay on one hand, and seeking, through visualization, through meditation, and other methods, a source of peace, the cessation of sensory input, even oblivion, on the other. Death hasn't seemed threatening for a very long time. It's been a quiet, present refuge, never actively beckoning*, just always reassuringly there. I have no fear of it.
I do, on the other hand, have a tremendous horror of the process of dying. I hate pain. After some study, I accept that pain has its uses and that some people invite the experience of pain for release of emotional or physical or sexual tension. That applied judiciously, consciously, pain can liberate and exalt some people. I am not one of those people. I also deal poorly with change. My experience has always been, nothing stays the same, and nothing ever really changes for the better. So the transition from life to death does scare me, quite a bit. But once across that threshold, death holds no terror for me. I almost look forward to it, as a reward for persisting. But I made promises, having had honest discussion with nearest and dearest. And I keep my word.
But death doesn't hold the same horror for me that it might for other people. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. But it does feel like it makes me less relatable, somehow.
*just to reassure anyone who might be concerned
no subject
Date: 2014-06-29 09:54 pm (UTC)Yes, family gatherings were pretty awful for me as well -- even worse, gatherings with in-laws, extended family. Not that I don't like them in ones or twos -- well some of them -- but in large numbers. No.
Morning, right? All these years, and Scruffy still wants to talk to me. I just sneak out of bed and pray he doesn't wake up.