Ride the lightning
‘I’m only scared when I’m in danger. I’m scared, therefore I must be in danger’
This reverse engineering of risk is something to which I’m particularly prone. I’m enormously, abundantly, tragically bad at understanding health risks; everywhere I look I see health dangers and somehow there’s a part of me wholly sold on the idea that to foresee these risks somehow allows us to be better prepared.
The idea is of course laughable.
I work out, I eat well, and as I told my neurologist with no small measure of embarrassment ‘I’ve got my pharmacology game tight’. But even with these efforts I can’t wholly prevent medical problems from happening, multiple sclerosis aaaabsolutely withstanding.
Yet I find myself watching the horizon health-wise and at the first sign of trouble I get to work, reading everything I can, understanding the science and the medicine, looking at the details of every blood test, every scan. But, and I can’t say this clearly enough, it doesn’t help me at all, like not even a little.
Even were I to have a complete picture, the benefit of every test imagined by our brightest medical minds, and therefore a perfect vantage from which to see impending dangers, and even if my training were comprehensive enough to be able to perfectly interpret what I was seeing, I would still be largely helpless.
I feel a little like I do about the climate catastrophe. I watch the tragedy of our circumstances and feel the need to do something, and while I do my best to reduce my carbon footprint and indeed I don’t have children and that alone has dropped my carbon footprint through the floor, in all honesty that’ll do little to ameliorate what is going to happen next.
The issue I have with both climate anxiety and health anxiety is my predisposition to learn more. I read a lot about the climate, about tipping points, about records broken, and the instinct to doom scroll in this way is compelled by the same drive to see what is coming.
But the only thing that changes for all my knowledge is that my anxiety is better informed.
Being better informed does me no good. I’m not a climate scientist or indeed that kind of doctor and me understanding what my mildly raised ALT levels might mean for my liver’s health is akin to me knowing more about what the hurricane currently tearing its way through Florida means for the health of the planet.
Maybe the instinct comes from earlier simpler days, when my agrarian ancestors would have needed to watch the skies for weal and woe, and that limited forecasting would permit them to actually do something to prepare, crouch over saplings, jump at clouds to scare them off, usher the trees inside, I don’t know I’m not a horticulturalist.
But now my forecasting is totally, fundamentally, useless. I can’t coax my liver into feeling better any more than I can shoo off methane emissions. And therefore me knowing more about future possibilities only makes me anxious. Worse, my reverse engineering of that anxiety tells me that I’m in immediate danger, a danger about which I can do essentially nothing.
All my reading, all my pages and pages of test results strewn over my desktop, all the reports for my scans telling me the number and location of brain lesions that are just now a permanent fixture of the inside of my head. The inside of my head! All of this information is great for doctors to know, I’m all for more tests for them to review over a cappuccino with concerned colleagues.
But to me this information is toxic.
What I really want is to be able to see test results without absolutely wholesale panicking every time. To be able to look, internalise the high liver enzymes, not know what in the world that means, and to just accept the not knowing, to accept that I can’t know the level of risk I’m in, and to laugh in the face of the danger.
I don’t know how to do this. I think I need to realise that there’s nothing I can do. Like being on a rollercoaster and seeing bolts fly out of the mechanism while looping around. You can freak out with anxiety, scream, try in total vein to escape your fate, or you can let go and enjoy the ride. Whether this is going to be your last ride isn't something you can control, and your fear of the future only changes your experience of the present moment.
There are moments, precious moments, where I feel like I'm riding the lightning. I feel like an extreme sportswoman reading about the risks of dying horribly in an accident, wide eyed as I strap on my wing suit looking lustfully at the open door of the helicopter; the danger part of the excitement. In my experience we are never more alive than when we are in peril.
So as I sit here waiting for the call from my team to learn more, anxious about what comes next, tempted to Google the horizon for weal and woe, I will instead try to let go. Please let's let go…