Has anyone else experienced this? Somewhere in transition, just feeling afraid?. You know: "very, very afraid"? Where it's not immediately obvious of what?
Or is it just me being weird again, or maybe being a "drama queen"?
(The rest of this is going to just be incoherent rambling/free association. Skip the rest of this post if you want to read something that actually makes sense.)
I woke up at 3:00 a.m., unable to sleep, just feeling afraid. I've been trying to figure out of what and how much, and I come up with all manner of explanations, but I can't tell what is real and what is just an rationalization to cover up what's really going on. It's like how they describe faerie: one minute something's real, the next moment it's illusion. One minute, I'm convinced something really big/weird is happening to me, the next minute I'm sure it's just a little indigestion. One minute, I feel like it's just a little anxiety (time to adjust the meds?), the next, I have this sinking feeling that this is just the tip of the fear-berg that I, like the Titanic, am about to ram into (or maybe I already have -- like people playing shuffleboard on the deck with the chunks of broken-off iceberg.)
I feel like I'm changing, but I don't know what into or how, nor do I have any control over where I'm going or how fast. I'm stuck in a driverless car that's going God knows where. I don't know who I'm going to be or whether I'll be me any more when it happens. The image of "Cthulu rising" comes to mind (disclaimer: I only know what I've heard about Cthulu, I've never actually read any of the Lovecraft stories about him) -- something alien rising from my depths, after which everything and everybody will be unrecognizably altered. Or like the main character in Piers Anthony's Macroscope. Or what happens to the title character in The Demolished Man.
I went Contra dancing recently, and there were moments when I felt like: I don't know if I can do this any more. I think it's the moments where my dance role forced me to recognize that I was dancing the man's part. In most of my life, I can pretend that I'm not "being a man," but being some genderless (bodyless?) humanoid entity, and in the instants where I'm forced to recognize that I'm male (typically when I feel like it would be most natural to do X, but I can't because I'm not a woman) it's like a punch in the gut.
I was left with the sudden feeling that not only are things changing in me, things could change a lot faster and a lot sooner than I've anticipated. Sort of a "not as much time left as you think" feeling. I don't think it's the hormones exactly (I haven't been on them even two weeks yet), but it might be related to the act of starting them. I'm not ready for this, I'm not going to be ready.
There are moments when I just want to get a whole pile of dynamite and blow myself up. (No, I'm not going to actually kill myself.) It's like that would be the only way to stop feeling this. Or maybe it's a subconscious description of what's happening to me.
(Time to go back to bed, I guess....)
