When trying to explain the reality of mental illness to others, I will sometimes refer to the monkey on my back or the ape in my head. I’m certainly not a dualist, but consciousness is a strange, emergent phenomenon which regularly defies description. There seem to be layers to our minds and personalities and they don’t always live in harmony. Rather than a single ego driving us, it seems more likely that our actions are decided by committee and only after the choice is made do our minds then draft the narrative of free will.
As products of evolution, our brains have a set of hardwired priorities which don’t always coincide with the more rational parts of the mind. It’s this inner animal, tasked with keeping us alive, that sometimes becomes a major impediment to our well-being. Picture one of our ancient relatives perched in the trees, scanning the environment for potential threats, maybe a predator hunting us or a rival encroaching on our territory. Even now, this sentinel exists within our minds, but what we perceive as threats now are far more abstract.
To make matters worse, humans have an impressive talent for pattern recognition, even where there is no signal in the noise. We’ve likely all experienced this: being startled by what turns out to be a stick or a shadow, or thinking we hear someone calling our name when there is loud background noise. Unfortunately, that primordial sentinel in our heads also has access to those tools and, for some people, it absolutely loves to make whatever tangential connections it can.
It’s tragic, really: an ever-alert sentinel in our minds, doing everything it can to keep us alive, when our deaths are ultimately inevitable. It’s the pinnacle of futility. I sometimes think of anxiety as the terror this animal feels, doing its best to sail a sinking ship. Being knowledgeable only makes the situation worse since I’m painfully aware of the myriad ways the human body can fail. Thus this panicked creature climbs the walls inside my skull, shrieking and pointing at every danger it senses, as though I have any ability to avoid them.
The Nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot, has a song with the line, “Doubt you could follow a charting of the manifold ways I’m ill.” This speaks to the core of my being as I’ve long-since lost track of all the various maladies I worried I may have. Countless heart attacks, strokes, aneurysms, ALS, various cancers, dementia… I’m sure I’m barely scratching the surface. It’s exhausting and indescribably demoralizing, but this is veering into Sword of Damocles territory as I digress.
My anxiety doesn’t always focus solely on health concerns, there are times when my internal alert system obsesses over other things as well. An ominous e-mail from a supervisor at work or a conference with an angry parent are just as likely to prompt a cascade of worry. That’s the nature of the beast: anything that could be perceived as a threat triggers an existential crisis. We have to struggle for our very survival. Fight or flight.
