thoughts percolating

[rm]

But, instead of telling you them, I have a poll.

What's your relationship to death/Death (capitalization as you prefer)?
Please share any thoughts you have about gender as connected with that.

Thnx.

Comments

hmm.

[radiantfracture]

How very well-adjusted everyone appears to be. I think I will comment just for variety.

I've had a horror of death since I was a small child. It recurs periodically, often when I'm under stress, as a kind of phobic attack. Food goes tasteless in my mouth, etc. I call these the Death Threats.

I use various strategies to deal with this feeling -- to distract, to rationalize, to focus on the present moment. It isn't that I haven't thought about how death is natural, logical, a gift, ad infinitum, wa ha, it's just that in the moment of contemplating the blankness of nonexistence, the annihilation of the self, these things are often insufficient balm. Or they quiet the crisis of the moment, but they don't prevent it from recurring.

No doubt I simply have more fear chemicals than most people, and it is more about Phobia and less about Thanatos. The level of crisis has sometimes dragged me through to insights I might not have experienced otherwise, so I'm grateful for that.

I've noticed as I've gotten older that sometimes when I'm very tired, after a long and uninspiring day, death seems like kind of a nice break.

On the smaller scale, I am afraid of dying before I've written enough. Also afraid of running out of things to write before I die.

Gender, though. This death thing seems to be a private battle of mine, girl and man. In that testosterone does alter my relationship to my emotions -- it makes them less immediate and trickier to decipher -- it may help to reduce the frequency of the death threats. It hasn't changed my relationship to the idea of my dying, which is: I'm against it.

I am interested, though, in what your hypothesis might be.

{rf}