hi my name is spooky | dating @phantomoftheoperaunoffical | art blog @rosepetalwings | white cuban | they/them | 24 | my gender is being goffik | please ask me to tag any triggering things!
when people are talking about those ugly-ass boring-looking corporate-memphis covers they’re putting on romance novels now and they’re like “well at least they aren’t putting half-naked men all over them anymore……..” like wow shut the fuck off. are you even listening to yourself. “ohh i’m so glad novels don’t come with their own lovingly realized oil paintings on the cover anymore” that’s how you sound. good grief. be quiet for 100 years.
Love that they put “a sense of impending doom” as one of the symptoms of a heart attack, like girl, that’s just how it is to be alive these days, you’re gonna have to be more specific
This made me chuckle but after scrolling away I felt the need to come back to it.
Because as someone who has felt this I can not stress how different it actually is from anxiety. Which is saying a lot because I have a massive anxiety disorder.
I’ve only felt this twice in my life - once when I was going into kidney failure due to an infection and again when my body was going into shock due to dehydration and malnourishment due to GI issues - and I can not stress how much it saved my life. It’s hard to even put it into words. It’s not like a panic attack, or anxiety. It is a horrific gut turning feeling of absolute dread.
Especially if you have anxiety you’ll know the difference honestly. It’s so much worse. It’s every cell in your body and your brain screaming that there’s something horribly wrong in a way you’ve never felt. It’s your brain screaming out that you are going to die in a way no panic attack has ever done before.
I can not stress how important it is to get yourself to the ER if you feel this way. Especially if your having other physical symptoms.
This is amazing and incredibly helpful, oh my god. Thank you.
Seconding the above : I was going into shock from internal bleeding, and that sense of “something is gravely wrong” was entirely different from my day-to-day whirlwind of anxiety.
For me, it was very quiet. For me, there was a deep sense that I could just lie down on the floor and not have to ever get up again, no effort required.
That combined wrongness/relief was so weird and so unsettling that I drove myself to the ER.
The “impending” part is really key to that symptom, I think, based on my experience. It’s not the existential dread of late-stage capitalism grinding the world into nurdles. It’s a ghost crow on your shoulder whispering “it’s here, it’s now.”
Impending doom is also a feature of anaphylaxis, something I’m intimately familiar with as someone with mast cell dysfunction.
For me, its the overwhelming, near calm certainty of doom that distinguishes it from the jittery panic of “but something could go wrong.”
There’s no “what if?” There’s no room to question it. It just IS. And it’s very different from the “calm” of disassociation too. I’m not disassociated from myself when it happens. I’m probably actually the most present ever.
I’ve turned to doctors and told them calmly and with utter certainty “I am going to die” and the reaction that calm certainty gets is immediate intervention because doctors also recognize that stillness as the body not bothering to waste any time on fight or flight and just going straight to “death is imminent due to some internal failing, act accordingly.”
When I was lying in bed recovering from a hit to the head, I remember a moment in the middle of the night where I went from a sorta half asleep state to being instantly wide awake and feeling, with absolutely certainty, that I was about to die. It was dead silent in my head other than that thought, screaming at me that Something Is Wrong, something is Terribly Wrong. It was like I could feel the dread seeping into my bones, my chest, like I could see it in the back of my eyes, sense it around the corner. Everything was going haywire, like a train was blowing its whistle and I was on the track and my body was trying to get me to Move Dammit.
I called emergency services and tried to explain what I’m feeling. I thought I would be written off, but when I started describing the feeling, immediately the dispatcher sent paramedics to my apartment. Good thing too, as I had a stroke in the ambulance.
Impending doom is real, and a defense mechanism created by the brain to get you to get medical help for something that you cannot handle by yourself, and as someone with panic disorders, it is wildly different and arguably even more terrifying than any attack I’ve ever had.
