Why I’ve Been Feeling Deathly Recently

A rough few days of sickness and thoughts of unease. Time to vent in a stream of consciousness.

It’s That Time

Well, it’s that time again. After a week of feeling on top of the world, a catalyst occurred which snowballed into yet another downturn. And needless to say, I’ve been feeling like garbage because of it.

I don’t know how long this one’s going to last. So, since writing about your thoughts and feelings is a good way to release some of that stress (apparently), I might as well jot down a few words.

And I don’t have any articles ready to be published this week anyway.

“When life gives you lemons, use them to get views on social media.”

Ninety-Nine Problems

Let’s start with physical health. It kind of sucks right now.

This time of the year is when the heat and particulates are really becoming consistently irritating. I have to sneeze all the time. I’ve gone through at least a couple dozen tissues today blowing my nose.

You know what’s the worst though? When you have to sneeze, but no matter how hard you try, you just can’t. I have to try and breath so that the air tickles my nose in the right way to trigger the achoo.

My eyes are drier than a bone. I used special eye drops after suffering for days, and the itchiness and burning that resulted from that first application was agonizing. It may have helped in the end, but it hurt like hell throughout the process.

The heat and allergies have completely demolished my cognitive ability. There’s been so many days where I’ve done basically nothing. No game dev work, no articles written. I did do some coding, but this feature I’m working on could’ve been done so much sooner without the haze.

It makes me worry that these next few months are going to be a whole lot of nothing. Even with strong allergy medication, the symptoms are only mitigated somewhat. I still feel like sneezing every minute, and my eyes are still bloodshot.

The last few days have been especially brutal. Due to the discomfort from all of this, I haven’t been able to sleep well. I woke up at 2:00 AM every single night, and I couldn’t fall back asleep until 6–7 in the morning.

If the pollen hadn’t already made me fatigued (it had), actual lack of sleep certainly did the job.

Apparently, waking up in the middle of the night like this is actually normal. People centuries ago used to do stuff between those two 4-hour periods of sleep.

Well, I hate it.

I did some research into why I had trouble falling asleep even when I was so tired. It turns out that the stress from insomnia puts you into a state of heightened awareness, in order to be ready for the danger you’re perceiving to be imminent.

But that awareness keeps you awake. Which means you can’t get sleep to fix the problem. And that leads to losing even more sleep. Causing more anguish for myself.

Between allergies and this, I’m starting to wonder how much of a design failure humans really are.

So yeah. Headaches, sneezing, a runny nose. Oh, and strong nausea as well. I’ve got a lot of burps and acid reflux, from both the allergies and the unease from all the stress. I’m barely holding onto consciousness.

This sensation is making me ponder on my own mortality. Sometimes I wonder if I’m actually dying. If I were to do so, I wouldn’t even know.

I’ve been under local anesthesia before. And I remember how it was to conk out when I was a kid. I would imagine that death would be similar to these. To lose consciousness, but just never wake up.

That doesn’t seem so bad. Obviously, it’s not that I want to die. But with these allergies, it often feels like I’m doing so. And not peacefully, in the way described before. It’s in agony.

I’m not necessarily afraid of death. After all, it’s been said that people fear public speaking more than dying. I’ve already experienced that fear countless times, so it’s likely no worse than that.

However, it’s times like this that make me wary of the ever so thin line between life and death. And whether I’m about to cross it.

Well, time to google my symptoms. Hey Google, am I dying?

Anyway, that’s going down a whole existential rabbit hole.

I’ve just noticed it’s already past midnight. It’s been a long day. I should get what little rest I can, before inevitably waking up randomly at 2 in the morning again.

I’ll be right back.

Alright, back to ruminations and suffering.

I actually got good sleep last night, ironically. I feel better now. And so the entire motivation for this article has already passed. I’m still going to finish writing though. The past four days were a pain.

I’ve realized my negative thoughts tend to stem from negative feelings. The worse I feel, the worse my thoughts are. It can be extremely frustrating. I find myself constantly stuck in a state of anger toward everything.

Then I question whether they’re intrusive thoughts, or what I actually believe. I don’t want to think about any of it, but they consume me.

It’s always this constant grumbling in my mind. I’m reminded of every past transgression made toward me, as well as my own mishaps. I think about all the worst things, and the mental anguish from doing so is no different than if it had actually happened.

I had a package that was to be delivered yesterday. But because I was away for the day with family, I couldn’t get it. I had ordered the item a few days ago, and it was supposed to come in 2-5 days.

What were the chances of it coming on the one day I’m gone…

It arrived at the post office and went out on the mailtruck. And since I wasn’t there to sign, I got that pink slip from the USPS, and had to reschedule the date.

I always fixate on my bad luck. It’s a bias I’ve had. It feels like I can wait for something for hours, but the second I leave my house, whatever I was waiting for happens.

Obviously, that isn’t always true. There’s been plenty of times when I’ve been home to get the package or whatever was needed. But I don’t remember them as vividly. I guess that’s negativity bias in play.

Relatedly, I often get this feeling of guilt, as though others think my existence is a nuisance. It’s weird, considering few people even know I exist. I’m not that important. But again, these hypotheticals feel as though they happened in real life.

For example, I can’t help but wonder if not being there annoyed the mailperson. To order something and have them bring it all the way out, only for me to not be home when they do.

It’s pretty illogical. I don’t know them and they don’t know me. I’m not the only person getting mail. I’m sure it happens all the time. But my mind wants to fill in the gaps with shame filling.

The item in the package is a brand-new camera. An Insta360 X3, with 5.7K resolution. Waterproof, hyper smooth image stabilization, etc. Overall, there’s a lot of features I’m eager to try out.

There are a couple of reasons why I bought it, but there’s already so many topics in this that could be separate articles. So I’ll save the details to milk them later.

I’m already worrying about being judged. It’s one of those cameras you need to put on a selfie stick, so it’s not exactly discreet. It makes me self-conscious just thinking about using it.

I think about all the uncomfortable situations I could get into with the unwanted attention. I’m not even recording for social media, it’s for personal use. But I worry about being assumed to be an out-of-touch “influencer”.

You know, the ones who harass people on the streets and create disruptions to the peace. I imagine others imagining me as that.

As I’ve mentioned, these thoughts create real emotions. And so just envisioning this makes me feel like I’ve committed a crime. Even though literally nothing has happened. Oversensitivity to others’ perceptions of me has been a huge problem of mine.

This makes feeling good about the purchase even harder. Sure, I sold a stock option and made a few bucks from passive income apps. So the purchase is already halfway paid off with those.

Yet there’s this nagging feeling that’s telling me it was a wasteful buy. I can’t help but think I could’ve put that money back into investments and made even more in the long run.

And what if the camera turns out to be no good? The image quality isn’t even as good as a traditional camcorder, it’s just the features that make it versitile. Will I even use it when my current one is still good?

Perhaps I’ll figure that out when it’s redelivered tomorrow. There’s just a lot of bad feelings circulating within me. It’s not all gloomy though. As I said, I’m doing better today.

The downtrend might’ve ended sooner than I had thought.

The Other Side

Yesterday, I was back in San Francisco. The last time was right around the time I started writing here on Medium. So I guess this is the first time these bimonthly trips have come up in my writing.

Going back home, getting together with family, and enjoying some homemade food.

Potstickers, siu mai, and some bolo/char siu baos (I had no idea you could combine the two). Then for dinner, lemon fried pork, jumbo shrimp with snow peas, beef with onions, and much more.

Because of the sea breeze, the air was so much better. It’s still allergy-inducing, but nowhere near as bad. Being in my childhood home elicits a sense of familiarity as well. Listening to the constant toots of the cargo ships in the distance.

This is the carefree feeling I used to remember. I had a long nap to try and make up for days of lost sleep, and took it all in.

The feeling of home.