For quite a while there – several months, in fact – my depressive Bipolar symptoms were basically in remission. No suicidal ideations. No free-floating anxiety. The improvement coincided roughly with my cancer diagnosis. As I wrote back then, I really don’t know why I got better. Not to say that I was symptom-free all through the fall and early winter. In particular, the steroids that they gave me during my chemotherapy set off mild hypomanias. But, thankfully, those have never been dangerous or destructive in my case.
I thought I’d write today about my fear-symptoms, as they are making a reappearance. I’m very unhappy about it.
Let me start with some philosophy and linguistics pertaining to phrases like ‘I’m afraid’. One can believe something false, but not know, remember or discover that such-and-such, if such-and-such isn’t the case. Many people believe, e.g., that Obama was born in Africa, even though that’s untrue. But no one has discovered that he was, no one remembers that he was, etc. Nor could they: that’s just not how such verbs function. (At best, one can seem to know/discover/remember that p when p isn’t true.) Crucially, ‘I fear that __’ belongs squarely with ‘I believe that__’ in this respect: one can fear, e.g., that Brian Mulroney will become Prime Minister of Canada again, even though that won’t happen. (He’s no longer with us.)
Relatedly, fears can be about things that don’t even exist! My niece Lisa was once afraid of Santa Claus. I learned this too late, when I was enthusing to her about how old St Nick was coming right to her house, to this very living room. She got terrified. She was afraid of a non-existent entity! And Lisa was no anomaly. Many Latin Americans were afraid of the chupa-cabra monster, children all over fear the boogey man, and so on. In sum, and again like ‘believe that __’, it’s not merely the case that such folks seem to be afraid of what-is-not; they really are afraid of “the unreal” sometimes.
One more linguistico-philosophical observation about fear. Most of the time, fears have what philosophers and linguists call “an object” that they are about, even if said object doesn’t really exist in our concrete reality. Ditto for belief. Lisa’s fear was about Santa. The conspiracy theorists’ belief was about Obama. What’s weird is that there can be free-floating fear sensations, without any thing the fear pertains to. Occasionally, one can simply have the sensation-as-of-fear, but it isn’t about anything. In this respect, fear may be even stranger than belief: you can’t have a belief that isn’t about anything, not even anything unreal.
This takes me at last to my Bipolar fear symptoms and what they are often like. Picture walking down a dark alley at night, worried that someone is going to jump you. Now focus on the unpleasant sensation, as opposed to the imagined alley and its potential inhabitants. Some people – myself included – get that sensation totally out of the blue, for no apparent reason. I don’t know whether it’s apt to call this sort of thing an actual fear. As above, often I describe it as “the feeling-as-of-fear”. What I do know, all too well, is that the feeling is extremely unpleasant even when it’s just “the-feeling-as-of fear”, without any subject matter.
I used to rack my brain wondering: what have I noticed sub-consciously that has triggered this fear sensation? That is, what am I afraid of, but such that I didn’t notice its presence consciously? All very Freudian. I nowadays think that’s a fool’s game. Instead, here’s how I understand the situation now: some fear hormone, say cortisol, goes flowing into my brain for some purely physiological reason; that hormone causes me to have the fear-sensation (i.e., the one I asked you to imagine); this makes me feel afraid, even though there is nothing that I’m afraid of! I’m not even afraid of something “unreal” like a monster. I just feel terror.
As I say, I went months without this symptom showing up. Then, on Christmas day, the fear-sensation came back for no obvious reason. That was super unpleasant – not just because the sensation of fear is designed by evolution to be something animals avoid, but because I experienced a “meta fear”, i.e., the fear that my fear-symptoms were returning. My base-level fear may not have been about anything at all, but the meta-fear did have an “object” that it was “about”, namely getting afraid.
Since my chemo and radiation treatments have ended, I’ve been getting that free-floating “fear without an external cause” multiple times per day. Is it because I’m not distracted anymore? Is it because, not visiting the clinic anymore, I’m not interacting with as many people daily? I really don’t know. But man am I dismayed that my fear symptoms have come back.