The Silent, Creeping Terror

[apolla]

The Silent, Creeping Terror

 

It is one of the great failures of our civilisation, up there with poverty, infant mortality, famine and ignorance. It is a silent evil, hiding itself until the moment it can inflict the worst and most lingering damage upon its oftentimes-unsuspecting victims.

 

It is a creeping, cowardly kind of terror. It so rarely announces itself, preferring instead for the victim to get low enough to pounce without remorse. One moment a person is will and fine, the next in a world of silent pain. It's silent, because so few people will admit to feeling or being lonely. Who likes to admit it? So we bury our disease beneath a surface, a haze of lies and false cheer.

 

Anything can trigger an attack- a tart remark by a relative (“Not married yet? Never mind, dear.”) or a random moment on a TV show or in the movies. A song. The news. Seeing someone else happy walking down a street. Now, it’s my firm believe that nobody, woman or man, needs a boy/girl/husband/wife to make oneself ‘complete’, not least because loneliness is a disease that can (and frequently does) affect the supposedly Smug Marrieds. It’s not as simple as love/sex/romance/crap from Reese Witherspoon movies. It is the kind of fearsome thing that a person can live with quite comfortably for days, weeks, months and years between attacks. Unfortunately, the attacked are savagely ferocious and have no mercy to speak of.

 

It comes when one sees a handsome member of one’s preferred gender… and they look right through oneself. It comes with the Happy Ever After in a book or movie or whatever… and one cannot bring oneself to believe in it. It comes on a sunny day when everyone else seems happy… and for oneself it might as well rain until September. It comes when one hears a song like ‘Sea of Love’ and one cannot remember ever having had such an experience… because it has not ever happened.

 

It comes at lunch with pals and several relatively handsome, relatively decent young men, and the realisation (regardless of one’s own opinion of them) that none of them are there for oneself.

 

I suppose that reading above, between and on the lines, that loneliness and ego have something of a Special Relationship. Like the political one, this one is almost entirely a one-way street. When the ego is strong and well fed, loneliness has no power. When the ego is weakened, loneliness can grab the reins of power and start yanking them any which way. If one’s ego is pampered, nothing so petty and silly as loneliness can interfere… Which is OK, except that nobody has an invulnerable or bionic ego. Those weak moments come to us all, and for those in a position to contract it, loneliness is a disease easier to catch than herpes off a Parisite.

 

It comes always when one feels lowest, when one feels that one looks like a horror movie extra… all the moments when the ego has already had the kind of pummelling not seen since the Rumble in the Jungle.

 

But, if loneliness isn’t about sex or love, what is it about?

 

I’m going to dispense with the hypothetical ‘one’ here. At my loneliest, I believed I would die utterly unloved, utterly alone and worst of all, forgotten. This was a very long time ago when I was young and believed dying alone was a fate worse than, well, death. Why so? Why was I so utterly, completely lonely? Surely not all those hours spent watching Ally McBeal? Perhaps that didn’t help, but no, it was the simple lack of people who cared about me for my own sake and of their own free will.

 

I lost my loneliness when Natasha, Rachel and John stormed into my life demanding I cheer up. Or so I thought. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they were the chemotherapy to my tumour, and while they forced it into remission, it lay dormant. Waiting.

 

While the presence of friends like them, the kind that deserve immortalising in bronze or marble, there are parts of a soul that best friends cannot reach. This is the bit occasionally hinted at in movies but more usually glossed over:

 

To be loved entirely for one’s entire self, and to love so completely in return, this is the only cure for the silent, creeping terror. It isn’t a cure-all-ills type of thing. It doesn’t make every day like a picture perfect Christmas Day. It doesn’t induce permanent bliss. It isn’t happy ever after, but it is so powerful that to be loved so is to really never be lonely again. I don’t know if this cure is 100% effective, or even if it truly exists, because I’m one of those unfortunates to have had to battle this disease alone all my life.

 

For long-term sufferers, there is another question: Why me? Why indeed? I’m not particularly hag-like, I don’t smell, I have fucked up teeth but they’re all there, more or less. I wear ridiculous but passable clothes. I have a relatively kind, humorous-if-scathing personality… so why me? Like I said, ego and loneliness are old drinking buddies. In fact, when my ego is at it’s most strong (a rare event indeed, even for one so arrogant as I) the old sickness comes back… except the question isn’t why am I alone but why are people not fawning all over me?

 

It’s a terrible disease, and I have the least of it- occasional attacks that pass quickly. While it remains to be seen how Fate has chosen the manner of my death, I no longer fear the death alone. I live my life the way I choose and apologise to nobody, least of all myself… but there is, for people like me, always a little something lurking in the back of the head waiting, and it forms a question: why me?

*

This is not friendslocked, because if I can't be honest and open about this, who can?

Comments

[marquiserachel.livejournal.com]

I love you Clare. Try not to doubt yourself, you are fabuloso.
I am however not entirely sure about being described as chemotherapy since the associated side effects include, amongst other equally horrific ones, sickness, hair loss and huge fuck off mouth ulcers!
The Tower awaits us me dear. xxxx

[angiej.livejournal.com]

Hey girl. *hugs* Here if you need me. Just... I can relate to this more than you know.

*hugs again*