A Moment of Realization...

I've come to grips with the fact that I may be a partial hypochondriac. I wouldn't say that I'm abnormally anxious about my health, but I am definitely anxious most of the time.

I've been attempting to trace the causes of my anxiety in an effort to convince myself that I'm not actually physically sick (mentally, we're still trying to ascertain...haha). It recently dawned on me last night while I was eating frozen yogurt with a dear friend.

She had been explaining the sudden diagnosis and prognosis of a friend of hers. Stage 4 cancer of the brain. This individual is 23 and has a bright and academic future. I recalled that I too knew of a few classmates our age (23) that had also recently been diagnosed with terminal diseases. I mentioned something then that after thinking about, I realized was all too true. I mentioned that her and I had been conditioned from an early age to understand the reality of cancer in young adults. When we attended high school together, one of our classmates was diagnosed with breast cancer at 16 and died at 17 from the disease. Of course for the invincible high school student, this was a hard dose of reality.

I can trace my own anxieties to the events surrounding this student's death. Suddently, every bodily pain became worrisome and as I got older, the constant worrying and seemingly lethargy of my doctors left me without the answers that I "needed" to get over it. The more that you worry about things, the worse they eventually get. Eventually my stress started leading to more physical pain and so on until I was convinced that I was dying.

Of course, as far as I know I am not. But how is it that the frequency of our friends dying young and of freak accidents is seeming to increase? As I drove home from yogurt I thought about one thing in particular, Facebook.

Facebook keeps everybody up to date on everybody's lives. Users are literally connected to thousands of people either directly or indirectly. When somebody gets ill, or dies, groups are created to show support, and without a doubt, some of your friends will join this group. When your friends join the group, it shows up on your daily status feed and so you click on the group. Suddenly, by proxy, you feel connected to this person. Friends that would have fallen through the cracks without Facebook are suddenly back in your life. I think that when this happens, suddenly the large social world comes into a very small focus and the small frequency of "freak" illnesses and deaths suddenly become very close to home.

I might be suggesting that some of my anxiety and others anxiety about health issues stems from the fact that our social scope now includes a much broader network of people whose lives we are suddenly connected to.

So the question now becomes, how do we combat the social anxiety stemming from a wide social scope? As I previously mentioned, my friend and I actually know individuals who were killed or who are sick. For us, it goes a little more in depth than just anxiety by proxy, but I think that the approach can still be the same. It's important to remember that freak accidents and illnesses are in fact, freak. Going to college, being on a social networking site, and keeping up with friends from high school exposes you to A LOT of people. Surly, amongst those people, statistically, somebody will get sick, and somebody may die. This may seem to be a fatalistic approach, but there is some truth to it.

For now, I'm going to try to keep things in perspective. Perspective can be the only check on scope I feel. We have to do the best with what we're given, and leave the rest to chance.