Hypochondriasis has been replaced in the DSM-5 with both somatic symptom disorder and illness anxiety disorder. I deal with illness anxiety disorder.

I wake up every single day grateful to be alive. I don’t know why, but I expect every night to be my last. This has been going on for a little over a year. Before that, I would find myself anxious standing in large groups or before giving a speech. I’d gotten over that, and I learned to love giving speeches, talking, and being around lots of people.

It feels like my anxiety will always shift and find me something else to worry about. Large crowds or my own mortality. Which is worse? I cannot say. It’s only bad in the moment, and once it passes I seem to feel okay.

Trying to describe what my anxiety feels like is difficult because my experiences with it are wordless. Like describing a color, there’s no way I can articulate my experiences well enough to know for sure that you’re fully understanding and feeling what I am talking about; that the thoughts and feelings in your head bear any resemblance to the thoughts and feelings I’ve had while dealing with my own mental illness.

Nothing narrates my experiences. Nobody is following me around, putting into words everything I do and think as it occurs. There are no words to perfectly describe my thoughts and what they feel like. It’s been said that in order to describe abstract thoughts and experiences, one must use analogies that lack perfect clarity and allow for open interpretation. I can only try.

Having my anxiety disorder is like wearing a really tight hat. When you first start wearing this hat, it feels tighter than anything else you can imagine. You can’t stop focusing on it because the sensation is so strong and overwhelming. It’d be like trying to drink coffee without tasting it; the flavor always intrudes unbidden into your awareness. Once you’ve been dealing with anxiety long enough, it starts to feel like the new normal. You start to forget what it was like to not wear the hat, what it was like to not have anxiety. You’re a new person now, an anxious person.

You will inevitably get better at dealing with anxiety. Once you wear the hat long enough, your body becomes acclimated and you stop being constantly aware of it. Similar to how you don’t always feel the shirt you’re wearing, but it’s there.

But then something cues your awareness. My cue is a slight headache and insomnia that makes me suddenly anxious about the brain cancer that I’m 100% positive I have. Now I feel the hat again, and I’m thinking about it, and thinking about it, and thinking about how I’m going to die of terminal brain cancer. How I’m certainly going to die in my sleep, because that’s how brain cancer works for some reason.

So I stop going to sleep because of this fear. Great, now I have insomnia. Isn’t insomnia a symptom of my terminal brain cancer? Yes, apparently. It is in these moments that I forget why I haven’t been sleeping. I haven't been sleeping because I’m afraid of dying in my sleep. I use this insomnia to confirm that I do have terminal brain cancer. It’s a vicious cycle and it doesn’t make any sense, but I never look at things that way in the midst of an anxiety attack. I want to get my brain scanned but I am so afraid of getting positive results that I refuse to do it.

I only get sleep when I’m so tired I can’t think enough to be anxious when sleep becomes inevitable. Sometimes I tell myself that at least I won’t be awake when I die, my own morbid consolation in what I truly believe are my last moments. Each day I’ve woken up so far, pretty good streak if you ask me. But that never seems to be convincing enough to quell my fears.

Going online and looking at WebMD for hours each day only confirms all of my suspicions and anything that doesn’t perfectly fit my diagnosis is probably just something else that I am unaware that I'm dying off. I seriously never stop self-analyzing, trying to find another reason for why I am dying. Most of the time I’m not even aware of it, but it is always happening. It’s about as constant as my heart, that has been reliably beating for the last twenty years.

Don’t ever tell me I look sick.

“You look sick, are you okay?” a friend asks me this. My heart jumps into my throat as my anxiety peaks. I’m pale because I go to Wabash and I’m always inside studying. I’ve got bloodshot eyes and dark circles from lack of sleep from fear of dying (or apparently, my brain cancer). Of course, I look sick, I feel sick, I think I’m sick, everything about me is sick. Their kind gesture of concern becomes my death sentence. I briefly consider getting life insurance so I can leave a settlement for my family.

“Oh, I’m fine.” I quietly say this. I’m not ever really convinced.

Since I've started dealing with illness anxiety disorder, more and more people have been telling me I look sick. This only confirms all of my suspicions.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I’m a Biology major.

You know, for a science that focuses on the study of living things, biologists sure like to talk about death a lot. A little too much, in my opinion. Like the mentally ill psychologist, I find myself drawn to Biology. It deals with something very personal to me. It helps me rationalize my fears. It’s almost therapeutic.

I’ve gotten better at dealing with my anxiety, a lot better. It’s hard; it has its ups and downs. It’s made me stronger as a person. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has helped me greatly. I hardly notice the hat anymore, and I hope that one day I’ll figure out how to take the damn thing off.