A Gentleman.

i think i’ve managed to unearth about half of the ones i was looking for

Because as someone who has felt this I can not stress how different it actually is from anxiety. Which is saying a lot because I have a massive anxiety disorder.

I've only felt this twice in my life - once when I was going into kidney failure due to an infection and again when my body was going into shock due to dehydration and malnourishment due to GI issues - and I can not stress how much it saved my life. It's hard to even put it into words. It's not like a panic attack, or anxiety. It is a horrific gut turning feeling of absolute dread.

Especially if you have anxiety you'll know the difference honestly. It's so much worse. It's every cell in your body and your brain screaming that there's something horribly wrong in a way you've never felt. It's your brain screaming out that you are going to die in a way no panic attack has ever done before.

For me, it was very quiet. For me, there was a deep sense that I could just lie down on the floor and not have to ever get up again, no effort required.

That combined wrongness/relief was so weird and so unsettling that I drove myself to the ER.

For me, its the overwhelming, near calm certainty of doom that distinguishes it from the jittery panic of “but something could go wrong.”

There’s no “what if?” There’s no room to question it. It just IS. And it’s very different from the “calm” of disassociation too. I’m not disassociated from myself when it happens. I’m probably actually the most present ever.

And then I collapsed outside work one evening in excruciating 10/10 pain.  A stranger had to call an ambulance; the paramedics couldn’t figure out what the problem was even though I kept screaming about the pain in my abdomen regardless of the 3 doses of morphine they gave me on the ride to the hospital.  Once the surgeons were able to crack me open, they found that I had an ovarian cyst that was 6cm in diameter (an ovary is, on average, 1cm in diameter) and had migrated to strangle the fallopian tube before attaching itself to the stump where my appendix had been before it was removed. The cyst was black when they removed it, and the tube and ovary were both white from strangulation.  If any of the doctors had taken me seriously sooner, I wouldn’t have ended up in that ER with a dead growth in my body and half my reproductive system struggling for life. I was 21.

"Wales has three national parks. There's the one I can't pronounce so I'm going to say Brecon Beacons, there's Pembrokeshire Coast, and there's Snowdonia."

Said with that lil laugh English people do when they say this stuff, because they think they're being funny and charming in a 'what am I like' way rather than disrespectful and arrogant as fuck

"This one is by a reservoir in Gwent I can say, tee hee! Landy something, but-"

Me: Llandegfedd

Her: uh... yes, so difficult! Tee hee!

FUCK OFF

"This one is called... Um... I don't know how to say it tee hee!"

Me: Ysgir.

Her: I'm so bad at Welsh haha

YOU ARE DELIVERING A THREE QUARTER HOUR LECTURE TO WELSH STUDENTS IN WALES ABOUT WELSH INFRASTRUCTURE

YOU HAVE MULTIPLE WELSH SPEAKING COLLEAGUES CRAWLING OUT OF THE WOODWORK WHO COULD HAVE TOLD YOU

But last year, I gave a lecture on grassland management. As part of it, I told the students about the ngitili silvipastoral systems in Tanzania. I am in no way saying I'm perfect!!! I am not a template to be copied!!! But ahead of that lecture, I scoured YouTube until I found a video of an indigenous person in Tanzania talking about the system!!! And I listened to how they pronounced it, and I memorised it, and then I even wrote out the phonetic pronunciation on the slide so my students could learn too, because not bothering to learn that while then presenting myself as an authority on the subject would have been grossly appropriative and colonialist and also plain fucking rude.