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have you been feeling Bad for a while? your energy levels, interest in things, and general functionality slowly and incrementally worsening? your world getting narrower and narrower as the limitations hem you in to a smaller and smaller existence?

very importantly: have you found yourself thinking with serious, grim resignation that the end might be coming for you real soon?

this isn't suicidal ideation. and though it can feel like melodrama and whining or letting the depression go wild in the driver's seat, it's an almost quiet sense of unhappy acceptance. a feeling of "this must be coming", and you'd change it if you could, but you don't think you can any more. that it's truly too late. that feeling of running out of time like you're running out of energy and waking hours and everything else.

listen to that goddamn feeling.

odds are much higher than you realize that it's not histrionics or dramatics or attention-seeking (especially since, most likely, you feel this quietly and privately and swallow it like it's made of knives because you don't want to scare your loved ones or come across as some kind of drama queen.)

the odds are much higher than you think that this feeling is your body hitting defcon 1 and sounding every alarm, flashing light, and shrill, screaming siren it can still pull a working lever for.

it's quite literally your body assessing how much Something Is Wrong has now piled up and telling you "okay literally we are dying, DO SOMETHING."

but we train ourselves out of listening to that calamitous noise because we've convinced ourselves (and been convinced) that our own sense of calamity is actually overblown and overreacting.

if it's been going on for a while, it is very likely a real warning that your body is begging you to listen to.

source: i've literally spent the last several months more and more grimly convinced i was genuinely, quietly, incrementally dying, that my time was running out and i truly didn't know how much longer i'd be around, but it didn't feel like long.

and that's because i've been fucking dying, slowly, incrementally, oh so very quietly.

literally i have been diagnosed with heart failure. i just spent several days in the hospital after months of downplaying in my own brain the seriousness of my condition and how long i'd been feeling like shit. i now get to rearrange my entire life to counterbalance this shit i've been pretending was probably not really as dire as it felt.

but all that life-rearranging means i am now not running out of time, the end is not breathing down my neck, i'm not on my way out the door in spite of digging in my heels and not wanting to go.

i finally listened to all the damn alarms. very importantly and consequentially, i shared the alarms with someone whose judgement i trust and who i knew would be able to assess my condition far more objectively than i would offer myself. and i let their concern override my deeply ingrained knee-jerk reaction of downplaying, dismissing, minimizing, and undercutting my own sense of myself.

because i listened, to myself and to someone i knew was actively invested in me not dying, i'm going to live instead. my quality of life will gradually improve in so many ways, the walls that have been closing me in to the threat of crushing me beginning at last to retreat, to let me breathe, and see more than a narrow line of light ahead.

so if the description of this sense of encroaching doom and grim acceptance of it is ringing bells for you, they just might be alarm bells. pay real attention to them.

if you have been feeling for a long while like you might be slowly dying, it might be that you've been slowly dying. and you don't have to. you don't have to accept that grim fate as inevitable. look up at the flashing red lights. let those screaming sirens chase you out of the burning building.

It’s the final few days of the Bluminarmour Project! After some issues with Kickstarter let’s see how far we can get!

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