A
misdirected mind becomes a prison.
And I’ve lived most of my life shackled up by my own mind—a prisoner, a slave, engaged
in a constant battle.
This became most obvious to me a couple years ago, when I thought I had a heart attack.
It all started when I took an energy drink before working out.
After my first set, I struggled to take full breaths, my heart pounded, and it felt like
oxygen wasn’t entering my lungs.
I sat down, struggling to breathe properly, and after half an hour, I finally felt normal
again.
That event instilled a new fear within me: a fear of death.
I never thought about Death much before that day.
It sat way in the back of my mind as an abstraction, as a concept, as something I knew would happen
one day, not as something I felt in my day-to-day life.
But now, in the calendar of my mind, Death no longer sat far off in the future.
I felt like our meeting was soon approaching, and my mind wanted to find Death’s number
to tell him that now was not a good time.
But everyone know’s that the reaper doesn’t compromise.
His meetings are final.
Over the next few weeks, the same symptoms occurred intermittently—shortness of breath,
rapid heart rate, and the addition of some chest pain.
I became acutely aware of my own heartbeat, noticing when it was fast or slow, uncomfortably
feeling it beat against my chest when I slept.
And one day, my symptoms reached a peak, and I felt like I was going to have a heart attack.
I rushed to the emergency department, and after several tests, the doctor decided it
was likely a panic attack.
But he also discovered a murmur in my heart and sent me off for further testing.
I felt a sense of impending doom.
I became obsessed with avoiding my perceived doom.
I shrank from the world and struggled to leave my home, worried that might trigger another
attack.
My thoughts became paranoid.
Did the doctors miss something?
Will my follow-up tests show that something’s actually wrong?
After a few weeks, the results came in and nothing was wrong.
I was in great health.
But the panic attacks continued.
Life became smaller, less colourful, less exciting.
My comfort zone shrank down to the size of a point, and even within that point, the fear
of death still loomed.
I felt like a prisoner in my own body.
I needed wisdom to free myself, and I found it in the writings of Epictetus, an ancient
Stoic philosopher.
As a former slave, he knew something about freedom and imprisonment.
Epictetus believed that freedom arose when one focused only on the things if life they
could control, and imprisonment arose when one focused on the things in life they could
not control.
This concept is commonly referred to as the dichotomy of control.
I had latched onto something I couldn’t control: death.
I suspected something had happened on the day I had worked out after taking an energy
drink, some anomaly in my body.
And that anomaly led to my sudden fear and realization of death.
And in trying to control the uncontrollable, in trying to control death, I secretly trapped
myself in a mental prison.
And the prison of my mind took on a physical manifestation as I trapped myself in my own
home, afraid that leaving might cause more panic attacks.
I could have controlled my food choices, my exercise regimen, whether or not I left the
comfort of my own home, and whether or not I got my health checked out.
But I couldn’t control death.
And the more I tried to control it, the more I shrank away from life.
I hit rock bottom.
I decided I had had enough.
I’d rather have lived a short, full life than a long, empty one trapped inside my own
home.
I needed to let go of the desire to control death, and I did it in the only way I knew
how.
I went back to where it all started: exercise.
I decided to go for a run, and I decided that if I died on this run, if my heart gave out,
it would be okay, because it was better to challenge my fear than let it consume my entire
life.
Unsurprisingly, I ended up not dying on the run.
And as I challenged the fear more and more, it began to recede.
As I focused more on the things I could control—like my breathing, my diet, and my exercise regimen—my
body began returning to normal.
I breathed normally once again, my chest pains disappeared, and I stopped getting panic attacks
soon after.
I find when I desire to control things I can’t control, such as death, aging, or even views
on YouTube, I become a prisoner to my own mind.
On the other hand, when I surrender control to Fate and focus on the things I can control,
I become the master of my own mind.
I escape the mental prison.
It would be a mistake for a reader of this essay to think that there’s any advice here.
This essay is simply the report of my own experiences with living in and escaping my
own mental prisons.
But upon examining his or her own life, a viewer may find that they too are trying to
control the uncontrollable, and by doing so, they have trapped themselves in
a
mental prison.