Enough about me, let's talk about what YOU think of me

I spend bucketloads of time giving feedback to the other writers on the course. I love giving feedback. Some of these other students do amazing stuff, though some of them can’t write shit. But I still love to see how everyone's imagination takes him in a wildy different direction from the same starting point on our daily exercises. But, if I have to be honest, I will admit that giving feedback also feeds my ego. And even more than giving feedback I love getting it. I keep checking the writers’ board to see if anyone has commented on my pieces that I’ve posted up. When someone says they love a piece of mine, I log in repeatedly to reread their praise. I am absolutely pathetic.

Today’s little exercise was on fear. I write it from a medical point of view; my character is someone who is ill, who knows he’s going to die, but in whom the doctors can find nothing wrong:

Cold metal clenches my gut and jerks sharply, like a hari-kari sword. Something is not right. I can’t help but imagine a yellow acid, seeping into my tissues, corroding my joints, eating away at my body. I’m so goddamn tired all the time, but I’m not sleeping well. I wake short of breath in the middle of the night, with a hot sour taste on my tongue. My blue pillow is cold and slick with greasy sweat. Food smells make me gag now.

Of course, I went to my doctor. He asked if I’d changed my diet (no), been under any unusual stress (no), visited a foreign country (no) or in fact anywhere unusual (no again). He poked me, prodded me, looked into my eyes, my throat, my ears, and stuck his finger up my rectum. Then he drained many vials of blood and sent them all away for 47 separate tests. Nothing. They can find nothing wrong.

And yet I can feel death stalking me from inside. My hair has started to fall out, large mats of it, clotted with soap scum, in the shower drain. And a week ago, out of the blue, I got a huge painful blister on my lip and the skin on my hands cracked and flaked. But by the time I could get in to see the doctor again these weird symptoms had disappeared. He sighed when I entered the room, and tapped his Montblanc pen on his desk all the way through our interview. He doesn’t want to be bothered with me anymore. I can understand this. I mean, what exactly is he supposed to do with my bizarre litany of symptoms, and no other clinical evidence? He asked me if I had a history of mental illness in my family.

I have a deepening sense of foreboding. It’s going for my mind too. Yesterday, I suddenly couldn’t remember my brother’s name for a good three minutes. And shortly afterwards, in Carlyle Street outside the drycleaners, I got a sudden pain in my gut, so searing and sharp that I cried out, doubled over in the street, and shit myself. Liquid shit ran down my leg and bloomed brown on my trousers. The stench was terrible. No one stopped to help me, people scurried away. No one wants to know. Maybe they know instinctively that I’m ill. Maybe they subconsciously fear something contagious. I don’t know anything anymore except that I’m going to die soon.