The Freeze Instinct

Jack


The voice and the infection are tied together somehow. The voice is familiar but since I've become infected it has a presence. It feels like it has a face and arms that reach out inviting me to a dark place.


The more I read online about these people eating other people the more that stench crawls into my nostrils and into the back of my throat. The more that voice shackles and weakens me. Plagues and infects me. Debilitates and cripples me. I'm left with a sense of powerlessness I think I've felt my whole life but is now magnified by my profound inability to survive. The blackness crawls in me and torments my brain. I'm dying.


It comes with every thought to move or take action I have. It goads me into getting up off the bathroom floor. Yeah get up. Let's see what you can do you stupid brainless shit. I don't get up and the blackness spreads. I slice at my arm trying to get it out. I find my way up to my feet and look in the mirror. You've never done anything right. You are going to fuck this up like you fuck everything up. Pathetic. I look directly at my eyes swearing that my eyes look blacker. My pupils taking up more space. I look at the bullet wound in my arm. I'm infected. I know it. You're going to die. You've never been able to do what you say. You think you can get out of here? Kill somebody? You couldn't even save Dee. You were a failure and a deadbeat in the that relationship you impotent shit. Life was never anything you could handle.


Somewhere out there is a basement room with a toilet in the middle of it. Out of this toilet shit pours out with rats, infectious waste, and people's forsaken entrails. A place where the blackness that is inside me overflows from abundance. This is the home for my mind. Since that bullet coated with infected blood lodged itself into me it handed over the deed to this new one bathroom apartment in the basement. This is home for me now. Where blackness, doubt, and fear determine my existence. 


I find myself telling this to Grave.


My body is infected. Every time I think about leaving I think about how I'm going to freeze when one of those things comes after me. I think about hesitating while this voice reminds me I can't. I can't. I am unable.
Grave looks up from his notebook.
You're frightened.
Yes!
You are frightened because you believe at you're core is incapability. When that ultimate test comes you'll fail. We are creatures governed by our mind but our minds our governed by our perceptions, our subjective beliefs. Do you know you will fail or do you fear you will? 
I think I will...
He interrupts.


Our capabilities far extend past our perceived capacity. But if our mind does not believe it our body makes it so. People say that the animal instinct in each of us responds with flight or fight when our survival is threatened. But people so often forsake the most human of all instinctual responses. Freezing. 
I'm going to freeze, Grave. Threat is all around me. That stink is a constant reminder of this darkness creeping inside me and those monsters creeping outside.
Seemingly uninterested in my worry he continues.


Instinct is predicated upon the idea that thought does not interfere with action. Survival, do you understand. Survival is at stake. So, the body calculatedly forfeits the luxury of reason and rationality and responds immediately for the sake of surviving. For some, when survival is threatened their very first reaction is to freeze. 
I can sense the blackness moving up me now. He is exposing some piece of me I don't want to wrestle with. I begin hoping to disappear. 
My instinct is to freeze, Grave. There is no thought process. Just a response that will kill me outside that door.
Jack, pay attention. Arms, legs, and eyes of stone. Gripped. When that threat finds you Jack, you will freeze. 
I want to fight.
We aren't animals. Our instincts are muddled in our minds. Minds determine instinct for humans. Behind a fighting instinct may be someone who grew up thinking that to get by one must fight. So, one has a predisposition to fight when under threat of extinction or when one simply runs into confrontation. For those who run perhaps they learned that by avoiding confrontation, they too have survived. But those who freeze... it is their fearful doubting mind that educates their instinct. A sense of incapability like you describe. A belief in one's smallness. Doubt. Doubt. Doubt. Like the blackness you falsely believe infects you. It spreads to our heart and our mind so that when we look death in the face we believe we know we will lose. So we don't fight. We don't run. We handicap and paralyze ourself. Human instinct is tied to the mind and your instinct is tied in fear.
How do I become a fighter?
You don't. Fighters fight for better or worse as do runners. If you fight every time you die. If you run every time you forsake those you may need to protect.
I won't survive if I don't fight.
No. You won't survive if you don't kill. You don't have to be a fighter.
What then? What do I have to do? Run?
You will need two things Jack? Two things only. But it not enough to hear them. You have to live them, breathe them, and know that it is these two things coursing your veins. Not blackness.
What are they?
Understanding and faith.
Grave, I don't really believe in God...
No. Listen. 


I'm scared of what he'll say. These two things are what he thinks I'll need, but they are also an offering. A path he is showing me I'll need to walk. My whole has been spent being given opportunities I didn't take for fear that once I did, I would be expected to perform. I didn't do well with expectation so I didn't give people a reason believe in me. I never allowed people to see me, just a watered down version of me I found out people were much more likely to accept than to think anything much about or reject. It wasn't happiness I found in this, just other people's approval and a true self that was buried alive. A buried self that I could hear screaming to be exhumed.
Grave went on. 
Understanding and faith will determine your instinct. You come to a place where you will understand that you, Jack, will die. It may be walking into a hord of the dead. It may be by the living. It may be tomorrow or during old age. You're instincts and thoughts will be predicated not just on a thought, but a belief and an understanding that you are going to die. So, when 50 of them beat down that door they will they evoke an acceptance and understanding of your connection to them. This understanding leaves no room for fear. For the room that fear occupies is not filled with anything. Just dead space. When one fills that void with the understanding that they are undoubtedly going to die the acceptance allows room for potential and capability. There will be no fear of failing. Because hey... what's the worst that could happen?
And faith?
In the light not a darkness inside of you. You can't have delusions about what you can control and what you cannot, but you cannot fear your capabilities. You must have faith in them. To believe you can't walk through a door is to close every door that lies beyond that one door. There is true capability in each of us. That is our light. Fear blackens our light and clouds our thoughts with perceived incapability. That is not real. You have capacity. You have capability. Put you're faith in them.
You mean I have to just believe I can do it?
It can't be superficial. Blind faith is to put your life in the hands of something that will come to control and dictate you. There are the earthly capabilities of you have that thirst for you faith. You think you can't walk out that door and lodge a knife into the skull of another person you are wrong. You can and will. Then there is faith in your capacities that lie beyond earthly understanding and more in you connection with something spiritual. There will come a time when having faith in your capabilities will mean understanding their limits... and getting the hell out of dodge. The understanding and the belief must be real.
How do I.
I pause. I can't grasp it all. I swallow and the stink shoots up my nose as I inhale. You'll never, ever be able to...
How do I get there?
You are there already, but the fear creates a veil blocking your vision. It blocks your understanding and faith. We must dispense with your fear and your darkness. Pick up that hammer and that gasoline. We're going to burn this place down.