my fear of dying is destroying my ability to enjoy life

CW: mentions of violent dreams, dying and obsessive thoughts. tagged as violence/death just in case.

I’m 23(F) and probably 6-8 years ago now I was housesitting for my grandma while she was overseas. I had Game of Thrones marathons and would end up falling asleep on the couch eventually. Until I started having recurring nightmares of someone breaking in and violently murdering me and then me having to watch my own funeral as a ghost. At first, the nightmares really bothered me and then they went away and I didn’t think about them anymore.

What did stick with me though was the realisation that I would die one day and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I’d lost my grandpa a few years previous but thankfully no one since and so it wasn’t till those dreams that I’d really considered the permanence of death.

But it wasn’t until during covid times that it really hit me. I don’t even remember when or what triggered it but I had a really intense panic attack about my own mortality and I was just never the same. I began to have frequent panic attacks, I started experiencing disassociation and derealisation in combination with paranoia, I struggled to sleep at night time because I was convinced I’d die in my sleep…. it became obsessive and since then has been all-consuming for my mental health. Shows and movies that mentioned death that had never bothered me before suddenly became massive triggers for me. My intrusive thoughts became severe. I struggled to leave my house because I was convinced I would die.

I know my thoughts aren’t rational, but everyone I tried to talk about them too only made me feel worse. People couldn’t understand this fear. I’d get told “well it happens to everyone so why be scared?” or they’d look at me funny for asking if they were scared of dying because no, they weren’t. Nobody understood how intensely terrified I was - so terrified that I almost checked myself into psych wards multiple times. There was even a time where after my dog died and we buried her in our yard, my panic attacks got so severe that I was convinced I had to dig her up to protect her from dying because I’d stupidly googled the stages of decomposition in dogs in my grief.

I ended up speaking to my doctor who got me in with a therapist (I live in Australia and we can get 10 free sessions a year with a therapist). I tried to unpack this with her but I never felt like it helped because in my brain I’m like “it’s not a fear of heights, which I can just avoid… this is something totally unavoidable and out of my control and I physically cannot process or comprehend not being alive anymore”. It just felt like an endless, exhausting loop.

Then, my free sessions ran out and my therapist had to part ways with me because I couldn’t afford to pay for sessions (I’m a student currently earning $400 a fortnight from student support payments because the job market is so terrible even McDonald’s has denied me for being too overqualified) and now I just feel stuck. I don’t want to live this way for the rest of my life… it is so exhausting and frustrating to be so affected by my mortality that I can’t enjoy my life. I feel like I’m running out of time and it’s my own fault. I feel so alone in this feeling; I feel like I’m drowning in it and everyone is watching me and laughing for not knowing how to swim.

I don’t know why I’m posting this - it’s literally 5:30am and I can’t sleep because of said anxiety - but I’m hoping at least one person relates and can make me feel less alone…