Oh, eurêka.

 I may have mentioned I have a deathly fear of asphyxiation of any way, shape or form. Whether it's drowning, whether it's gases, whether... you know. I'm not going to make a list, otherwise my nervous system is going to spin hard.

But it just hit me as to why. It's not just because not being able to breathe is very legitimately terrifying.

It's because you don't come back from it.

You can come back from cuts. From drugs, if you don't have an elephant's dose, and even then, some people for some godforsaken unknown reason still survive. You can lose a limb, yes, or have it move differently... it sucks, but your personality is intact.

If there's no oxygen to your brain, it's fucked forever. Your fucking motherboard is dead. And it takes only a few minutes. What's there not more terrifying in the world?

In fact, I think this is probably the most lethal mean, and it's the only one I would never use. I thought it was because I was traumatized by a certain episode of Criminal Minds as a kid (the one with Robert Knepper as the serial killer), but in fact... I think there's a deeper reason that I hadn't uncovered until now.

You don't come back from a lack of oxygen to the brain. From pretty much everything else, you do. You're in bad shape, you're unrecognizable for example if you used self-immolation, but you're here. Your personality, your perception, your connection to this reality is intact.

If your brain is damaged... there's no going back.

Perhaps at the end of the day, it's yet another proof that I've been wanting to live all along. It's just that living is excruciatingly painful for no good reason and that I've spent almost twenty-seven years trying to figure out how. Even as a teen, all that I wanted was to un-exist... for a while... just the time to rest... because I probably had no idea then how badly I got it, but I was already feeling exhausted.

But that's it, folks, that was Hi'iaka's eurêka moment.