One analogy might be this: imagine sitting in a room with the door closed. In the room next door you can hear something terrible happening - like there's a fire burning someone alive, someone is being beaten to death by a mob, or something like that. You can hear everything going on and it is so, so distressing. And you just know that there's a good probability that, whatever is happening over there, you'll be next. You're just not safe - ever. No matter what you do or where you're at you are never, ever safe.
This manifests it's self as a deep and profound sense of terror, stress, fear, and dread in my body. Again, none of this is actually happening - there's no one actually being tortured next door. It's just this deep feeling in my bones that is not attached to any particular thought or event.
So, when I go to a therapist and they ask me about why I feel this way or what triggers this feeling I really can't answer (and then they get frustrated with me for constantly saying "I don't know"). It drive's me nuts how they want to narrow in on a specific thing that makes me feel this way when there isn't any. They, and people I've talked about in general, just can't believe this fear is not attached to a specific event or thought.
The "unalive" pressure comes from living with this great fear/dread/stress/terror. It's absolutely exhausting and terrifying and stressful, yet I have to be a normal person whilst feeling this way. I have to pay bills, buy food, have a roof over my head, go to work, go grocery shopping, etc all the while feeling that at any moment some unnamed, unidentifiable thing I can't control is going to cause me and/or other people a great amount of harm.
To use another poor analogy, it's like being in an abusive relationship or terrible job. You can't wait for it to end or to get out of it. Only with this omnipresent problem you can't leave the relationship or quit the job. You have to "quit" life. Which is where I'm kinda at.
