The Influence of Anxiety

It began in 2007.  I had been in Jordan with my father; our spouses remained stateside.  He got on fine, with dozens of doting nieces and nephews keeping him flush with arak, but I decided to cut the trip short.  Booze was never my thing. 

I missed my wife and our small condo in Blacksburg, Virginia, but mostly I’d seen enough of Madaba, my father’s hometown, despite the charm of its stone alleys and shabby storefronts, ambiance for a carnivalesque sense of tenor and motion.  It was the time of year when many residents spend the night on verandas and rooftops. 

We were staying in my uncle’s flat, a spartan but comfortable space with two sitting rooms, built atop spice and jewelry shops.  It used to be near the edge of town, but from my uncle’s balcony, I could see an old agricultural valley, down past the portrait of Abdullah and Rania, rising into blocks of new construction. 

Nothing was unusual.  I’d been to Madaba many times and knew to expect a mixture of overbearing curiosity and easygoing chaos.  I wanted out, though.  I couldn’t point to a particular urge, just a nagging desire to escape some unspecified dissatisfaction.  Everything felt connected to a series of mishaps that had shepherded me to the Middle East in the first place.  I took a bus to downtown Amman and argued my way into an earlier return ticket. 

Two days later, I was at the old Alia airport, a bona fide dump, leaning against an escalator rail while waving to my dad standing in the departures lobby.  He was taken aback when I told him I’d be leaving, but solicited no guilt or contrition.  I suppose he chalked it up to the softness of early marriage.  Perhaps he granted me latitude by remembering when he was younger and more susceptible to emotion, inhabiting a world in which it would be unbearable to leave my mother. 

In Madrid’s coldly modern international terminal, I sprang for wifi and rented a one-way car from Dulles to Blacksburg.  Anticipating fatigue on the drive, I found an electronics store and paid exorbitant prices for Guns N’ Roses and Michael Jackson.  I had quit smoking a year earlier and needed something to keep me engaged.  Eurobeat and rural FM radio wouldn’t do it. 

I abused the rental car’s little engine and finished the drive in three hours.  My wife was waiting for me with a lasagna, one of my favorite dishes.  We ate with a sense of joy.  Then I spent most of the night in the bathroom. 

Getting sick had plenty of logical explanations.  Eight hours on an airborne petri dish.  Going from an empty stomach to 2000 calories of dairy and carbs.  An immune system compromised by fatigue.  And God knows what festered in my intestinal tract after weeks of unrefrigerated street food.  The illness lasted through the following night. 

Then it returned after my next hearty meal.  I quit eating heartily, opting for starchy fare spiced with cayenne powder.  The queasiness became less regular, but so did my food intake.  Every few days I would suffer nausea followed by nervous dietary restriction.  My shirts started to sag around the neck and shoulders.  I spent hours on the internet trying to find a diagnosis.  Medical tests ruled out every condition that approximated my symptoms.  A nurse suggested that I could be suffering anxiety.  I found the notion ludicrous. 

I continued the pathetic eating pattern, finding it difficult to leave the house in case I needed a bathroom.  At a picnic in a public park I was chatting with a colleague when suddenly I felt dizzy, a wave of static overwhelming my vision, sweat gathering on my forehead and scalp.  I crumpled onto the grass.  The colleague seemed less mortified than annoyed as my wife guided me to our car. 

A few weeks later we attended a wedding in Madison, Wisconsin, where we lived after grad school.  Soon after arriving, we went to Ian’s, a by-the-slice pizza shop with playful toppings that had provided a weekly treat for three years.  On the drive to the hotel, odd sensations accompanied the familiar nausea.  It felt as if somebody had fired a glitter gun inside my extremities.  I spent a sleepless night curled around four balled-up pillows.  Things didn’t improve in the morning.  I managed to walk five blocks before stretching across a bench in the lobby of Monona Terrace. 

Teaching required conversation and composure; I was generally up to the task.  I arrived in the classroom feeling morbid but left calm and content, sometimes lasting until dinner.  Extracurriculars were out of the question, though.  Writing, a reliable form of stress relief, was beyond my capability, and usually my desire.  By late autumn, my diet consisted of Ensure and rice cakes. 

We still managed to go out, which was bittersweet.  I appreciated the movement, but longed for the normalcy everyone else seemed to enjoy.  During one excursion, we passed a store with a glass façade.  My reflection revealed the gaunt remains of a once-operational human.  It was clear I would die if I didn’t learn how to eat again. 

*****

Here I’m supposed to pivot into a contemplative tone and offer insight into mental illness, or perhaps recount the individual triumph that returned me to life.  I can’t follow convention, though, because I have no special knowledge and I still commune with specters of deprivation. 

Recovering from anxiety is never an individual pursuit.  I’m not sure recovery is even possible.  Ultimately, the condition derives energy from structural forces and requires a communal solution.  We can aim to manage physical manifestations of anxiety, but in the end it’s a social disease. 

My redemption story is straightforward:  after weeks of resistance, I gave therapy a try.  I came to love the therapist, but refused medication.  She convinced me otherwise after minimal physical improvement.  I tried some psychotropics.  They freaked me out, but one of them restored my appetite.  After stopping at a barbeque joint on a trip to North Carolina, I waited for nausea to ruin the drive, but my stomach contentedly digested almost a pound of potatoes and hush puppies.  I still consider the aftermath of that meal a milestone. 

Over the next few months, I gradually incorporated more foods into my diet, including pizza.  I’d be nervous for around two hours after eating, absorbing myself in all kinds of online silliness (much harder in the early days of social media).  With the first flash of hunger, I could call it safe. 

We visited Mexico to celebrate.  Some habanero salad dressing actually made from pureed peppers (rather than being the pepper-flavored concoction of my gringo imagination) provided the only problem I had with food.  I felt remarkably fortunate even as the sun stung my scalded lips for two days. 

I knew things were better when an old pair of jeans 34 inches at the waist started feeling snug around my backside.  I would soon outgrow them, shooting up four sizes in the next two years (hefty, but not quite Zizekian).  As I write, struggling to excavate a truly bizarre episode, I am overweight (according to medical pundits, anyway), introverted but not agoraphobic, and consume plenty of food without fretting about nausea. 

There are moments, though.  Panic attacks arrive infrequently but abruptly.  They’ve happened while I was giving a speech or out to dinner with acquaintances.  The anxiety also assumes different manifestations.  After an especially stressful day at work, I had trouble inhaling for two weeks.  I’m apt to lightheadedness and a sense of detachment from physical surroundings.  Worst of all, my body occasionally mimics the symptoms of a heart attack, with sharp chest pain and tingling in my fingers and toes. 

You can call what I’ve described an eating disorder, depression, anguish, chemical imbalance, post-traumatic stress, introversion, whatever, but I’m partial to anxiety because it accommodates multiple connotations:  excitement, nervousness, fear, worry, tension, foreboding, anticipation.  I don’t know any word, really, that properly describes what it means for the mind to express displeasure by devouring the body. 

The term has settled into routine now that I consider myself functional.  I’ve long been scared to sort through my experience of anxiety because I’m neither a physician nor a psychoanalyst.  At its rawest, writing is a kind of testimony.  So I approach you not as a theorist or an entertainer, but as a confessor submitting insecurity to the judgment of strangers. 

*****

Growing up in Southern Appalachia, we had a cranky neighbor, one of those “get off my lawn” types.  (He literally screamed “get off my lawn” whenever we approached the property line.)  He was a source of both terror and amusement.  We provoked him but also took off whenever he approached, cane in hand. 

I wanted to know what could inspire this kind of acrimony, so I asked my mom. 

“Some people forget what it’s like to be young,” she explained. 

*****

Speaking solely from my experience, panic attacks feel literally like death—or perhaps they hypostatize feelings of death from the unconscious.  Those feelings are deeply subjective, so I can only try to describe their effects. 

At the onset of a panic attack (or elevated anxiety or whatever you want to call it), not only do I feel as if I might die, but the sensation of death is palpable, even tactile, and almost calming in its air of inevitability.  Doom washes over my intellection and a thought arises, clearly and rationally, “This is the end.”  I don’t think about my son or wife or comforting moments from childhood.  I should according to popular accounts of near-death experiences, but that’s not how it works for me.  I think about how, come oblivion or recovery, the pain soon will end. 

I imagine these attacks to be exactly what I’ll feel in the moments before I actually die, which makes death less daunting.  I now identify the outcome as a type of relief. 

*****

I hide in a corner of the dressing room, where dankness from pubescent armpits and faulty drainage likes to gather.  I can hear their voices bouncing around the lockers one row over.  Their faces have been close enough today.  I no longer want to feel their breath near my earlobes.  I no longer want to hear the language it carries.  It’s been a lifetime experience, this violent delegation into otherness. 

We file onto the basketball court for aerobics (last week’s lesson was square dancing; next week’s will be wrestling).  I’ve managed to escape their notice by lingering at the back of the group.  Cachet, I understand at this point of my life, is impossible without humiliation.  I am not reputable.  I am the foreign object who provides raw material for the conqueror’s social capital.  So I slink and skulk my way through a mandatory education designed far beyond our schoolhouse walls.  

I trip over the workout step, letting out a yelp and eliciting a few stares.  I’m still largely unnoticed, though.  But it can’t last.  I’ll soon be indexed by the teacher, the spectators, the building itself.  I am too dark amid this uniformity, too indispensable in my expendability.  Ever ignored, civilization will still insist on seeing me. 

*****

The frustrating thing about anxiety is its interplay with politics.  The condition condemns its victims to relitigating ugly histories in unexpected places.  Anxiety tends to emerge when compassion is restricted by popular notions of common sense. 

Anxiety doesn’t simply interact with politics; it conditions politics, as well.  Social media discourses, for example, are replete with obvious expressions of anxiety.  I recognize the patterns in my own usage.  Some people I just dislike.  Immediately.  It sounds bad, probably is bad, but I imagine nearly all users have the same experience.  We like to attribute dislike to taste or ideology, but it’s worth considering whether taste and ideology quantify rather than produce the initial reaction.  In many conflicts, I suspect, antagonism precedes disagreement. 

In online interchanges, we don’t always encounter rhetors, but exemplars of trauma.  Even where they’re not explicitly toxic, social media platforms can’t satisfy our emotional needs.  By pretending to have this ability, they make sure that bereavement will be the result of consumption.  

A lot of conditioning establishes what we imagine to be visceral.  Strong reaction to a face or a personality or a set of words is a form of self-defense.  It needn’t be logical or systematic.  Anxiety is the emotional detritus of deliberate forgetting.  People processing trauma want badly to remake the world.  We get angry when potential friends appear to betray that desire. 

My mother’s insight has been a constant blessing in my life, but her theory about our angry neighbor was misplaced.  Humans don’t forget what it’s like to be young.  We remember it too damn well. 

*****

I’m not a brawler on social media.  I’d like to say that I avoid conflict, but merely commenting invites confrontation.  No matter how much restraint I attempt, I too squabble and remonstrate.  Negative interactions can nag at me for hours, or days, beyond the strictures of logic.  My stomach tightens and I have no appetite.  I understand that I tricked myself into pursuing an outcome that cannot be granted. 

The logic doesn’t take, but I lean into it, anyway.  What was the reason for my comment?  For commenting at all?  What point was I trying to prove?  To whom?  Was it the result of some deep-seated need to be correct?  To be recognized as correct?  Am I tacitly aware that political commentary isn’t materialist, but material for the politics of online hierarchy?  Have I reduced a sense of self to electronic branding?  To affirmation through emoji?  Is my participation an effort to escape the physical world?  Or an attempt to negotiate its disturbances?  Because you know those motherfuckers are always on the horizon, right? 

People can point to a legitimate sense of community in certain sectors of social media, but they’re fragile spaces, subject to quick accusations of apostasy or treason.  In me, those spaces engender timidity and regret.  I’ll post something and then wonder what the hell I’m doing.  People respond, but I’d delivered an opinion I don’t care about enough to defend.  Then I realize I was in no mood for hostility.  I fret over wording, or being misunderstood, subject to a mobbing.  I delete.  I’ve no desire to entertain anxiety.  These days it announces its approach. 

Similar patterns exist offline, of course, but social media offer platforms where people congregate to extract validation from strangers.  Those platforms are perfect for conveying anxiety.  They offer an important service to the ruling class, too.  Social media tap into the same frustrations that compel people to riot. 

Offline, anxiety is self-perpetuating thanks to political culture and civil etiquette.  Social life under capitalism necessitates a repetition of trauma.  The US system we’re supposed to uplift has produced exceptional suffering.  We’re told that it’s both possible and necessary to compartmentalize the past from the present, but these fantasies of linear progress only highlight the agonies of continued injustice.  Theories of insurgency and upheaval can be deeply appealing; appeals to preserve a ravenous polity feel like a form of violence. 

As for etiquette, I don’t know how to explain it without sounding like the goal is to exonerate myself of rudeness—and it occurs to me that exonerating myself of rudeness may in fact be the point—but social and professional conventions disdain immobilization, which only compounds anxiety.  The industrialized world isn’t structured to benefit the demure or hesitant; civilized societies mistreat people deemed unproductive.  Avoidance is a terrific way to earn scorn. 

It causes me tons of distress.  My brain deadens in the face of simple tasks, like answering an email or a direct message.  Even when I like the person who has solicited a response, even when I want to maintain a relationship, I can only stare at the screen, hopeless and angry, willing myself to answer.  Come on, man!  Something perfunctory.  Start with a salutation.  Then a sentence or two.  That’s it.  I stare through hollow sockets before navigating away in shame. 

Shame arises in similar fashion those thousands of times I let the phone ring, unwilling to honor whoever summons, or when I’m committed to a social function and can’t drag myself anywhere near the door.  It’s a bizarre [what does one call it?  affliction?  sensibility?  condition?  illness?  attitude?  habituation?]. 

I don’t want to alienate friends and colleagues.  I don’t want them to dislike me or, worse, imagine that I dislike them.  I want them to understand that I’m trying but sometimes find myself locked into inexplicable paralysis.  And yet I can’t expect them to accept my absences.  Who but a fellow misanthrope likes being ignored? 

Social functionality and personal inhibition can be painfully discordant.  Nobody’s trained in the etiquette of reclusion.  We judge the availability of others according to ego, attraction, status, and desire; mental illness is usually absent from the calculation. 

*****

As an undergrad I used to hang out in my favorite professor’s office.  A heavy smoker, she allowed me to light up as I pleased.  (This shows that I’m old, yeah, but it was after the university had banned indoor smoking; the professor just didn’t give a damn.)  Her name was Rita Riddle, from Coeburn, Virginia, a tiny coalmining town near the Kentucky border.  Her license plate read “Dr Mama.” 

She was a tough character, both unpopular and beloved.  That sort of paradox defined her; she also alternated between brusqueness and candor.  It depended on what mood her audience inspired.  I learned to write under her guidance.  She kept me in pocket money by assigning odd jobs around her house and yard.  Mostly we chatted about epic works of film and literature:  The Godfather, Richard III, Mansfield Park, Citizen Kane, Moby Dick.  I’ve never met anybody with a better understanding of hubris and power. 

“Dammit, boy, don’t you ever become cynical,” she’d demand.  “Promise me.”  So I promised.  We had the conversation a dozen times.  It was important to Rita Riddle that I not become cynical.  At the age of twenty, beholden to an unfamiliar future, it was an easy pledge.  Youthful confidence is mainly a byproduct of ignorance, eroded in time by the strictures of civility, the stresses of family life, the silliness of politics, and the stupidity of education.  Time and again I wanted to fail my mentor, something that would have been easy, a natural consequence of anguish, but I’ve not become cynical enough to break a promise. 

*****

During therapy, I discovered that my arrival from Jordan wasn’t actually the beginning.  I remembered that when a girlfriend dumped me in grad school, I suffered nausea every night for two months, sleeping with the bedroom and bathroom doors open so I could get to the toilet more easily.  And I remembered the chest pains I complained about in elementary school.  My mom took me to specialists in Durham and Miami (where my grandmother lived at the time); I still harbor images of the electrode patches on my skeletal chest. 

At the start of first grade I cried until the school finally called my parents to cart me home.  The memory is hazy, but I can put together a setting.  Glistening floors.  Antiseptic odors.  Tiled walls.  Dark stairs.  Frustrated adults not bothering to whisper.  A crushing, cavernous loneliness. 

I had loved kindergarten.  The classrooms were four trailers in an old parking lot.  They were relaxed and colorful.  Children pounded the asphalt like jackhammers during recess.  We napped side-by-side on miniature foam cots.  I learned to write love letters, to tie shoelaces, to grow flowers. 

The main school was set back from the trailers atop a steep hillside.  The building still stands, still looks like a Victorian prison with its harsh angles and concrete inlays, a monument to scholastic austerity.  There I was to be socialized, tempered, domesticated, shaped into a good boy anxious to learn the ways of the world.  But I knew.  I fucking knew.  I didn’t want to be near that goddamn building.  Even at the age of five, I understood that death feels like the hypostasis of progress.