by Daniel Smith
• • •
A couple of years ago, I paid a visit to Scott, my oldest brother, to talk about anxiety. This wasn’t an unusual topic. Scott and I talk about anxiety the way some brothers talk about money, which is to say often, and always with an eye on who has more of it. In truth, however, we aren’t in competition. Our anxieties are different breeds. Mine is cerebral. It starts with a thought—a what if or a should have been or a never will be or a could have been—and metastasizes from there, sparking down the spine and rooting out into the body in the form of breathlessness, clamminess, fatigue, palpitations, and a terrible sense that the world in which I find myself is at once holographically unsubstantial and grotesquely threatening.
Scott’s anxiety is more physical. It starts with a twinge or an unaccustomed tightness and then rises to his mind, which, in the natural process of investigating the sensation, magnifies it, which results in further investigation, which further magnifies the sensation, creating a feedback loop that ends with Scott either curled up on the couch with a jar of Nutella and a sack of soy crisps or strapped to a gurney in an ambulance, being rushed to the cardiac unit for a battery of tests that invariably reveals nothing more malignant than a few gas bubbles. In short, Scott is a hypochondriac.
Scott and I sometimes argue about the relative demerits of my “free-floating” versus his “somatic” anxiety. But mainly we commiserate. We whine, we exchange strategies for how to settle ourselves down, and we test out pet theories on each other. On this visit, I wanted to talk to Scott about my anxiety’s origins.
We talked in Scott’s kitchen. He was starting dinner for his family, scraping minced garlic and onions into a cast-iron skillet. I told Scott about my theory that the onset of my anxiety coincided with the moment I lost my virginity. That was the turn, the evolutionary, or devolutionary, leap. Before: normal childhood. After: quaking adulthood. The smell of sautéing aromatics is a kind of natural sedative, an air-borne Valium. It loosens the tongue. I spoke for a long while. When I was finished, Scott gave the pan an expert little toss and said, in the tone professors use with their least perceptive students, “Jesus, Dan. Maybe. I guess. But listen: It’s not like we were raised by Buddhist monks.”
There are two things to say about this statement. First, contrary to popular belief, Buddhists can actually be very anxious people. That’s often why they become Buddhists in the first place. Buddhism was made for the anxious like Christianity was made for the downtrodden or AA for the addicted. Its entire purpose is to foster equanimity, to tame excesses of thought and emotion. The Buddhists have a great term for these excesses. They refer to them as the condition of “monkey mind.” A person in the throes of monkey mind suffers from a consciousness whose constituent parts will not stop bouncing from skull-side to skull-side, which keep flipping and jumping and flinging feces at the walls and swinging from loose neurons like howlers from vines. Buddhist practices are designed explicitly to collar these monkeys of the mind and bring them down to earth—to pacify them. Is it any wonder that Buddhism has had such tremendous success in the bastions of American nervousness, on the West Coast and in the New York metro area?
The second thing to say about Scott’s admonition is that I’d never before realized how influential our upbringing must have been. It seems remarkable, because he’s right. Of course he’s right. An account of my anxiety that vaulted over my mother’s was like starting Moby-Dick when the whale takes a harpoon in the flank. And not just my mother’s anxiety. Scott spoke in the plural: monks, not monk. We were raised by two anxious parents. My father’s anxiety was as different from my mother’s anxiety as Scott’s is different from mine, darker and more complicated. But it was there, sometimes in force. In his early forties, my father had a series of panic attacks that literally laid him flat, and then sent him packing to the behavioral ward for a rest. Meanwhile, all the while, my mother was struggling to make it through PTA meetings without hyperventilating herself into unconsciousness. And still I didn’t realize.
Did I have intimations? A year into my mother’s clinical career I sneaked into her office and defaced the first few business cards in the pale porcelain dispenser she kept on her desk. The cards, of which she was very proud, read:
MARILYN SMITH, MSW
PSYCHOTHERAPIST
When I was through they read:
MARILYN SMITH
PSYCHO
But this was an act more of mischief than of understanding. I had no real knowledge that my mother’s therapeutic work grew out of her therapeutic needs. I had no real knowledge that she had therapeutic needs, that there was anything to her temperament but her: the maternal constant. Anxiety has many signs: ragged nails, gnawed cuticles, sweaty palms, excessive blinking, the inability to sit still for more than a moment. All the things the monkey does when he’s in command. But you have to know what to look for. And even if you know you may not find anything. The more practiced anxiety sufferers are adept at the art of subterfuge. For the sake of propriety, ambition, desire, or privacy, they learn to seal their anxiety off from public view. They learn to cork their anxiety within themselves like acid in a vial. It isn’t pleasant. The human mind isn’t Pyrex; it can corrode. But it works.
But a child is a sensitive instrument. You can hide the factual truth from a child, but you can’t blanket influence. Your agitation will out, and over time it will mold your child’s temperament as surely as water wears at rock. It was not until I was nearly twenty, deep into my own way with anxiety, that my mother spoke to me explicitly about her anxiety and the grief it caused her. But by that time she was essentially talking to herself. I’d become her. It wasn’t merely genetics. It was the million little signals: the jolting movements, the curious fears, the subtle avoidances, the panic behind the eyes, the terror behind the hugs, the tremor in the caresses. It was the monkey. A child registers who’s raising him.
• • •
After I went to talk to Scott, I went to visit my mother in her office. It isn’t the office I knew as a child. A few years after my father died my mother sold the house and moved to a condo development farther east on Long Island. She now sees patients in a single-story suite dominated by a chiropractic office. Between patients, she sometimes pops next door for a lumbar adjustment.
My mother and I are close and usually easy with each other. Yet from the moment we sat down she bobbed her legs and squirmed. She was sitting on her sturdy clinician’s chair. I was on the clients’ couch, beneath a print of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World—a girl lying on a parched, sloping field. When the phone rang, my mother answered, “I can’t talk now, Donna. I’m being tortured by Daniel.” Then, hanging up: “I’m nervous!”
“Why?” I asked. “Why are you nervous?”
“I’m nervous,” she said, “because I don’t want to fuck up your book.”
“You won’t fuck up my book, Mom. How could you? It hasn’t even happened yet.”
“Exactly. The book hasn’t happened yet. That’s what I’m afraid about.”
“And anyway, the whole concept is that—”
“Concept!” She spat the word out like it was a bad olive. “That’s just the beginning, the concept. You’ve got to put it into words. And I’m nervous. I have anticipatory anxiety.”
“You have anticipatory anxiety because you think if the interview goes poorly the book might not come out well?”
“I’m nervous because . . . because I’m the queen of anxiety and you’re the prince, and if the interview goes poorly, and it’s my fault, then yeah, the book might not go as well.”
The Queen and the Prince. She’d never put it like that before. It might have sounded prideful if it hadn’t been so thickly larded with guilt. What my mother was feeling, it soon emerged, was responsible—for everything. I’d come to ask a few simple questions and she reacted as if I’d brought along klieg lights and a set of dental instruments.
“I’m sorry!” she said. “I fucked up. I’m sorry. I did! I didn’t know ho
w to raise kids. I was anxious. And I was naïve. I thought we’d get it right by the time you came along. You were number three. Raising kids was supposed to be like making pancakes. The first couple always come out a little mangled, but by the third everything’s usually pretty smooth. But I got in my own way. I was anxious. I’m so sorry.”
I felt awful to have made her feel awful. At seventeen, perhaps, I would have savored my mother’s remorse. At double the age, any blame I ascribe to her anxiety is overwhelmed by admiration for what she’s done with it. For thirty years, my mother’s anxiety disallowed her the comfort, easy amiability, and confidence she believed she detected in her peers. It lined her mind with garish mirrors. I know what the nervous system hungers for under these conditions. It hungers for unconsciousness—or, failing that, inebriation of one kind or another. Like all anxious people, my mother engaged in her fair share of escapism. Unlike many, however, she didn’t narcotize her way out of anxiety. Nor did she take the other popular path, that of lifelong miserable resignation. Instead, she stood and did battle.
She didn’t win; no one wins. It was more like she struck a bargain. The bargain was this: Admit the anxiety as an essential part of yourself and in exchange that anxiety will be converted into energy, unstable but manageable. Stop with the self-flagellating and become yourself, with scars and tics. That my brothers and I at times judge this bargain harshly—that we see it, sometimes, as a stubborn unwillingness to exert maximal control—is in the logic of my mother’s life beside the point, and evidence of our own limitations. My mother took the measure of what could be built with the material she’d been given, and she built it. More than that, she has built shelter for others, hundreds of others. It’s no insignificant thing. Anxiety is a narcissism machine. To have found a way to use it for good is unusual indeed. Long live the Queen.
• • •
A couple of weeks after I visited my mother’s office, my cell phone vibrated and lit up and the following text message appeared:
From: Mom
just drove by stonybrook pond where you almost drowned! start of anxiety? xoxoxo
CB: 516-606-XXXX
I had forgotten all about this, which is strange because it’s an oft-told tale—Family Story #289. It refers to an event that occurred in the fall of 1980, when I was three. The setting was Mill Pond, in Stony Brook’s T. Bayles Minuse Park, on the North Shore. The occasion was an outing with the extended family: my parents, my aunt and uncle, my brothers, my two cousins, and me. The genre of the story—at least as it has been told in the family ever since—is comedy.
The first part of the story is simple to tell: I wandered away from the group and fell into the pond. Mill Pond is filled with ducks and massive, ill-tempered swans, who steal the bread that children feed to the ducks. The pond has no gate or railing along its perimeter. It’s just grass, then dirt, then a ragged stone lip, then water. I was a toddler; I was toddling. I don’t know what everyone else was doing. My brothers and older cousin were no doubt running around, laughing and arguing. The adults were no doubt sitting around, laughing and arguing. In any event, no one was paying attention, and no one remembers exactly how long the heedlessness lasted. It could have been a minute, it could have been five, it could have been more. By the time someone thought to check on me, I was face down among the fowl—arms at my sides, motionless. Someone screamed, my mother screamed in turn, and she sprinted to the pond.
So far, so unfunny. It doesn’t take long for a child to asphyxiate. Short of death there is the risk of brain damage. Time is of the essence. It is this, coupled with the fact that I emerged physically unharmed, that has led my mother to have to take a decades-long ribbing about what happened next. At the time my mother was a serious amateur photographer, and as she rushed to the pond she had hanging from her neck a brand-new, 1980 Winter Olympics collectors’ edition, Canon AE-1 camera with a focal plane shutter and an interchangeable lens. There are two versions of what she did with this camera once she reached the pond. One version has it that, leaping without hesitation into the water, she held her camera far aloft with one hand while with the other she scooped me up and carried me to safety. The other version—uncharacteristic, but who knows?—has my mother actually pausing at the bank of the pond to remove the camera from her neck and place it on the ground before coming to my rescue. Whatever the truth, the point of the story is that right there at the water’s edge my mother performed a sort of farcical reenactment of Sophie’s Choice, the main difference from the original being that instead of having to choose between the lives of her two children, my mother had to choose between her child and a piece of luxury electronics.
To be fair to my mother, who now refers to Mill Pond as “the place where I was horribly negligent and almost let my three-year-old drown,” the Canon AE-1 is a fine camera. She still has it. After being pulled from the water, however, I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say a word. A bystander at the pond offered a quilt and my mother bundled me up and took me to my aunt’s house, where she held me in front of the fire, rocking me and berating herself. For the next eighteen hours I was mute.
When I woke the next morning I was my usual garrulous, playful, enervating self, as if nothing had happened. Near-death experience? Who wants to build a fort? Post-traumatic stress? Let’s watch Sesame Street!
Yet when my mother’s text came in I knew immediately what she meant. This is the trouble with origin hunting: There are so many origins. My mother may blame her genes and her temperament for my anxiety, but as a therapist she believes firmly in the transformative power of adversity—the ability of negative emotions to startle awake the devils in our chromosomes. Finding traumas is her business the same way that finding the murderer is the detective’s business. It’s what she is trained to do, and it is the skill that, after our conversation, she applied vigorously to my case. She went looking in my past for clues, and merely by mentioning the pond incident I knew the clues she had found. They were the episodes of my childhood fear of water.
Clue #1: The September following my near drowning, I am outside with my brothers. Our house is one of four in a small horseshoe-shaped cul-de-sac where the neighborhood children like to play. Suddenly my mother hears a high-pitched, operatic wail, a panicked air-siren of a scream. She rushes outside to find me wide-mouthed and shivering, my fists at my temples and, at my feet—at everyone’s feet—a half inch of rising water. A neighbor, it seems, has decided to empty his swimming pool into the street and the minor deluge has set me off into some post-traumatic flashback. My mother thinks of this now as my first panic attack.
Clue #2: The following year I become fervently afraid of the toilet. Abruptly, I lose all confidence that the act of flushing away my excretions will work as it always had. Rather than causing everything to sink down the pipes and into the septic system, pushing the toilet’s handle will, I become convinced, cause everything to rise up—a physics-defying, endless rising up. It isn’t the filth that terrifies me; it is the water. The toilet will overflow and the water will creep steadily up the walls, eventually pushing open the bathroom door, cascading down the carpeted staircase in a foaming torrent, and filling the house like a fishbowl. And I will drown.
Clue #3: Two years pass and I develop a fear of swimming. Won’t go near a pool. Won’t look at one. Can’t even catch a whiff of chlorine without hyperventilating. Hoping to clip this fear at its bud, my parents sign me up for swimming lessons. The first and only lesson takes place at an indoor, Olympic-sized pool with mosaic-tile walls and a vaulted ceiling, the kind of place in which every sound above the smallest whisper is amplified and echoed many times over. The sounds I begin to make as my father leads me to the pool are way above whispers, and are filled with obscenities so ornate and vulgar that under different circumstances he might have taken some pleasure in my precocious mastery of them. Under these circumstances, he is preoccupied with simultaneously holding fast to me while not allowing my nails to catch his skin and draw blood. Squirming free, I bolt to
the locker room and wrap my thin arms around a changing bench until my father relents and takes me home.
Clue #4: At around the same time, my mother tries to transition me from chewable to swallowable daily vitamins. Although I have no trouble eating and drinking normally, I endure months of embarrassing failures before I successfully make the switch. It’s perplexing. I appear to have some psychological block against pill swallowing. My throat closes, I gag, and out the tablet soars, arcing across the kitchen before skidding to a stop on the table or floor, or else cleaving momentarily to the white linoleum cabinets, then falling with a moist clack to the countertop. It isn’t the vitamin, it emerges under parental questioning, that causes everything to clench. It’s the water or juice or milk or soda. The fluid passing my lips is the sensation that trips the warning system within me. The pills are tiny. Even if one were to get lodged in my trachea I’d be able to breathe comfortably. But the fluid—the fluid could choke me dead.
• • •
Could be, I suppose. It’s a theory. But like many theories, it’s selective. It feeds off cherry-picked evidence. I was a hydrophobic, yes, but I was hypersensitive and neurotic in other ways, too. There are many flavors of anxiety. My childhood was a taster’s menu.
I would gladly skip over the mundane examples—your run-of-the-mill fears of the dark, ghosts, the basement, the attic, the woods, animals, doctors, old people, solitude, separation—were it not for the fact that even these anxieties manifested themselves in me with gusto. Among my strongest memories of childhood are of being physically restrained by medical personnel. It was not unusual, when I was young, for a procedure as routine and noninvasive as a strep culture to set me off like a pig in a barn fire. It often required as many as four grown men, one for each scrawny, thrashing limb, to pin me down while a fifth drove home the inoculation or swabbed my swollen tonsils. I can still remember the look that invariably came over the doctor’s face as I began to claw at the clinic door and throw fistfuls of tongue depressors at him. It was the same expression the priest in The Exorcist wears when Linda Blair spouts pea soup on his frock.