Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

by Daniel Smith

  • • •

  For the anxious, love—the most redemptive of experiences and the pinnacle of human relations—is a hell of agonizing indecision, corrupted joys, unreliable desires, unbearable self-realizations, and the most intense, paradoxical loneliness. And guilt. Above all, guilt—implacable and vicious. Because in love an anxious person becomes a persecutor as well as a masochist. He doesn’t intend to hurt anyone, least of all his beloved. He isn’t a sadist. But he is toxic, and merely by yielding to his affection he draws an innocent into the zone of pollution. Psychological self-abuse becomes psychological assault. In love, anxiety takes victims.

  When I met Joanna, in the summer of 1999—freshly graduated, freshly employed, paralytically anxious—I didn’t know any of this. I had been in love just once before and it had been unrequited. I had never had a girlfriend, I had never had a long-term sexual partner. I had never had the chance to see how my anxiety performed in the romantic field. I had never given myself the chance. All through high school and college the same comedy repeated itself over and over again: Boy meets girl, girl likes boy, girl expresses like for boy, boy agonizes day and night over the potential consequences of girl’s like for boy, ultimately convincing himself that the end result of a single date to the movies will be an inextricable entanglement, a loveless marriage, a crippling divorce, and years of shame, penury, and clinical depression. Boy has friend tell girl that boy has contracted double pneumonia and will be unavailable for six to eight weeks.

  Joanna’s charm and misfortune was to be the first person to break this cycle. What possessed her to get close enough even to be implicated in this milestone is a mystery. I’ve studied photographs of myself from the party where we met and can detect not a hint of allure in the spectral young man staring back at me. I look like I’m on a weekend pass from a methadone clinic. The haphazard beard on my cheeks is at once sinister and faintly rabbinical. My skin has an insomniac pallor, there are charcoal-colored circles beneath my eyes, and I am wearing rumpled, out-of-style clothes. It seems more likely that I’d attract a case of head lice than a woman.

  Yet there was Joanna: bronze-skinned, bright-eyed, full-lipped, with a modest glittering diamond in each ear. I caught her looking at me as I loitered by my brother’s bookshelves, trying to seem as absorbed as possible by a paperback copy of Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics—to ward off humans. I thought maybe I had guacamole on my chinos. Then my sister-in-law led Joanna over and introduced her as a coworker—they had adjacent cubicles at a midtown nonprofit, where they were paid to distribute a billionaire’s money—and I had to work quickly to process three very unlikely deductions. First, despite my unsightliness and her beauty, Joanna appeared to have been neither coerced nor threatened into speaking with me. Second, despite the sharp panic lodged in my neck, chest, gut, and groin, Joanna appeared either not to notice or not to care. Third, despite all established precedent, Joanna’s presence was not only not exacerbating my anxiety, it seemed actually to be tamping it down. I noticed this immediately. She was like a living, talking, blue-eyed Xanax tablet. Just the sight of her—sipping from a plastic cup of wine, nodding at my answers to her questions, idly uncurling a strand of her hair—was a tonic. The effect was so unfamiliar it was almost distracting. For the rest of the party we were inseparable, and as we chatted in a hallway, or joked flirtatiously, or ate food off each other’s plates, I kept having to will myself not to think, I am chatting in a hallway with a woman, I am joking flirtatiously with a woman, I am eating food off a woman’s plate. I am engaging in an exchange that the arbiters of social behavior deem a sign of virility and health.

  It may have been that I’d internalized the fundamental safety of the situation: a pre-vetted woman in a familial setting I’d be leaving in fewer than twenty-four hours for a city two states away. But even the internalization of safety, rather than the internalization of hazard, contingency, and flux, would have been something to note in my diary, and as I drove along I-95 the next morning, Boston-bound, a mountain of fact-checking documents awaiting my attention, not even the tractor-trailers bearing murderously down on my car could uproot the new confidence I felt the encounter had planted within me.

  • • •

  I expected nothing to come of it. At Joanna’s request we had exchanged numbers, but I’d assumed she was just capping off the flirtation. “The next time you’re in town look me up,” and so on. But the very next night the phone rang at my bedside and there she was again, soft and nervous, reintroducing herself unnecessarily.

  I was delighted to discover that the therapeutic sorcery Joanna had worked on me at the party worked long distance, too. Listening to her talk about her life in New York—about her work at the foundation, about her passion for public education, about her friends and roommates—I detected a bizarre clarity materializing in my mind, an unfamiliar ability to differentiate between fear and excitement. These sensations had always been frustratingly similar, starting as they do with the same adrenaline flush, causing the same bodily disorientation. But I felt no confusion about what the chill in my chest and the tingling in my limbs now signified. This wasn’t fear. This was elation.

  The rest happened with an inevitability that makes it hard to account for. We spoke for more than two hours that night, we spoke for more than two hours the next night, and we spoke for more than two hours every night after that. During the days I focused on the articles the editors assigned me, and during the nights I focused on the woman who had assigned herself to me. After three weeks, I couldn’t stand it anymore and laid down my credit card for a flight to New York. From that point on, we went back and forth every other weekend. After nine months, I couldn’t stand that either and asked my roommate to move out and Joanna to move in. Let my sister-in-law give the billionaire’s money away alone for a while. Joanna was my salvation. She was needed up north.

  • • •

  Poor lovers of the anxious! Poor martyrs! Poor Joanna! In moving in with me she could not possibly have known what she was getting herself into. I hinted at my anxiety here and there, but when I did it was with the self-deprecating ethnic pride I’d picked up from Roth—that clowning Jewish swagger—rather than with the full historical, clinical, and necessary truth. Joanna should have been informed of my anxiety the same way prospective pet owners are informed of a dog’s distemper.

  But, then, what incentive was there to tell the truth? Not only did I not want to drive Joanna away, but in her presence I couldn’t see the truth. The truth she needed to know was, so far as I was concerned, the old truth, the pre-Joanna truth. With her in my life there was no old truth. There was only the wonderful new Joanna truth: stability, sensuality, other-centeredness, affection. An optimistic psychological future. I had a few apprehensions about undergoing so significant a change, but I chalked them up to just that: apprehensions about undergoing a significant change. Perfectly normal to feel those. Nothing pathological about it.

  Those who knew me better than I knew myself had an easier time seeing the peril in the scenario. “Are you sure?” asked a college friend. “You’re moving pretty quickly with this chick.” “Joanna’s great,” said Scott. “I love Joanna. She’s like family already. But think this over some more, buddy. Consider it. You’ve never even had a girlfriend before.” “What’s the big rush?” said my mother. “Why not keep things the way they are for a little while? At least you can get separate apartments the first year. I’ll help you look!” My friend Kate later claimed that when I told her Joanna was moving in with me, she saw a flash of panic in my eyes.

  Probably she did see a flash of panic. The germ was certainly there. But it was veiled, obscured beneath the large, noisy, delicious distraction of my passion for Joanna. No, Joanna could not have known the difficulties that were coming. I, having never been in love before, could not have known the difficulties that were coming. But they came. Joanna moved to Boston in the summer of 2000. Six months later, when my electroshock article was published and
a fresh gust of anxiety toppled me, Joanna was toppled, too.

  • • •

  The problem wasn’t that the germ of anxiety inside me grew and strangled my love. That would have been relatively simple. With a certifiably dead love I might have been able to say, to everyone’s benefit, “Sorry. I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have asked you here. Now let’s go see if we can get your old job back!” The problem was that my anxiety colonized my love. Anxiety is, among other things, a disorder of choice. It begins with a doubt about the self and if that doubt is not isolated and slaughtered immediately it will breed like vermin. The doubt will populate every precinct of the mind, no matter how sacred.

  At first Joanna wasn’t implicated in my anxiety about my article. I brooded plenty about my reportorial and potentially moral failings. I brooded about the slipperiness of truth, the double-edged nature of success, and the ethical conundra at the heart of the journalist-subject relationship. I spent hours hashing over the details of other journalistic controversies, in particular the one Roth mentioned in his letter to Whitworth along with the Lewinsky scandal: the psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson’s libel suit against the writer Janet Malcolm. I rushed out and bought Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, and was both comforted and appalled by its notorious opening claim that “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” But I kept Joanna out of it. I needed Joanna. She was my cheerleader and my confidante. She was the person I came home to each night with my Willy Loman look, fatigued and demoralized by the strain of remaining conscious for more than eight hours at a stretch. She was the one who poured me drinks, stroked my back, and said, “Things will get better soon. I promise. You just have to let this blow over.”

  It blew over. After a few weeks, the online comments trickled off, the letter writers moved on to other alleged abhorrences, and the editors appeared satisfied that no legal or reputational harm would come to them or me. Yet promise or no, things didn’t get better. The stimulus disappeared but the response remained, and so, like a hermit crab stripped of its shell, my anxiety went looking for another home and found one in the woman who was sharing mine. A terrible pattern began, an abusive dance in four recurring steps.

  Step One: mounting uncertainty. Perhaps what I’d felt for Joanna all along, I began to say to myself, was not love but infatuation or desire or desperation or lust. Maybe it was a weak man’s need for emotional shelter. Maybe it was a temporary masking of loneliness. Maybe it was what Roth said at the start of The Anatomy Lesson: “When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do.” Whatever the case, it had been sheer naïveté, a folly bordering on self-destruction, to have Joanna move in with me. I was now more trapped in proximity than ever before.

  Step Two: withdrawal. Increasingly doubtful of my affection, as well as embarrassed by my anxiety and resentful of Joanna’s inability to calm it, I’d become sullen, neglectful, and blatantly discontented. In short: an asshole. I would put Joanna down, dismiss her ideas, ignore her requests, and in general make it clear in a thousand unsubtle ways that her presence in Boston, my apartment, and my life had become an awful burden to me.

  Step Three: blowback. Registering my behavior, Joanna would respond with sadness and the fear that she had uprooted her life for someone who not only didn’t love her but didn’t even seem to like or respect her very much. Recriminations would follow. Tears. Slammed doors. Fertile silences. Stock scenes from the disintegration of every romance in the history of the world.

  Step Four: retreat. Horrified by my cruelty, suddenly terrified by the prospect of life alone, I would dedicate myself to repairing the damage. Gourmet meals. Gerbera daisies. Amateur poetry. Proclamations of undying adoration. Anything and everything to win Joanna back to my side.

  Push, pull. Push, pull. Push, pull. It was textbook battered woman syndrome, just without the beatings, and it placed me in illustrious company. Kierkegaard so badly tortured his beloved with his neurotic indecision that she fell into a depression; for eleven months he wavered maniacally between affection and aversion, devotion and abandonment. “So after all,” she said when they’d finally broken off, “you have also played a terrible game with me.” William James, who was beset by acute anxiety throughout his twenties and early thirties, afflicted his future wife with the same inconstancy; he wrote long, tormented letters in which he assiduously courted her and fended her off in the same short paragraphs. And then there is Kafka—the worst lover in the Western canon. For five years, Kafka strung his girlfriend and fiancée along, dedicating all the literary, intellectual, and polemical skills at his disposal to two contradictory goals: winning and keeping her hand, and proving to her that he was a “sick, weak, unsociable, taciturn, gloomy, stiff, almost helpless man” with whom life would be a complete disaster.

  • • •

  Joanna and I had been planning our trip to Italy almost as long as we had been living together. We studied Lonely Planet, we bought and listened to the Pimsleur tapes, we accumulated restaurant and pensione recommendations. The emphasis was to be on decadence and plain, unmitigated fun. But as the weeks and my anxiety progressed I began to attach a sense of immense obligation to the trip. If I was going to slip the binds of my neurosis and end the agonizing back-and-forth into which I’d forced us, I was going to need an ocean to help me. The geography of work and home was too constricting and familiar for a rebirth. And a rebirth was what I, and I and Joanna, needed.

  That we were unlikely to get one I sensed even on the flight over. As Joanna flipped through the thick folder of travel articles, maps, and reviews she’d put together, I nursed an eight-dollar Budweiser and wondered whether a panic attack might compel the pilot to turn the plane around, and if so how he would announce this over the intercom. It’d have to be a real doozy of an attack, but I thought myself capable. It seemed my last chance to avoid what, I realized somewhere east of Newfoundland, was bound to be a catastrophic two weeks. Two weeks in a strange country! Two weeks of being perpetually side by side with another human being! Two weeks during which the need to appear chipper was going to be exponentially more oppressive than it had been at home.

  For a while I managed to stifle myself. Except for a few fleeting, cherished exceptions—sharing a cigarette on the Ponte Sant’ Angelo; napping together with the shutters open, tickled by the breeze; sunbathing in Siena’s Piazza del Campo—I couldn’t enjoy things, so it seemed only fair that I focus on concealing my unenjoyment. We’d each tapped our savings for the vacation. This way Joanna would at least get her money’s worth.

  It was a well-intentioned scheme, but it had two very large flaws. First, Joanna happens not to be an idiot. She can tell the difference between pleasure and suppressed panic. In addition to piquing her annoyance for being joyless, therefore, I was also piquing her annoyance for withholding my true feelings—a double crime. Second, the more stifling I did the more alienated from the world I became, and the more alienated from the world I became, the more I cleaved to the guilty content and madman logic of my anxiety. By the time we made it to Florence, about halfway through the trip, I was beginning to feel like a cross between the guy in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Raskolnikov—thoroughly locked-in to the most unstable of minds. All the lovely and luxurious things we did, all the picnics we had and masterpieces we saw and love we made, were wasted on me. I wasn’t even there. I was back in Boston, staring at my article, obsessed by the harm I had purportedly done. Convinced of the harm I had purportedly done. Imagine: Lounging with my loving, devoted girlfriend in the Boboli Gardens on a warm spring day, all I could concentrate on was the application of 50 to 225 millicoulombs of electricity to the temporal lobes of catatonically depressed inpatients.

  In Venice, in a pensione overlooking the Grand Canal, Joanna finally hit her limit. We had just set down our bags, I sighed one of the long, sorrow-of-the-cosmos sighs that were becoming my trademark
, and Joanna turned on her heels and said, “You know, I can’t remember the last time you told me you loved me.” Here is where I tried out a theory I had been working up for just such an occasion. The theory was that if I were to stay as motionless and silent as possible—like a lizard trying to outwit a predator—Joanna would forget whatever she was demanding of me and carry on as before.

  The theory failed.

  “Well. Say something.”

  I stammered, then finally got it out: “I don’t think I do love you anymore.”

  It was true, in its way, though it sounded awful out there in the world like that, audible and alive. Sometimes I loved Joanna. When I felt good, or very, very sleepy, or when we were in bed together, or when I’d had a milligram or more of Xanax. But increasingly I couldn’t even see her anymore other than as an obstacle to the total self-enclosure toward which I was inclined. And how could you love someone if you can’t even see them? Though if you can’t see them why does it at the same time feel crucial that you keep them? And is the very idea of “keeping” someone a consequence of not being able to see them?

  I was just starting to parse all this when, in my peripheral vision, I saw the first object soaring at me from across the room.

  14.

  brian

  It took Joanna eight whole months to cut me loose. She was hurt and often confused, but she seemed to understand that the pain I was inflicting on her wasn’t advertent but merely a spilling over of my own pain. She was no stranger to anxiety herself. She knew a bit about what it meant and what it felt like. And she loved me, the poor thing. She wanted to think the best. That summer, I proposed we find separate apartments; she agreed that a little distance might improve matters. That fall, I decided to resign from the Atlantic; she believed me when I said I was leaving to concentrate on writing. In truth, I quit because I couldn’t bear being around people anymore.