Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

by Daniel Smith

  The deciding indignity for Joanna was when I showed up at a holiday party at her new apartment two hours late, slurringly drunk, with a married friend who proceeded to pull off his wedding band and proposition one of the guests. (Me, today: “I don’t know how you lasted as long as you did.” Joanna: “Low self-esteem.”) Dumping me, she seemed gleeful and relieved, as if she’d just learned that a chronic disease she’d endured for years was at last in remission. I felt much the same way. I had been waiting for her to muster the courage I lacked. At last I wouldn’t have to worry about hurting her anymore, or berate myself for being unable to stop.

  The good feeling lasted forty-eight hours. Then I took to bed with a pinching headache and found that I couldn’t get back up. For a full week I lay on my mattress on the floor, hemmed in by spent tissue boxes and pill canisters, snotty and stricken and fixated day and night on the hulking character flaws that had led me to sabotage the one true relationship I’d ever had and probably ever would. It was the old Macbeth feeling again—that self-referential psychosis. I couldn’t do, see, hear, or smell anything without being reminded of what I’d demolished, without being reminded of Joanna. I couldn’t watch movies. I couldn’t read books. I couldn’t watch TV. I couldn’t read magazines. I couldn’t even stare out the window: The trees, swaying, swayed like her. The birds were too exultant; it was like they were chirping to mock me. Even the rain, the mere rain, was too much to bear. The rain said, We can wash it all away, all the dirt and all the garbage and all the dust, but not your heartbreak and definitely not what is spoiled inside of you.

  It was worse than anything I’d imagined would befall me if I lost Joanna. It was like she was murdered—disappeared. Certainly she wasn’t taking my calls. After a few frantic days I’m lucky anyone still did, and that they not only continued to indulge my sniveling but to offer words of comfort and advice.

  Few of those words were productive, of course. There isn’t much you can say to a person in hysterical grief that won’t sound like a cliché. But there was one suggestion that, surprisingly, did me real good. This was a suggestion from my brother David, whom I called one evening weeping and whining for help. David, who has the patience of a Trappist monk, listened silently for the ten minutes it took me to spend my cache. Then he said, “What you need to do is get dressed, get in your car, and go rent Singin’ in the Rain.”

  My first thought was that David was trying to avenge some unspeakable outrage I’d visited upon him in childhood. Rent Singin’ in the Rain? I’d just lost the woman I loved and he wanted me to watch a movie that centers on the birth of a pure and passionate romance. And with dance numbers! I would die. That’s all: I would die. I would lose so much snot and tears in weeping that I’d dehydrate, shrivel up, and die. My roommates would find me days later, hollowed out like a cicada husk on my bed as Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds embraced in the Hollywood sun. I couldn’t survive such bliss.

  But David was insistent. “You’d think that,” he said. “You’d think Singin’ in the Rain would be the absolute last thing you’d want to watch right now. But actually it’s the only thing you can watch.” Singin’ in the Rain, David argued, was the only known entertainment in the history of humanity that is totally incapable of causing distress or sadness of any kind. No matter who you are, no matter what emotional condition you are in, no matter your race, religion, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, or creed, Singin’ in the Rain will make you forget your worries and smile.

  And damn it if he wasn’t right. To this day, I’ve yet to take a pill more miraculous. The entire movie was like some cinematic antidote for neurotic disturbance. To watch it was to be transported for 103 minutes to a universe in which negative emotions have no role except as hurdles tidily jumped on the way to joy—joy of such absurdly high Technicolor wattage that one’s own troubles are washed right out for the duration. Musico-visual Prozac: that’s Singin’ in the Rain.

  • • •

  Now the world knows. Now others can benefit from the insight. But the American Psychiatric Association shouldn’t revise its treatment guidelines just yet. Singin’ in the Rain might get you through an anxious week or two, but it won’t get you through an anxious life. For that you need either a brain transplant (the only procedure of its kind, it has been said, in which it is better to be a donor than a recipient), a fully stocked bomb shelter, or a thorough adjustment of your perspective on existential risk and reward.

  It is possible that the latter would have come to me without the help of the psychotherapy provided by Brian, whom I began to see shortly after Joanna and I started having problems. Some people simply grow less anxious as they grow older. They accumulate their mistakes—the botched love affairs, the blundered career moves, the bungled ambitions—and they come to learn that none pulled catastrophe down on their shoulders. They slow down. They ease up. They develop a more detached, humbled, amused outlook. For many, anxiety is a young person’s vice, a symptom of idealism, suggests Thoreau, who knew from anxiety and idealism: “The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.”

  But I already knew far too many people over forty to buy much stock in this hope. And my own anxiety felt far too muscular and stalwart to expect it to subside without a real struggle. The question, as always, was what I should bring to that struggle, what methods, what weapons, what skills—and who would teach me to fight?

  • • •

  Simply perusing the therapist directory supplied by the Atlantic had been a daunting experience. What to choose? There was transpersonal therapy, humanistic therapy, gestalt therapy, constructivist therapy; Jungian, Adlerian, Kleinian, Rogerian, Reichian, and Sullivanian therapies; rational emotive behavior therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy; art therapy, narrative therapy, dance therapy. It was a crammed field, and one made all the more confusing by the fact that most therapists aren’t theoretically pure; they mix and match from different orientations according to preference and circumstance.

  Every therapist I saw before Brian had taken this magpie approach to my anxiety, and for a long time I had no idea Brian was different. For a long time, I barely listened to Brian. The anxiety was too bright and irritating. All I could do was babble, chew on my cuticles, and plead, quarter-jokingly, to be institutionalized. Once, just before she ended the relationship, Joanna came to a session. I dominated, grousing and fulminating for the full fifty minutes. If you’d taken a time-lapse photograph, Joanna and Brian would have come out looking like statues, and I like a wisp of fog.

  And yet it wasn’t just that I was too desperate to listen to Brian. It was also that I wasn’t desperate enough. “Hitting bottom” is a dubious concept—there always seems to be farther that one can fall. But after Joanna left I felt an unmistakable acquiescence sweep through me, a sudden apprehension that the old mechanisms were spent and worthless. I was tired—anxiety is so tiring!—but I was also disillusioned. I’d tried to make it through on my own and look where it had landed me: no job, no girl, no prospects, and a half-century-old musical eight days late at Blockbuster. It was time to relinquish control.

  The previous therapist I’d seen, right out of college, had solidified my understanding of what relinquishing control meant in psychotherapy. Time and again, she faulted me for what she called “defensive intellectualization.” She meant I thought too much, and that I used thinking to deflect and avoid therapeutic change. She had a point. I spent a lot of our brief time together sailing in the stratosphere of ideas, unreachable and safe. Where she wanted me was down in the lowlands of family, childhood, memory, trauma.

  After Joanna I was finally prepared to muck around in that sump. At last, I thought, I’ll lay down my armor and we’ll get down to the crux of this anxiety. Brian struck me as shrewder than other therapists. With his interesting
beard and his unaffected manner, he reminded me of the Robin Williams character in Good Will Hunting—a man who’d call you out on your bullshit, then give you a bear hug. He seemed an ideal partner with whom to attack the really earthy clinical questions: Who screwed me up? Through what actions? Out of what motivations? Who screwed up the people who screwed me up? Was there blame to be assigned? If so, where? Were there resentments still to be digested? If so, which? Was there anger still to be articulated? If so, let’s do it now. Let’s anatomize my psyche. Let’s build a narrative. Let’s make a catharsis.

  With all this fervor, it was confusing to discover that Brian didn’t care about any of this stuff. Every week I took the train from my apartment to the clinic itching to unload a week’s worth of memories and feelings, and every week Brian idled away the session staring into his coffee mug or picking lint off his coat. Nothing seemed to reach the man. It was unnerving and disorienting, almost insulting. Finally, when Brian responded with a barely stifled yawn to an expression of the despondency I’d felt upon losing my virginity—a story I was sure would pique his interest—I spoke up.

  “I’m sorry. Am I boring you?”

  “Oh, excuse me,” he said. “No. Go ahead. You were saying.”

  “What?” I said. “What is it?”

  “Nothing. It’s nothing. Please, continue.”

  “What?”

  “Well,” Brian said. “It’s just that . . . you’re in pain, right?”

  “Yes, I’m in pain. Of course I’m in pain. What are you talking about?”

  “You’re in active, right-now-as-we-sit-here, present-tense pain.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m in active pain. What?”

  “It feels like you’re in a house, and the house is on fire, and you have to escape right now or you’ll burn to death.”

  “Yes. Exactly. Thank you. That’s exactly what it feels like.”

  “OK,” he said. “Well, then, if you’re in a house that’s on fire explain to me the logic of sending in the marshal to figure out what caused the fire. Wouldn’t it make more sense to—oh, I don’t know—put it out first?”

  For a moment, I was dumbfounded. I had the distinct sense that I was being tested. “So you don’t want to hear about the lesbians anymore?” I said.

  “On the contrary, I’d love to hear about the lesbians,” he said. “I’m happy to hear about the lesbians. We can talk about the lesbians, we can talk about your mother, we can talk about your childhood, we can talk about shock therapy or Joanna or books or whatever. We can talk about anything you want to talk about. It’s your dollar, kid. I’m just suggesting there might be, maybe, possibly, a better use of your time.”

  • • •

  In the past, I had not been pleased with Brian’s ideas on how I should use my time. After my article was published, he suggested I spend ten minutes every evening reading the harsh comments on the Atlantic’s web site. I lasted twenty seconds the first night and had an anxiety attack that sent me rushing off to hide in the bathtub. Then I unplugged my computer and put it in the closet. Brian tried a few more times to coax me and then concluded, I suspect, that the best tactic was to wait me out. I was an uncommonly stubborn client, but the way I was going it was inevitable I’d submit.

  What he suggested to me now was, I realize, not all that different from confronting my detractors. He no longer advised me to go online, but he did advise me to face the direst accusations against myself squarely and thoroughly. It was just that the accusations he now advised me to face were self-generated. When you feel anxious, what are you thinking? This was the first question Brian encouraged me to ask myself. What is going through your head when you feel that icicle form in your chest? What are the thoughts that make you feel so uncomfortable?

  This was not as simple or straightforward an assignment as it may seem. Not only did attending to my own thoughts sound dangerously akin to, say, petting scorpions, the idea that those thoughts preceded the feeling of anxiety contradicted everything I knew about how my anxiety and mind operated. The truly gripping thing about anxiety had always been how physical it was. It worked its way into my nerves, my skin, my organs, my hair. Like a fever it infused me. And yet now here came Brian with his mango-colored muttonchops intimating—claiming outright, when I asked him—that it was in fact the exact opposite that was the case. First came the thoughts, then came the feeling. Fever dreams, then fever. A topsy-turvy notion.

  “That’s not what Freud thought. That’s not what Jung thought. That’s not what Erikson thought.”

  “So?” Brian said. “So what?”

  “OK then,” I said, “if what you say is true then why have I never noticed it happening like that before?”

  “Because you haven’t been paying close enough attention.”

  So began a grand experiment in self-exploration. So far as my friends and the IRS were concerned, I spent my days hustling as a freelance journalist—covering aldermen meetings and local-interest stories for the Globe, doing a review here and there, fact-checking the odd piece when the Atlantic needed an extra hand. But I considered my real work to be keeping a close watch on my cerebral cortex. I didn’t want the slightest cognitive fart to escape my notice. As soon as I felt that familiar pulse of anxiety in my body I’d shine a meta-flashlight on myself to test Brian’s proposition. Had I been thinking something beforehand? Was it something anxious? Had I spooked myself?

  The exercise itself was salutary; it was invigorating to put the narcissism of anxiety to sanctioned clinical use. The experiment also proved Brian right. The more attention I paid to the mechanics of my anxiety the more I began to notice an aspect of my mind I’d never noticed before—a sort of subconscious chatter, just beneath the surface of awareness, that was always going, always yammering, always commentating, like a little newscaster perched on my frontal lobes. And this newscaster, it turned out, was not the kind of person you’d want to sit next to at a dinner party. He was very pessimistic, my mental homunculus. If there was even a slim chance that a situation could end in calamity, he’d toss it up on the teleprompter and treat it like news. What had happened to the little guy? What was wrong with him?

  I had no idea, but at least now I knew the prickly bastard was there, which meant, Brian said, that I could begin to challenge him. All these years my mind had been quietly talking to itself and I hadn’t realized it. Was what it was telling itself true? This was the second question Brian encouraged me to ask myself. Listen closely. When you are anxious note precisely what your mind has said and then interrogate what you find for accuracy. Treat every anxious thought like a philosophical proposition and test it. Apply logic to the content of your mind.

  I first took this advice, or found the courage to take it, on a Tuesday afternoon while waiting for an editor to call me back. I pulled up the Atlantic’s homepage and, before I could reconsider the wisdom of what I was about to do, I navigated to the public forum for my article. As before, it took just one negative comment—in this case, the designation of the article as “libelous”—to unleash a cascade of anxiety into my system. The impulse to recoil was tremendous. But I forced myself to stay at my desk and tease out what I had thought in the millisecond just after reading the comment and just before becoming frantic. It didn’t take long to determine that what I’d thought was this: The commenter is right. The article is libelous. Once I’d made this discovery I took a deep breath and asked myself the next prescribed question: Was the article really libelous? After all, the word “libel” isn’t like the word “stupid” or “rude”; it has a formal, static definition. I got out my Webster’s and looked it up.

  libel (li´bel) n. [[ME, little book < OFr < L libellus, little book, writing, lampoon, dim. of liber, a book: see LIBRARY]] 1 any false and malicious written or printed statement, or any sign, picture, or effigy, tending to expose a person to public ridicule, hatred, or contempt or to injure a person’s reputation in any way

  On this basis, it was indisputable that the article
as a whole was not libelous; it had been fact-checked according to the magazine’s rigorous standards. Possibly an error had slipped in or eluded inspection, possibly that error had exposed a person to ridicule or contempt or injured his or her reputation. But had there been any malice in the theoretical error? No. Impossible. I had written the article in good faith, no matter what else could be said about me. Ergo, there could be no libel. My anxiety had stemmed from a false premise.

  It was like defusing a mental bomb, and Brian intended for me to apply the method boldly, to shy from no potential reality. Take the usual existential-ruin line of thought, the one that begins with an innocuous choice—white or whole wheat, scrambled or poached, orange or grapefruit—and spins off into a fantasy of poverty, homelessness, disease, shame, death. Brian didn’t want me to dismiss these possibilities. It’s a funny life; anything could happen. But if I was going to insist on entertaining disaster scenarios, I at least had to be honest about the probabilities. Yes, a particular breakfast order could conceivably lead, by a series of logical steps, to the total derailment of my hopes and prospects. Yet even I had to admit that the chances were slim. It didn’t take a sociologist to confirm that well-educated, upper-middle-class Jews seldom end up sleeping in dumpsters. And if I was an exception to the rule? If I did end up alone, disease-ravaged, and dead?

  “Well,” Brian would say cheerfully, “at least then you won’t be anxious anymore!”