Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

by Daniel Smith

  15.

  digging a trench

  I wasn’t with Brian long as these things go, just over a year. As the summer approached I concluded it was time to leave Boston for New York. Joanna and I lived less than two miles from each other. I was starting to hear rumors of her dating. I imagined large, resolute men with steroidal forearms and short haircuts—Navy SEAL types. That and the crematorium around the corner from my apartment kept me in a somber mood even when my anxiety was dormant.

  New York seemed the more natural place for me anyway. I told anyone who asked that I quit the Atlantic because fact-checking didn’t leave me time to pursue my writing. It was a lie that forced a life. Being home all day was repellent—all that quiet downtime, all that envy of the gainfully employed and fully insured. I didn’t dare get a job, however, for fear that it would make me look foolish, and that it might be worse. Through a combination of timidity, pride, and inertia I thus became a professional writer, and professional writers, I believed, should live in New York. It helped that David, Scott, and my mother were all still there. It might be nice—I was shocked to hear myself think this—to be around family again.

  I didn’t tell Joanna I was leaving Boston. Having persuaded her to make the opposite move, I doubted she would take the news kindly—if she would even agree to see me. And I still doubted my ability to treat her with solicitude and kindness. Applying Brian’s suggestions was proving to be arduous, creeping work, and I was devoted to it above all other considerations. If anxiety woke me at 3 a.m., I got out of bed, turned on the lights, and x-rayed my dreams to see what they’d said. If anxiety struck me in the grocery store, I abandoned my cart in the aisle and used the long walk home to set myself right. If anxiety struck during an interview, I excused myself, went to the bathroom, and sat on the toilet seat until I’d identified and analyzed my thoughts. Why shouldn’t I make myself my priority? It was the one perk to being alone. With no one to be responsible for or to, no one to have to please or gratify or even talk to, I could indulge my needs as much as I wanted. I could convert my life into an emergency room, and myself into both doctor and patient.

  A new solipsism to replace the old solipsism: the irony didn’t escape me. But I didn’t much care about irony anymore. I was weary of complexity and doubleness, fed up with the knotted and the thorny. Around that time I came across what Freud had to say about anxiety. He called it “the nodal point at which the most various and important questions converge, a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light upon our whole mental existence.” Well, Herr Doctor, I thought, you can have the various and important questions. I just want a little peace. If that means being entombed in myself for a while longer, so be it.

  I left in late June. When I called my editor at the Globe to say good-bye, he said, “You’re a promising young writer, but I’m not sure we got the very best of you.”

  “Ha ha,” I replied.

  • • •

  Because Brian was so prescriptive a therapist, I was able to carry him with me to New York. I was never in doubt as to what I was supposed to do. Nor was I ever in doubt that what I was supposed to do was correct—that it fit the facts and that it would work. I could feel it working. With each instance of neutralized anxiety the little newscaster in my head got just a little less negative, a little less insistent. His wild subliminal rants played at fewer times, and had less demagogic power over me when they did.

  One night, a few months after I’d moved, I cut my finger trying to slice an English muffin. The cut was severe. I could see the pink of deep tissue and beneath it the bone. A year earlier I would have had instant visions of disaster—the night, the week, and in turn an entire existence ruined by a hasty gesture. I would have abused myself mercilessly for my stupidity. Now I just stood in the kitchen watching the blood drip into the sink, thinking, Well, that just happened. Better do something about it. And then I allowed myself a moment of quiet pride, for such matter-of-fact poise and practicality—such reflexive poise and practicality—signaled a momentous shift in my mental life. When they wove the stitches in, I almost smiled.

  • • •

  I have never been less anxious than I was during that first year in New York, even as the lawsuit against me was filed and I struggled to find work, pay my bills, and get over Joanna. For the first time in memory, daily life felt unencumbered and fluid. Natural. I thought I was cured.

  I didn’t yet realize that there is no cure for anxiety, just perpetual treatment. I didn’t yet realize that a quarter century of anxiety had gouged deep, packed-earth ruts in my brain, and that the only way to stop my thoughts from falling back into those ruts was to dig new tracks and keep digging them, forever. I didn’t yet realize that the only nonnegotiable approach to the anxious life is discipline.

  So it has been that, over and over again, through the years, I have relapsed and returned, relapsed and returned. With no perfect discipline the relapses are inevitable, but I have learned to take measures so that they don’t last as long as they once did, and so that the returns last longer and are less volatile. I have learned that the best safeguards against nervous collapse are responsibilities: jobs, contracts, assignments, and, above all, the blessed, bracing restraints of human relationships.

  Joanna taught me that. She moved back to New York a year after I did, landing, by dumb chance, in an apartment only five blocks from my own. At first this upset me deeply. Joanna was a living reminder of the terrible losses my anxiety could effect, the hells of indecisiveness it could conjure. It was painful enough that, through my sister-in-law and mutual friends, I was privy to occasional dispatches about her comings and goings. Now I had to worry about bumping into her at the corner bodega. Just a glimpse of her, I feared, would set me back months.

  I avoided her. We avoided each other. Who wants to relive the failed past? Then another year passes, another year of ebbing and cresting anxiety, and my subconscious pulled a fast one. I dreamed of her.

  We were at a circus or carnival in the country, holding hands at the center of a flat and crowded fairgrounds. All around us, kicking up dirt, were jugglers, stilt-walkers, fire-eaters, funambulists. There were tremendous elephants teetering on red-and-white balls. There were sleek white horses in tinkling silver finery. There were acrobatic monkeys in gaudy jesters’ clothes, diving and looping and baring their canines. I couldn’t see Joanna, but I could smell the soap on her skin and feel her thumb gently rubbing mine, a smooth rhythm in the chaos.

  I woke up confused and clammy. In the trashcan by the bed were the remnants of the three-dollar pork enchilada I’d had for dinner the night before. I kicked off the covers, vowed never again to buy Mexican food from an establishment owned by Koreans, and went out for a run to get Joanna out of my head.

  But she wouldn’t leave. All through the morning I sat at my desk fidgeting and neglecting my work, trying to shake the clingy dream-feel of Joanna and me side by side in the middle of all that mayhem. I spent the afternoon the same way. In the evening I took another run. Then I went to the movies. Then I got drunk. Then I threw up. Nothing helped. First thing the next morning, I called Kate.

  “I’m in huge trouble,” I told her. “I think I’m in love with my ex-girlfriend.”

  Kate forbade me from making a move. “Do not call Joanna,” she said. “It wouldn’t be fair. This might just be your anxiety or your guilt playing tricks on you. Or loneliness. Promise me you’ll wait a week. If she’s still on your mind we’ll get together and talk it out.”

  A week later Kate and I met for dinner at a restaurant downtown, an austere bistro with obscenely high ceilings and polished concrete floors. I was unshaven and there was a large soup stain on my shirt.

  “It’s not that bad,” Kate said.

  “It’s hopeless. Not even worth trying. I told her I didn’t love her anymore in Venice. Venice! Women don’t like hearing that, but they especially don’t like hearing it in Venice.”

  “Maybe she still has feelings for y
ou, too.”

  “Don’t patronize me, please. Did I ever tell you how a month after she dumped me I showed up at her door blubbering for forgiveness? She acted like I had scabies.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t have a choice. I’m going to move to South America. I have to start learning Spanish.”

  After we ordered, Kate spotted a friend sitting at the bar, a handsome, long-faced man reading a book and nursing a glass of red wine. He was an architect and author she had once done research for, and she said he’d been in a similar romantic predicament. He had dated a young woman for a year or so and then, out of a desire to play the field, broken it off. Some months later he realized that he loved her. He’d made a terrible mistake. By that time, however, she was with someone else, someone younger, and was unmoved by his remorse.

  “That’s awful,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Oh, they have a great apartment about three blocks from here. She’s six months pregnant with their first child.”

  I demanded an introduction and squeezed in at the bar. I told the man everything, from Joanna and I meeting at my brother’s party to my horrendous anxieties to our trip to Italy to my ongoing treatment and self-treatment to my recent dream and renewed obsession. He nodded as if he understood it all perfectly. When I was finally done, I asked him what I should do. What advice could he give me?

  He thought for a moment, then looked at me intently and said: “Dig a trench.”

  “What?” I said. “Dig a what?”

  “You have to dig a trench and wait. As long as it takes. She has no reason to trust you. You’ve been neurotic, crazy. Call it anxious, fine, but to her you just come off as an asshole. Why should she choose you? Why would she even listen? Your words don’t mean a thing anymore. You have to show her that you can behave well. You have to show her that you’re a stable, loving person. And that means digging in and doing it, really doing it, for as long as it takes to win her back. Being her friend first and foremost. But you better mean it. You better be able to really deliver, ’cause it sounds like you’ve caused this girl some pretty bad heartache already.”

  “But what if it doesn’t work? What if I don’t win her back?”

  “You might not. What do you want, a guarantee? There isn’t any. This is the best deal you’re going to get. But be prepared. Even if it does work it’ll probably take a while.”

  “How long did it take you?”

  “A year,” he said. “The most important year of my life.”

  • • •

  Joanna was merciful. She took me back after four months. I never pushed the matter; I never coaxed. I just showed up and was kind and quietly attentive. Like the architect’s girlfriend, Joanna had moved on to someone else. I willed myself not to be jealous. I practiced being patient and still.

  In due course the other guy faded and the moment came. When we kissed for the first time—again—Joanna pulled away and said, “Are you still nuts?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m afraid so. But I’m working on it.”

  “How do I know you won’t freak out again? How do I know I’m not being stupid?”

  I told her I undoubtedly would freak out again, numerous times. It was unavoidable. Freaking out is who I am. But I promised her, hand solemnly in the air, that my anxiety would never again infect her or us as it had in the past. I would make certain of it.

  Two years later, Joanna and I were married. I have struggled to keep my promise to her, but for the most part I have kept it. When I slip back into anxious rumination, I keep it to myself, or off-load it on Kate and others who don’t have to live with me. I take the time to reacquaint myself with Brian’s methods, which I now know to have a name—cognitive therapy—and a worldwide popularity. I meditate. I read The Book of Scott and the scattered bits of wisdom and comfort I’ve gathered on my own over the years. I even do my mother’s breathing exercises.

  And when nothing else works, I recall a little perspective-shifting trick Brian taught me just before I came around to doing the real therapeutic work. It was a simple trick—silly, really. I almost refused to do it. But something told me I should try, and I’m grateful I did.

  Here was the trick: Whenever I felt my mind tracing dire consequences again, Brian said, whenever I felt it spinning out its cruel, imaginative horrors, simply lift my eyes, raise my hands, and shout, “Bring it on! Lemme see what you’ve got!”

  It would be impossible to exaggerate how foolish I felt when I agreed to try this. I was standing in the middle of Brian’s office, trembling as usual. My underarms were stained with sweat. The palms of my hands and the bottoms of my feet were damp, as was my forehead and the small of my back and the backs of my knees. The only dry thing about me was my mouth, which felt as if it were carved out of balsa wood. I went through with it anyway. I lifted my arms above my head, I set my sights on the clinic’s dotted, dropped-tile ceiling, and I challenged God, the universe, the Fates, or the Furies—whatever or whomever I was meant to be addressing—to come at me with everything there is. Bring it on.

  Odd, the surge of terror that struck me upon beginning. For all my solid disbelief, at that moment I was as certain that there is something omniscient and vengeful out there as an eighteenth-century Hasidic Jew, a ritual slaughterer, I once read about. This Hasid used to weep bitterly every time he left his wife and children to go to work, as if he were setting off each morning to attend his own execution. When he was asked why this was, he explained that when he began his work he cried out to God. Who could say that God wouldn’t strike him dead before he had a chance to cry out, “Have mercy on us!”

  What was odder than my terror upon beginning, however, was what happened when I was done.

  I laughed.

  Despite myself, I laughed.

  It wasn’t much of a laugh. It lasted maybe a second before I was again enveloped in my anxiety. I can’t even say if it was audible or not. What it was, certainly, was unexpected—as unexpected as if the roof of the clinic had suddenly cracked open to reveal a beam of sunlight aimed in my direction. Laughter? I hadn’t laughed in months. Totally dried up. I figured I was done with laughter. What did I have to laugh about? Why was everyone always finding existence so damned funny? How could you possibly laugh when any minute your mind might sprout horns and fangs and a vicious temper? Laughter was for the ignorant. It wasn’t for the anxious.

  Yet there I was, laughing. What had come over me? I had no idea.

  I think I have an idea now. I think I understand now why I laughed, and as often as possible I try to remember why. I laughed, I think, because in return for my grudging stunt of cosmic defiance I received . . . nothing. Nothing. I rang the bell and no one answered the door. My little spasm of pre-invocation terror had been in vain, and so, by extension, had been all my terror. What was there to be anxious about? Many things. Many things. Death, sickness, loss, failure, success, poverty, violence, insanity, dismemberment, disfigurement. How many of those scourges afflicted me now? None. How many were designed to afflict me personally? None. I was alone, the dogged architect of my own humdrum degradations.

  What a fool.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Daniel Smith is the author of Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity. His essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic, Granta, n+1, New York, The New York Times Magazine, and Slate, and he is the co-host of the n+1 podcast. Smith has taught at Bryn Mawr and The College of New Rochelle, where he holds the Mary Ellen Donnelly Critchlow Endowed Chair in English.

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  1 In his article, Murphy notes that an elderly Icelandic farmer named Páll
Arason had promised to donate his penis to the museum upon his demise. From what I can tell, Arason, who would now be ninety-six, remains alive and attached to his member.

  1 See pages 227–30 of Andre’s book for a seriously unflattering portrayal of yours truly.