Playing Scared

by Sara Solovitch

  The disorder was first described in 1919 by Japanese psychiatrist Shoma Morita, who classified it as part of a nervous temperament called shinkeishitsu, a condition that involves a high degree of perfectionism. Morita regarded it as a distinctly Asian disorder, and psychiatry has generally endorsed that view. According to a paper2 in the 2010 Journal of Depression and Anxiety, “Social fears are very much dependent on a particular culture.” In other words, a culture is expressed through its specific disorders just as surely as it is expressed through its art and music. “We are an individualistic culture, in which the individual is at the center of everything,” said Stefan Hofmann, a Boston University psychologist and one of the authors of that study. “Japan is a collectivist society, and it’s been shown in studies that these relationship fears, the fear of offending others, are unique to Japan, where close attention is typically paid to other people’s thoughts and feelings.”

  Morita prescribed a treatment plan that combined a traditional form of Japanese psychotherapy with mindfulness meditation practices, physical activity, and self-acceptance techniques. The eponymous Morita therapy began with a period of isolated bed rest, during which patients were forbidden to read, listen to the radio or television, or indulge in conversation. In the second stage, they remained isolated but could leave their beds and engage in light work and simple chores. Under a therapist’s guidance, they wrote in journals and read classical poetry out loud. Slowly and gradually, their freedoms were returned to them until eventually, usually by the sixth week, they attended lectures and meetings on self-acceptance. The original treatment plan lasted forty days, which sounds practically biblical. But when strictly followed, it was reported to have a success rate of 93.3 percent.

  In India and Nepal, dhat, or semen-worry, is a folk term that describes a form of clinical depression in young men who suffer from premature ejaculation and impotence. The syndrome is bound up in a traditional Hindu belief system that deems semen the elixir of life, a fluid that is vital in the physical and mystical sense of the word. Young men with dhat seek medical help when they become convinced that they are passing semen in their urine, often during wet dreams. In some cases, they report that their penises have diminished in size. Their fear translates as a loss of male power. Doctors say there is no physical explanation; the cause is obsessive rumination.

  While the acculturation of medical conditions has sometimes been dismissed as a relic of European imperialism, the most current (fifth) edition of the DSM lists nine culture-bound disorders. One of them is the Cambodian khyal cap, a form of panic attack that typically ends in a dead faint. Khyal is said to be a windlike substance that rushes through the body, fills the lungs, impedes breathing, and enters the heart, causing palpitations. It surges through the brain, shoots from the eyes, and floods the ear canals.

  A khyal attack is often triggered by pul meunuh, or “poisoning by people.” It can happen in any crowded space, but, like aymat zibur, it frequently occurs in a religious setting—in this case, a Buddhist temple, usually on festival days, when the devotee has to present an offering to the monk. Suddenly, he is in the limelight. All eyes in the temple are upon him as he kowtows, or bows, three times, presents his offering, and then raises his hands to receive a blessing from the monk.

  “When they’re in large groups, they will often say, and be very articulate about it, that when they look from face to face, they smell the different people,” says Devon Hinton, a medical anthropologist and psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, who has written extensively on pul meunuh. A majority of his patients, who come from the Cambodian immigrant community in the Boston suburbs, complain of the disorder. “They will want to orient to the different smells that are present. They are overwhelmed by stimuli, as they put it. It induces dizziness, a very dramatic version of it. It can be debilitating. They can’t go to the temple, because they are afraid they can die from this.”

  Pul meunuh often manifests as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, dating to the Cambodian civil war and genocide. Under the Khmer Rouge, whose regime lasted from 1975 to 1979, a quarter of the population died by starvation, forced labor, and execution. But even these experiences are only a catalyst. In fact, the history of pul meunuh extends back through many generations. “Even before Pol Pot, they would explain it as poisoning by people—the idea that you’re up there and suddenly you smell other people,” says Hinton. “It’s how they explain not being able to perform.”

  Given the religious and existential overtones of such disorders, it should come as no surprise to find performance anxiety in pastors, preachers, and other religious leaders. Few publicly mention it or even acknowledge that their weekly sermons are performances of sorts. A number of divinity schools rebuffed my inquiries about programs to help young ministers get over their shakes. “We don’t have that problem,” one prominent Baptist dean informed me. Maybe not, but the physical manifestations of performance anxiety are exactly what one Kansas parishioner found so endearing about her new minister. She wrote about it on her blog: “Yes, our pastor suffers from stage fright. His hands shake and his mouth gets dry and sometimes he loses his voice and has to pause. Which might sound like a bad thing, but it’s something I love about him. He could never be a pastor on his own power. But the fact that he gets up in front of the congregation every Sunday and teaches us something new is a testament to the power of God.”

  The pastor’s name was Larry Smith, and when I tracked him down in Topeka and read him what his parishioner had written, he sounded taken aback. There was a long silence on the other end of the phone line. “Yes,” he finally said, “that sounds like me.” I flew to Topeka, where I shared my own issues with performance anxiety and learned that Smith had an even longer and more complicated story to tell—one that began with easy money, alcohol, and profligacy and culminated in born-again Christianity.

  As a young man in the 1970s and early 1980s, he had it all: a construction job that paid a munificent $32.50 an hour, “plus $50 a day just to show up.” He and his wife, Laura, owned forty-five acres in Northern California, along with boats, cars, trucks, and tractors. But he was an alcoholic who daily washed down a fifth of gin with a twelve-pack of beer. He was also an obsessive gambler, “a very unhappy person.” Then, at age thirty-six, “the Lord took it all away,” the good and the bad. Smith was struck with a rare condition called thoracic outlet syndrome that numbed the nerves in his hands and arms. Complications set in, and his back swelled to twice its normal size. His neck muscles grew so large that whenever he laughed he passed out, he said. Smith was close to death when the doctors told his wife to get his affairs in order. Sitting beside him in his hospital room, she told him that he had to “find the Lord.” And that’s when, with his wife’s help, he got down on his knees to ask forgiveness for his sins, was born again, and “wound up with this public-speaking problem.” In that order.

  No longer strong enough to work in construction, Smith enrolled at Sierra Community College near Sacramento, California. The classwork came easily to him. He had always been a good, if lazy, student. But in his second year, he took a public-speaking class, a requirement for transferring to a four-year university, and the first time he stood up to talk, he began to cry. “It almost shattered me. All the ugliness revealed itself in all its ugly ways. Shaking head, knees shaking, voice cracking. Most of the students were seventeen- to twenty-one-year-olds. They didn’t know how to respond at first, they made fun of me.”

  They stopped laughing when the teacher, Mrs. Battenberg—Smith remembered her name with affection—stepped in. She arranged for him to tutor his classmates in algebra, his best subject, and encouraged him to keep talking. He printed his speeches out in large block letters to help him stay on track when the rush of noradrenaline so blurred his vision that he could barely read the words on the page. Nor did the problem improve when he transferred to Oregon State University in 1989. As public affairs director of student affairs, he was occasionally asked to give a speech—an eff
ort that made him violently ill, to the point that he sometimes frightened the audience. One time, while delivering a talk at halftime during a football game, he said, “I thought I was going to die.” His classmates pressed tight against him to keep him standing.

  The fear of speaking didn’t stop his choice of career. “God may have placed it there so I would remain humble and do all things for Him instead of on my own,” Smith said. He was working on his master’s degree at Western Seminary in Portland when he was unexpectedly solicited by Ariel Ministries, an evangelical group whose sole mission is the conversion of Jews. Would he be willing to go to Russia and convert the Jews of St. Petersburg?

  Now it was my turn to be surprised. I toyed with the idea of saying something. Should I casually mention that my mother’s grandparents were Russian Jews from St. Petersburg? That they had permits to reside in St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, at a time when Jews were largely proscribed from life in the city—unless they happened to be university students, intellectuals, wealthy businessmen, or skilled craftsmen? According to family legend, my great-grandfather was a cabinetmaker who had built the interior of the czar’s train. I thought of the intricate, hand-carved rocking chair he made for my grandmother’s wedding day. It was sitting in my living room back home, the only thing left of that generation in my family. “For fifteen years, we were the only outreach to the Jewish community,” Smith continued, rocking me out of my reverie. “It was a very successful outreach—the only messianic missionary service in all of St. Petersburg. Hundreds of people came, people who didn’t know anything about Judaism except that they were Jewish. We were a long time in Russia.”

  “A long time in Russia,” repeated Laura. She had a habit of repeating the last few words of every sentence her husband spoke.

  As it happened, the Russians had little sympathy for Smith’s stage fright. Unlike the Kansas blogger, they did not find it charming. On the contrary, they were horrified. Smith, who lived in Russia nearly fifteen years, understood. “I was the pastor and the professor, the one with the knowledge and the power. People there expected a certain level of competence and decorum from someone with that status. When I broke down, they didn’t like it. Some of them were angry. Some of them were disappointed in me. They would come up afterwards and say, ‘Pastor, you can’t do that.’ My response was, ‘I’ll probably do it again, pray for me.’ Some of them left and didn’t come back. But the ones who got to know me got used to it.”

  Now Smith is back in Kansas, and after twenty years of preaching his voice still cracks, his hands clutch the lectern, his knees quake. Some of his American parishioners, like many of his congregants in St. Petersburg, ask why, if he is truly called by God, he is so nervous. Maybe if he had more faith, they suggest, God would heal him. The weekend I flew to Topeka to watch him preach, his head started aching on Friday. By Saturday night, he was in the bathroom with an upset stomach. “Yes,” he said, “it’s what the Lord has me doing.” It was a part of his life, and he had developed strategies to make it through Sunday services. He always looked for his wife in the audience. He printed out his sermons in a large font, just as Mrs. Battenberg once taught him. He never stopped moving or drinking water.

  The Sunday of my visit, he gripped the lectern and rocked back and forth. At sixty-three, he looked, with his white handlebar mustache, like the Wizard of Oz. It was a hot day in August, and the ceiling fans whirred overhead. The buzz competed with the sound of a tractor engine in a nearby cornfield, where a farmer was plowing under the year’s crop. Everywhere one drove in Kansas that drought-filled summer, the fields were the color of straw. Smith’s sermon focused on what I had come to recognize as his great passion, the all-important business of conversion.

  He spoke with an almost painful hesitation. “Say you’re out in the middle of Timbuktu, Kansas. I know we don’t have a Timbuktu, but you’re out in the middle of nowhere and you’re witnessing to a farmer who wants to be baptized. What’s to stop you?”

  “Nothing,” Laura called out from a pew in the middle of the church. About thirty people were scattered through the newly painted sanctuary.

  “Who does the baptism?”

  “You do,” she called.

  “That’s right.” He nodded. “There’s absolutely nothing … nowhere in the Bible does it say you have to be a church leader.” He paused noticeably, rocking from one foot to the other. “You find a water spout and let them make a profession of faith and they’re following Jesus.”

  His hands shook as he soldiered on. “You know, you know,” he started to say. “You know …” He appeared to have lost his train of thought. “I’m nervous. I’m excited. I might get a little emotional, so bear with me.” He stopped to drink some water. “Each one of us who has professed faith has received a gift, and we are to use it for the building up and serving of one another, so that others know Jesus Christ.” His hands were shaking now. “Please turn to Ephesians [the tenth book of the New Testament]. A great book, I highly recommend it. It’s a great book.”

  The sermon lasted half an hour—in truth, it felt somewhat longer—and the service ended soon after. When I stood up to say good-bye, Laura beamed and gave me a big hug. “I’m going to pray for you and your piano playing,” she promised.

  Chapter 12

  GAME PLANS

  After a storybook year as National League All-Star second baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Steve Sax lost the ability to throw a ball. It began with an error during a game against the Montreal Expos in April 1983, early in his second season. The batter doubled to right center, sending the runner on first to third. The outfielder threw the ball to Sax, who should have held on to it; there was no pressure to throw. Instead, he hummed it wildly to home, where it skipped off the catcher’s shin guard and skittered to the backstop. The man on third scored.

  It was a dumb error and not terribly important, except that the next day he made another error. Then came another. If he kept on at this rate, he figured, he’d log 132 errors by season’s end. He was twenty-three years old and had just been named Rookie of the Year. Now, for the first time in his life, he questioned himself. “And when fear and doubt set into your psyche, it will absolutely rob and suck out every chance of success that you have. That’s what it did to me,” he said, sitting behind the desk of his home office in Roseville, California, a well-to-do suburb of Sacramento. “It took over my confidence in doing the most rudimentary things. Like throwing the ball fifty feet to first base. I couldn’t do it anymore.”

  The walls were hung with his team jerseys, all framed and glassed like prized artwork. The dining room table was stacked with brochures and handouts. Sax makes his living as a motivational speaker, and he was preparing for the influx of financial executives who would attend his next seminar. Inevitably, he would tell them about his baseball meltdown. Thirty years after the fact, it still defined him.

  In the summer of 1983, Sax would make thirty errors, twenty-four of them in a three-month summer span as his collapse played out before a fascinated public. You didn’t have to be a baseball fan to know about Steve Sax’s fall from grace. The entire country knew. As a sportswriter for the Houston Chronicle wrote, “He would throw the ball into the dugout. He would throw it into the ground. Sometimes, he would hold the ball for what seemed an eternity, seemingly afraid of what would happen if he attempted another toss.” ESPN led each night’s broadcast with footage of his latest humiliation. Fans donned batting helmets, baiting Sax to throw at them in the stands. Letters poured in to the Dodgers’ home office, offering advice (“Try to make an error. Then you won’t”), derision (“You’re a freak. I’m a girl and I can throw the ball better than you”), and death threats (“One more time and we’re going to come and put a bullet in your head”). The nation’s gamblers were incensed; Sax had made it impossible to place a bet on a Dodgers game. The letters got so bad that he finally had to turn them over to the FBI.

  Some of his teammates avoided throwing Sax the ball, but Dodgers manager
Tommy Lasorda refused to bench him. Many times, Lasorda would take him out onto the field before a game, blindfold him, and make him practice his toss. “And I’d throw it every single time right there, blindfolded, to the person at first. I hit him in the chest every single time. And then the game would start and I’d throw that sucker up to Section J somewhere. Here we’d go again, the whole wave of problems, starting over again. I wanted to give up.”

  On the road, after a game against the Phillies, the Dodgers went out for dinner at a restaurant owned by one of Lasorda’s brothers in a Philadelphia suburb. Sax returned to his hotel room at three in the morning, too tired to take off his clothes or climb under the sheets. Hours later, as the sun began shining through the blinds, he reached for the covers and felt something on the pillow. He opened his eyes and made out a silhouette. The shape of an ear. Reaching out, he touched something greasy. He switched on the light and found himself staring into the bulging eyes of a dead pig.

  “I flew downstairs and went to the concierge’s desk and yelled out, ‘There’s a pig in my bed!’ So we went up there and there was a note attached to the ear and it said, ‘Sax, you better start playing better or else! Signed, the Godfather.’ And the concierge flipped it over, and there was a parking ticket from Norristown. Tommy Lasorda had done this to me as shock therapy. And no, it didn’t help.”