Definition of a writer: someone who goes out of her way to expose what normal healthy people go to great lengths to keep hidden. I didn’t make that up, I read it somewhere, and it stuck. I simultaneously yearn to put myself out there, while feeling swells of anxious vulnerability in doing so.
Anxiety seems to be my theme. I just finished a draft of a book that turned out to be an homage to anxiety, although my intention was to write something else altogether. My intention was to write about miracles, which I did, but the underlying theme revealed itself to be anxiety.
One of the primary miracles in the book was the experience of not feeling anxiety at the horrific scene of my twelve-year-old daughter’s accident. Téa was hit while crossing a remote country road in Maine, by a car moving at thirty miles an hour. Thrown forty feet, she lay unconscious in her pooling blood for the thirty-plus minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive. And I was calm. Preternaturally calm. Like Jeff Bridges in that scene from Fearless while the plane is going down and he roams the aisles beaming a strange yet real serenity. The major miracle in “I SURRENDER: shifting from anxiety to gratitude” (working title of my book) is the fact Téa survived, and recovered. The book follows the journey of her healing, and mine. Hers from her severe head injury, mine from a lifetime of anxiety—which culminated in the PTSD from her accident and my organic grateful elation over her recovery.
I grew up with unfortunate access to a treasure trove of anxiety-producing information. This was the late-Sixties, early-Seventies, long before Web MD, but I somehow got my hands on a detailed medical journal. I say somehow because my parents were not doctors, but the document arrived regularly in the mailbox at the foot of our driveway, and I would take it inside to research symptoms of diseases I did not want to befall our family. Any additional information I felt I needed, I looked up in the Encyclopedia Britannica collection that my mother had won as a booby prize for being a contestant on the game show Password.
No one stopped me. Because no one knew I was even doing this. My parents were out—again, it was the ‘Seventies, era of benign neglect. They were on the cocktail/dinner party circuit, out every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. Our babysitter rolled joints and played poker with her friends in our kitchen. My little brother stared at the television upstairs in our parents’ bedroom, preferring Scooby-Doo, Courtship of Eddie’s Father, or sports, but if they weren’t on, he watched whatever was. (He is now a gastroenterologist, and I swear part of the draw to that career was getting to stare at the imaging screens: barium flowing through an intestinal tract, a scope trailing down an esophagus.) I would curl up in the cozy room we called the library, with our dogs, and the cats I was allergic to, terrifying myself by boning up on various forms of cancer.
“That looks like a leukemia lesion,” I once said with alarm, referring to the impetigo on my brother’s shin, eventually convincing my parents and then our pediatrician to run a blood test.
“Dad’s bloodshot eye could be from a retinal tumor,” I warned, even though he’d been hit square in the eye socket with a squash ball.
Eventually, I wound up in therapy. Dr. Parmet taught me a word, “somatizing”, and got me to quit the habit of reading medical journals. He convinced me I was acquiring knowledge I was using to my detriment, and I saw his point. I was nine.
As an adult, I find I can be remarkably soothing to anxiety sufferers, having been around the block with it countless times myself. In fact, you could say I’ve literally made a career out of anxiety. In my work as a life coach, and a Hoffman Process Teacher, I help others explore the roots of their anxiety, and find ways to self-soothe. Is everyone anxious? People sometimes ask me this. I know of people who claim not to have anxiety, so I suppose the answer is No. But: really? Not to scare you, but we live in earth suits that expire. In other words, we die. Or, depending on your belief system, we might not but our bodies certainly do. Not knowing when or how this is going to happen to us or to our loved ones has got to have all of us just a little on edge. Doesn’t it? Mortality—our mortal condition—has to be the big underlying cause of free-floating human anxiety. We all have our strategies to deal with this, including avoiding the topic altogether. If you’re in the latter category, I send you my admiration, some genuine envy, and I have to say right up front that I may not be the writer for you.
I watched a little girl the other day, a toddler of about age three, in the back seat of the car in her car seat, madly gripping a plastic steering wheel. Wrenching it to the right, to the left, pounding on the plastic little horn. She seemed very convinced she was actually driving. It occurs to me (now a fifty-three year old woman), that her antics were a version of what I was doing with the medical journal. Trying to figure out every possible illness that could come down the pike before it happened, as if that were prevention. As if I were actually driving.
Life Matters 