Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  So for the next three months I waited. However hard I tried, I was not reassured by these confident predictions. I remember spending whole afternoons sitting on the floor of my flat, staring ahead, sick with apprehension. I found it impossible to read; I could not even listen to music, but was in a state of continuous, slow-burning panic. I should have liked to have somebody to talk to. I had lost some of the reserve that had inhibited me when I first left the convent, and could see that it would be helpful to discuss my options. What could I realistically do if the worst happened? What were the chances of an appeal? How would I endure the shame and the disgrace? But since everybody I might have talked to about these things refused—seemingly on principle—even to discuss these possibilities, I was on my own. I used to read the thesis over and over, feeling alternately elated at some of its felicities, and in despair when I came across a passage that I knew, with chilly certainty, would antagonize Professor Courtney. As I had expected, the viva was a rout. Courtney was brilliantly sarcastic; the coexaminer, who had been so encouraging to me earlier, was clearly daunted by Courtney’s reputation and looked at me helplessly across the table. I argued back, of course, but I could see that it was no good. As I walked from the Examination Schools to the station, the glowing shops festooned with the hearts and cupids of Valentine’s Day seemed an unkind joke. During the journey home, I opened the corridor window and threw my copy of the complete works of Tennyson out into the dark, rainy night. I felt calmly pleased by this gesture, which seemed to release some of the tension that had accumulated over the last months. I felt stalled, almost in a state of suspended animation. Sometimes that evening I seemed to look down at myself as from a great height, as though all this were happening to somebody else. So when the letter came informing me that I had indeed failed, I found that I did not feel nearly as bad as I might have expected. I read the letter, nodded grimly to myself, tore it up, and continued my preparations for a morning’s teaching, feeling the same curious detachment. I told myself that I had, after all, known this was going to happen. There was nothing surprising about it. During those lonely weeks before the viva, I had lived with my failure and grown accustomed to it. Not so my colleagues. Richard and Jackie looked at me dumbfounded when I told them the news that morning. For once even Richard, a naturally voluble and ebullient soul, was lost for words. And when I phoned Jane with the news that night, I was astonished and touched when she burst into tears.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  The other examiner, who was favorably disposed to my work but not nearly such a big shot as Courtney, was at the University of Birmingham. “It’s against the regulations for Miss Armstrong to have two external examiners,” she had complained. “Oxford should also be represented.” She herself had taken her first degree at Birmingham and, in the patrician climate of Oxford, felt at a permanent disadvantage. “My dear,” Dame Helen Gardner had replied suavely, “Alastair is much more internal than somebody like you!” So for the next three months I waited. However hard I tried, I was not reassured by these confident predictions. I remember spending whole afternoons sitting on the floor of my flat, staring ahead, sick with apprehension. I found it impossible to read; I could not even listen to music, but was in a state of continuous, slow-burning panic. I should have liked to have somebody to talk to. I had lost some of the reserve that had inhibited me when I first left the convent, and could see that it would be helpful to discuss my options. What could I realistically do if the worst happened? What were the chances of an appeal? How would I endure the shame and the disgrace? But since everybody I might have talked to about these things refused—seemingly on principle— even to discuss these possibilities, I was on my own. I used to read the thesis over and over, feeling alternately elated at some of its felicities, and in despair when I came across a passage that I knew, with chilly certainty, would antagonize Professor Courtney. As I had expected, the viva was a rout. Courtney was brilliantly sarcastic; the coexaminer, who had been so encouraging to me earlier, was clearly daunted by Courtney’s reputation and looked at me helplessly across the table. I argued back, of course, but I could see that it was no good. As I walked from the Examination Schools to the station, the glowing shops festooned with the hearts and cupids of Valentine’s Day seemed an unkind joke. During the journey home, I opened the corridor window and threw my copy of the complete works of Tennyson out into the dark, rainy night. I felt calmly pleased by this gesture, which seemed to release some of the tension that had accumulated over the last months. I felt stalled, almost in a state of suspended animation. Sometimes that evening I seemed to look down at myself as from a great height, as though all this were happening to somebody else. So when the letter came informing me that I had indeed failed, I found that I did not feel nearly as bad as I might have expected. I read the letter, nodded grimly to myself, tore it up, and continued my preparations for a morning’s teaching, feeling the same curious detachment. I told myself that I had, after all, known this was going to happen.

• From Don't Feed the Monkey Mind: How to Stop the Cycle of Anxiety, Fear, and Worry (2017)

  cry and deny everything, saying it wasn’t her fault. Everyone in the office will side with her. She’ll go home and tell her husband what a jerk I am. He’ll get angry too and confront me in person, telling me that I’m unfair and out of line and that our friendship is over. Then he’ll tell everybody we know what a jerk I am, and they will all turn against me. Everyone I work with as well as my friends that I care about will hate me and I’ll be alone. When Eric read what he’d written, he could see that it was a little far-- fetched. “But that won’t stop me from worrying about it,” he said. “Good,” I told him. As long as it provokes the monkey into sounding the alarm it will be great to use at Worry Time. Like all tools, Worry Time will be most effective if practiced often and regularly. With my clients I recommend scheduling a Worry Time daily for at least a week. Remember that resilience builds with repetition. For a downloadable worksheet version of this exercise, visit http://www.newharbinger.com/35067. In addition to the resilience you will accrue from the exercise itself, you will have the added benefit of another kind of expansive strategy to use when you get blindsided by monkey chatter. You can say to yourself, I will worry about this during Worry Time tomorrow. Postponing worry until you are in control works because you’ve stopped feeding the monkey. When you don’t feed the monkey, you get the banana. You get new experience and learning that creates new neural pathways in your brain. You are learning that the content of anxious thoughts is not important and you don’t need to act on them. Those pressing what ifs and what abouts that once echoed in your head are beginning to sound more like what they are: Woo-- woo-woo! Monkey chatter. You can tolerate them. You are expanding!

• From Wild (2012)

  I did not. I only wanted it to be eleven o’clock so he’d leave with me and I could stop wondering whether I was a babe or a gargoyle and whether he was looking at me or he thought I was looking at him. We still had an hour and a half to go. “So what should we do, afterwards?” he asked. “Have you had dinner?” I told him I had, but that I was up for anything. I didn’t mention I was currently capable of eating approximately four dinners in a row. “I live on an organic farm about fifteen miles from here. It’s pretty cool at night, to walk around. We could go out there and I’ll drive you back when you’re ready.” “Okay,” I said, running my little turquoise-and-silver earring necklace along its delicate chain. I’d opted not to wear my Strayed/Starved necklace, in case Jonathan thought it was the latter. “Actually, I think I’m going to step out for some air,” I said. “But I’ll be back at eleven.” “Rad,” he said, reaching over to give my hand another squeeze before he returned to his station and the band started up. I walked giddily out into the night, the tiny red nylon bag that normally held my stove swinging on its cord from my wrist. I’d ditched most such bags and containers back in Kennedy Meadows, unwilling to carry the extra weight, but this bag I’d held on to, believing the stove needed its protection. I’d changed it into a purse for my days in Ashland, though it smelled faintly of gasoline. The things inside it were all secured in a ziplock bag that served as a very unfancy inner purse—my money, my driver’s license, lip balm and a comb, and the card that the workers at the hostel had given me so I could get Monster and my ski pole and my box of food out of their storage area. “Howdy,” said a man who stood on the sidewalk outside the bar. “You like the band?” he asked in a quiet voice. “Yeah.” I smiled at him politely. He looked to be in his late forties, dressed in jeans and suspenders and a frayed T-shirt. He had a long frizzy beard that went to his chest and a straight rim of graying hair that reached his shoulders from beneath the bald dome on top of his head. “I came down here from the mountains. I like to come and hear music sometimes,” the man said. “I did too. Came down from the mountains, I mean.” “Where do you live?” “I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.” “Oh, sure.” He nodded. “The PCT. I’ve been up on it before. My place is in the other direction. I’ve got a tepee up there that I live in about four or five months out of the year.” “You live in a tepee?” I asked.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This, I must emphasize, was not because there was anything wrong with the school. Indeed, I was very impressed with it. Most of the girls seemed to like being there, the staff was excellent, and standards were high. It was also a humane place. I had passed my own school days alternately bored and frightened, but that was clearly not the case here. I even quite enjoyed the teaching, though not extravagantly so. People expected me to like my classes with the older girls best, but to my surprise, I much preferred the little ones. It was fun to watch them encountering Dickens and Shakespeare for the first time, and to catch them before they realized that a cool teenager was supposed to find these authors boring. Occasionally I would find myself completely wrapped up in a lesson. You cannot be a good teacher to every student, any more than you can be a good friend or a satisfactory lover to just anybody. But I could see that in the main I was doing a useful job, and I was grateful to have financial security for the first time since leaving the convent. The trouble lay not in the school but in myself. It was bad for me to be in another highly authoritarian institution, and I was keenly aware that I was slipping back into old craven habits of obedience and conformity. Instead of moving on and away from the constraints of the religious life, I felt that I was standing still. Indeed, sometimes I feared that I was actually losing ground, because in many ways school life seemed a parody of my convent years. The headmistress was a charismatic, unusual, and gifted woman, but listening to the tales of other teachers over the years, I have noted that this job has its dangers. A headmaster or headmistress has almost complete power in an enclosed world, and this often seems to go to their heads. Thus my headmistress at Dulwich tended to treat her staff like a temperamental parent. One day you were flavor of the month, the next, for no apparent reason, you were in the doghouse, your every request and suggestion refused, often discourteously, and your projects stymied. Then, a few weeks later, you were back in favor again. We were supposed to jump to attention if the head so much as sneezed. “The head is hopping mad!” the deputy would report, as though this were a catastrophe comparable to the outbreak of World War III.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  It’s one thing to gain information and understanding, but it’s another to have actual experience. Have you ever been at a party and innocently asked someone what they liked to do for fun, and they launched into a thirty-minute monologue about surfing or snowboarding or stargazing or something else you have no idea how to do? They were clearly passionate about it, and they talked until your eyes glazed over a bit. You probably learned more than you ever wanted to about their hobby, but that doesn’t mean you could do what they do. You had head knowledge (and maybe a headache), but you didn’t have any firsthand experience. So you really had no idea how to do it. There is a reason job interviews tend to focus more on real-life experience than just about any other qualification. There is simply no substitute for hands-on proficiency. Prayer is the same. You can read this book and five others from cover to cover, but if you don’t actually pray, you’ll never know “how” to pray. To get good at prayer, you have to do it. We taught our kids to make their own beds starting when they were about three years old. When they would first try, their reply was always the same: “Dad, I can’t, I’m not very good at it.” You can guess how I replied. “You can; you just need practice!” That never went over well. But it was true. Now they are bed-making pros, and someday their spouses are going to thank us for that. The same principle is true in prayer. Not being good at something doesn’t mean you can’t be good at it. It just means you need practice. If you’ve ever felt a little intimidated by prayer or unsure what to say, don’t give up. Instead, lean in. Experiment. Learn what works for you, what you like the best, how prayer fits in with your unique personality and your current schedule. There really aren’t any rules or protocols for how you have to pray. There are some things you should avoid (as we’ll see in the next chapter), but for the most

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  What is His will in the world around me, both locally and globally? “GIVE US TODAY OUR DAILY BREAD” The next line says, “Give us today our daily bread.” But the ultimate meaning isn’t bread (all the gluten-free folks can breathe a sigh of relief)—it’s everything we need to survive. It’s the essentials that God knows we have to have, such as food, water, clothing, shelter, and coffee. Definitely coffee. There are several important truths packed into this short sentence. First, it’s bold. Jesus isn’t telling us to come to God like strangers hoping for a favor, but as sons and daughters confident that He will meet our needs. Because that’s what dads do. Second, it’s honest. There’s no beating around the bush, no pretending our needs don’t exist or don’t matter. God doesn’t just tolerate your requests, He asks for them. He expects them. So don’t pretend you don’t matter. You’re a child of God, and He delights in meeting your needs. Remember, pray about everything, and be anxious about nothing. Be real. Be honest. Be specific. That doesn’t obligate God to do everything you ask, of course. He can and does say “No,” or “Wait,” or even, “Are you kidding me right now?” But honesty is a mark of an authentic relationship, so don’t be afraid of it. Third, it’s daily. It might seem more efficient to say, “God, could you please just take care of every single need I will ever have, every day, for the rest of my life? Thanks, bro. Talk to you in eternity,” but that’s not how prayer works. Because it’s not how relationship works. It’s not how God works either. God meets our needs daily. Very often, He doesn’t meet any needs further ahead than that. That might scare us. Not having security regarding the future can be frightening.

• From Wild (2012)

  I’ve never gone backpacking! I thought with a rueful hilarity now. I looked suddenly at my pack and the plastic bags I’d toted with me from Portland that held things I hadn’t yet taken from their packaging. My backpack was forest green and trimmed with black, its body composed of three large compartments rimmed by fat pockets of mesh and nylon that sat on either side like big ears. It stood of its own volition, supported by the unique plastic shelf that jutted out along its bottom. That it stood like that instead of slumping over onto its side as other packs did provided me a small, strange comfort. I went to it and touched its top as if I were caressing a child’s head. A month ago, I’d been firmly advised to pack my backpack just as I would on my hike and take it on a trial run. I’d meant to do it before I left Minneapolis, and then I’d meant to do it once I got to Portland. But I hadn’t. My trial run would be tomorrow—my first day on the trail. I reached into one of the plastic bags and pulled out an orange whistle, whose packaging proclaimed it to be “the world’s loudest.” I ripped it open and held the whistle up by its yellow lanyard, then put it around my neck, as if I were a coach. Was I supposed to hike wearing it like this? It seemed silly, but I didn’t know. Like so much else, when I’d purchased the world’s loudest whistle, I hadn’t thought it all the way through. I took it off and tied it to the frame of my pack, so it would dangle over my shoulder when I hiked. There, it would be easy to reach, should I need it. Would I need it? I wondered meekly, bleakly, flopping down on the bed. It was well past dinnertime, but I was too anxious to feel hungry, my aloneness an uncomfortable thunk that filled my gut. “You finally got what you wanted,” Paul had said when we bade each other goodbye in Minneapolis ten days before. “What’s that?” I’d asked. “To be alone,” he replied, and smiled, though I could only nod uncertainly. It had been what I wanted, though alone wasn’t quite it. What I had to have when it came to love was beyond explanation, it seemed. The end of my marriage was a great unraveling that began with a letter that arrived a week after my mother’s death, though its beginnings went back further than that.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Against the background of these strange periodic attacks, which Dr. Piet dismissed as mere symptoms of a deeper malaise, these psychiatric sessions felt as though we were conducting an esoteric discussion of medieval history while the house was on fire. I wish that Dr. Piet had allowed me to discuss my experiences in the convent. If I could have talked to him about the novitiate, the loneliness, the strain of the last few years of religious life, or my ambivalent feelings about it all, then maybe I could have begun to process the experience. But Dr. Piet usually deflected any such discussion. He saw it as a distraction, a smoke screen that enabled me to hide from my real problems. “You see, in the convent, you were safe,” he would tell me earnestly. “You were not challenged in any way. It was a secure, quiet existence—far from the madding crowd, if you like. You didn’t have to face up to emotional or sexual issues. You were in abeyance. You had, as it were, crawled back to the womb.” I would listen, bemused by this fantasy. For Dr. Piet, the religious life was like the secret gardens or lost domains of literature. He saw serene processions of beautiful nuns gliding down sunlit cloisters, and imagined the convent as an enclave of sisterly peace and concord. Seductive as the religious life had undoubtedly been, he would tell me sternly, I had been running away from my true problems and responsibilities. Indeed, he clung to this idyllic vision so persistently when I tried to interject a little reality into the discussion that I sometimes wondered what psychological significance this fiction held for him. True, we had been shielded from some of the uncomfortable realities of the outside world, but anybody who entered a convent simply to escape unpleasantness would not have lasted a month, let alone seven years. Furthermore, it was not really accurate to say that I had been running away. The core of most of our problems is our own self, and in the religious life I had been forced to confront this self for twenty-four hours a day 365 days a year. You have far more opportunities to escape from self-knowledge in secular life. It is very easy to change the subject, pick up the telephone, turn on the television, or pour a stiff drink. None of these options was available in the convent, and as a result we very quickly came to a most uncomfortable perception of our own limitations. But Dr. Piet was my only chance. Without him I could be condemned to a lifetime of these uncanny eruptions of horror, each one of which made the darkness encroach a little more. I felt as though I were standing on a beach with my back to a cliff, watching the tide creep up the shore a little closer . . . and then a little closer still.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But what in heaven’s name was I supposed to do now? I tried again: “Perhaps I could go back to being an ordinary member of staff?” I flinched at the thought of the drop in salary. With my heavy mortgage, I could scarcely manage on my far from munificent earnings as departmental head, but even a severely reduced income would be better than no income at all. The head made a decisive gesture of refusal. “You know that isn’t the answer,” she said. “You know that wouldn’t work. Miss Cockburn, to whom I’m going to offer the department, would be miserable with you working under her. And you should know— you of all people—that nobody should ever, ever go backwards.” I gazed out of the window, trying to stifle my rising panic. A group of girls passed outside, laughing loudly. The head winced at the noise but, controlling her irritation, turned back to me. “And anyway, the job itself is too much for you. Look at yourself, my dear. You look ill; you are ill. I’m told you’ve been spending your weekends in bed.” I could not deny it. Gone were the days when I had partied in North London after a school day. Now I would crawl home on Friday evening and fall into bed, exhausted by the demands of the week. The head let the point sink in and continued: “This is no good for you. You’re still a young woman. You are—how old are you?—thirty-six? That’s nothing at all, believe me. You shouldn’t be struggling like this, with no life at all outside school. You know that this isn’t right.” “But what am I going to do ?” My voice had thickened with tears, which I firmly tamped down. I wasn’t going to beg. And my financial prospects were no concern of the headmistress, who now dismissed any thought of perpetual penury with an airy laugh. “Oh, any number of things! You have remarkable talents, Miss Armstrong. You’re wasted here, my dear. A lot of people could teach English literature to the level required here, but you have an exceptional mind and you’re not using it to anything like its full capacity. There is nothing here to stretch or challenge you intellectually. You know that. You must be bored stiff a great deal of the time.” Again, I had nothing to say. She was quite right, of course. When I went into a classroom preparing to teach a class of fourteen-year-olds how to use the semicolon, I sometimes wondered how I could face the next forty minutes. But at least it was a job. This talk about my intellectual superiority was all very fine, but it had no market value outside the classroom that I could see.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  That summer, in part because he thought his weight was hurting his chances with girls, he lost forty pounds by restricting his daily food intake to a granola bar, a few pretzels, and a couple handfuls of nuts. He also began following YouTube fitness sensations such as Aziz Shavershian, a skinny-kid video gamer–turned-bodybuilder who has only become more popular since his death from heart failure at age twenty-two, amid rumors of anabolic steroid abuse; Vegan Gains, who once posted footage of his eighty-two-year-old grandfather mid–heart attack to illustrate the perils of eating meat; and Frank Yang, who claimed to have put on over thirty pounds of chiseled muscle in just three weeks without the help of pharmaceuticals. Fitness gurus are to boys what beauty and “thinspo” vloggers can be to girls: a source of entertainment, motivation, and, potentially, self-harm. For a while, Mason was obsessed with how-tos on creating six-pack abs (which in actuality are only achieved through dangerous loss of body fat). He also went through a phase of watching freak-show videos about synthol, an oil that, when injected into the biceps or calves, creates the illusion of impossibly enormous muscles. Sometimes he followed recommendations that went beyond the gym: when a favorite vlogger enthused about the mind-expanding benefits of psilocybin, Mason tracked down mushrooms from a dark net site that he described as “like Amazon, but for drugs.” Turning to the internet for purported expert advice, guidance, and information is second nature to millennials, so I was surprised when, midway through our conversation, Mason pulled out a purple flip phone. He’d met a guy at the Lollapalooza music festival the previous summer who had made the switch; the boy claimed chucking the smartphone kept him more present in real life, less dependent on technology. “He made the point that for our age group, whenever there’s a moment of silence people take out their phone to avoid awkwardness. And he wanted to embrace that awkwardness because life’s an awkward endeavor.” The idea intrigued Mason; plus, he’d been reading a lot about how smartphones and social media were linked to anxiety and depression among today’s teens. He’d had a brush with those himself, during his first semester of college. His then-girlfriend was three hundred miles away at another school, but they were in near-perpetual contact via text and Snapchat. They also kept track of each other through a location-sharing app. So when his girlfriend didn’t return his texts late at night, Mason could see precisely how often she was at the dorm of the guy with whom he suspected she was hooking up. “I was checking compulsively,” he said. “It’s so enticing. You know it’s bad for you. You know it’s going to be negative. But you can’t stop doing it. So . . .” He waggled his flip phone. “Also,” he added, almost as an aside, “it keeps me from watching porn.” Porn World Versus Real World

• From Wild (2012)

  The men got into the truck again and I rode in the back for a couple of miles by myself, until we reached the spot where Walter had parked his truck. He and Carlos drove off in it and left me alone with Frank, who had another hour of work to do. I sat in the cab of the yellow truck watching Frank go back and forth on a tractor, grading the road. Each time he passed, he waved to me, and as he rode away I surreptitiously explored the contents of his truck. In the glove compartment there was a silver flask of whiskey. I took a shallow swig, and quickly put it back, my lips on fire. I reached under the seat and pulled out a slim black case and opened it up and saw a gun as silver as the whiskey flask and shut it again and shoved it beneath the seat. The keys to the truck dangled from the ignition, and I thought idly about what would happen if I started it up and drove away. I took off my boots and massaged my feet. The little bruise on my ankle that I’d gotten from shooting heroin in Portland was still there, but faded to a faint morose yellow now. I ran my finger over it, over the bump of the tiny track mark still detectable at its core, amazed at my own ludicrousness, and then put my socks back on so I wouldn’t have to see it anymore. “What kind of woman are you?” Frank asked when he was done with his work and he’d climbed into the truck beside me. “What kind?” I asked. Our eyes locked and something in his unveiled itself, and I looked away. “Are you like Jane? Like the kind of woman Tarzan would like?” “I guess so,” I said, and laughed, though I felt a creeping anxiety, wishing that Frank would start the truck and drive. He was a big man, rangy and chiseled and tan. A miner who looked to me like a cowboy. His hands reminded me of all the hands of the men I’d known growing up, men who worked their bodies for a living, men whose hands would never get clean no matter how hard they scrubbed. As I sat there with him, I felt the way I always do when alone in certain circumstances with certain men—that anything could happen. That he could go about his business, mannerly and kind, or he could grab me and change the course of things entirely in an instant. With Frank in his truck, I watched his hands, his every move, each cell in my body on high alert, though I appeared as relaxed as if I’d just woken from a nap.

• From Bold Move

  Study harder? Protect my sister? Watch out for my mom? The anxious thoughts and feelings were endless. No matter how hard I tried, I often felt so overwhelmed that I would eat my emotions in the form of a big bag of cookies, which ultimately left me feeling like a failure. To make matters worse, when my mom caught me with said cookies, she would invariably put me on a diet, further proving to me that I was indeed not enough. It was a vicious cycle. In retrospect, I realize she was concerned about my health, much as I am for my own son’s health today. But damn, it hurts when someone’s way of telling you that they love you is to take away your cookies! At the time, I was hurt and confused. Why was she taking away the only thing that made me feel better in the moment? But, as is always the case, both my mom and I were doing the best we could with the tools we had at the time. Unfortunately, the tool kit we shared was rudimentary. Fortunately for you, the tools I’m about to share are more sophisticated and are supported by hundreds of scientific studies and lessons I’ve learned through decades of my work. I suspect my friends see me as bold because I overcame poverty, adversity, and trauma to get to where I am today—an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the director of the Community Psychiatry Program for Research in Implementation and Dissemination of Evidence-Based Treatments (PRIDE) research lab at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston. Perhaps my journey has been bold, but what my friends don’t see is that even today I have feelings of not being enough. So how did I manage to go from poverty to Harvard to becoming a published author? I credit this seemingly miraculous narrative to three factors: my mom, my grandmother, and science. My mom is a fighter, and to this day she continues to work hard to overcome whatever challenges she may face. As a single mom, she fought tooth and nail to feed us and give us the possibility of a better future. Today, I credit my mom with teaching me that no matter how I feel, the only path forward is through my emotions. She showed me that I could do the hard things regardless of the emotions I felt. Later in graduate school, I learned that this kind of behavior—through , not around —is at the very core of a concept called emotion regulation,1 which teaches us that experiencing our emotions is better than avoiding them. The woman I came to think of as my grandmother entered my life when I was twelve, when my mom was dating my stepfather.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Next time we’ll hear something different.” “Something different and the thunderstorm again. Please.” He grinned and became a child again. “And now— o f to the lavatory!” he yelled, and then, forestalling me, “And don’t forget to pull the chain!” Is that all you are having for dinner? It’s quite ludicrous! You must eat more than that.” Jenifer was standing at the top of the stairs, poised as if for flight and clearly uneasy. It was against her principles to proffer unwanted advice to the young. We looked at my supper tray: a boiled egg, two slices of crispbread, and a tub of plain yogurt. It seemed more than enough to me. I had now narrowed down my expenditure dramatically, so that I spent only about two pounds a week on food. I bought one small carton of eggs, which had to last six days. I was also learning to make my own yogurt in a thermos flask, which was a great deal cheaper but an uncertain process. Hence the tub I had permitted myself tonight. For lunch I consumed two pieces of crispbread covered with cottage cheese (again, one carton had to last the week). So I never actually stopped eating—just cut it back, and the results were gratifying. I had really started to lose weight. This had begun quite deliberately. I knew that I was not anorexic like Rebecca, because that was an illness that was beyond one’s conscious control. I, however, was choosing of my own free will not to eat. I was often ravenously hungry, and would sometimes allow myself a piece of real toast and butter, which, if I had been truly anorexic, I told myself, would have been quite impossible. And I was not driven by any ulterior or unconscious motive. My purpose was, I believed, simple and pragmatic: I wanted to save money. Money had become a major issue. I had never handled money much before. In the convent, we had owned nothing but everything had been provided, and the same had been true while I had lived in St. Anne’s as an undergraduate. At the beginning of each term, when we received our grant checks from the government, we paid a fixed sum to the college for bed and board. Our rooms were cleaned for us and meals were served three times a day. But now I had to buy my own food and manage my own budget, and I found this obscurely frightening. I had started to panic about the future. Academic jobs were notoriously hard to get and my present scholarship would last for only three years. What would happen then? If I couldn’t get a post as a university teacher, whatever would become of me? I was trained for nothing else, and at twenty-six, I was really too old to start again. There was school teaching, of course, but I knew that I did not want to do that.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I replied, and, satisfied, Jacob broke away and trotted ahead in the lopsided gait that was so like his father’s, looking back occasionally to see that I was still there. Yes, I would continue to take him to Blackfriars. I did not believe in any of it anymore; God had finally departed from my life; but it would do me no harm to sit for a while every week with those good people. And giving Jacob this new chance would be a positive thing to do. He had so few pleasures, and when he had found something that he so clearly relished, it would be cruel to take it away from him. It wasn’t as though I had anything else to do on Sunday mornings. In fact, I really didn’t have anything else to do in my life at all. 4. Consequently I Rejoice I have no idea how it happened, but it was the result of a wor-rying new development. At least, it was of concern to me. Dr. Piet had greeted the news with his usual nonchalance, but this latest symptom had been yet another sign to me that my mind was breaking down completely. I had started to lose control over my actions—only for a short period of time, and only infrequently, but I still found it very disturbing. The first time it occurred, I had been working in my room in Manor Place and decided that it was time for coffee. “Another cup, Karen?” Nanny smiled as I came into the kitchen and lit the gas under the kettle. “You must be thirsty this morning!” “Sorry, Nanny? What do you mean?” Nanny looked puzzled, as well she might. “Well, you were here just half an hour ago.” I must have looked blank. “I saw you going upstairs with your mug while I was tidying the drawing room. Surely you remember, Karen?” she added, disturbed about her own powers of memory. “I saw you quite distinctly,” she added, to convince herself as much as anything. “Oh yes, of course. I do apologize, Nanny. I was miles away.” Poor Nanny, I thought, as I returned to my room. She was getting on in years, and old people were notoriously forgetful . But when I opened the door to my room, I saw the mug on the windowsill; when I examined it, I found it full of coffee that was not yet entirely cold. Try as I would, I could not recall making it. I must have gone downstairs, boiled the water, poured it onto the coffee granules, and returned to my desk. And I had no recollection at all of any of this. Then, a few weeks later, I found myself unexpectedly sitting in the English Faculty Library.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  She pointed to a poster with a number of forbidden objects pictured with red bars across them—fire extinguishers, pacemakers, watches, steel skull-plates, anything metallic, evidently. The scanner stood in the middle of a large empty room. It was an enormous white edifice, like a very thick wall, with a large hole running through it into which patients were slid on a gantry. Something was making a great deal of fairly unpleasant noise. I removed my gown and lay down on the pad. A dummy computer keyboard was placed on my stomach and I was slid headfirst into the bore of the superconducting magnet. “Can you hear me, Arno?” I heard Dr. Orowitz-Rudman say through the intercom. I said that I could. “Good. Give us a few minutes to get things set in here before you start. Are you comfortable?” “I am. It’s very vaginal in here, doctor, in a smooth-muscle sort of way. Is the magnet on?” “Yes, it’s always on,” she said. “I expected to feel claustrophobic, but oddly, I’m not. There was this guy in college … excuse me—I’ll shut up while you get set up.” “No, go on,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “The technicians are getting set up—I’m just observing at this point.” “What is all this tiresome noise?” I asked. “That’s the coolant. The magnet has to be kept very cool, and the coolant has to be pumped around.” “I see. Well, there was this guy in college—” There was this guy in college, I said, who used to mime inserting one finger in a woman’s vadge, then two, then four, saying, “Yeah, baby. Really? More?” Then the whole hand would go in, then his arm up to the elbow, then up to the shoulder; then he would slide his other arm in, still saying, “More? You sure , baby? Okay.” He would place his head at the opening of the imaginary vadge and strainingly push up, turning his face, and suddenly his grimacing head would slide in alongside his arms, and finally he would squirm as much of his body into the vaginal canal as he could fit. “I feel a little like I’ve just done that,” I explained. “I’m in this huge electrovagnet. It isn’t womblike,” I babblingly hastened to qualify. “It’s purely vaginal.” “Interesting,” I heard Dr. Orowitz-Rudman say absently. She hadn’t been listening. She said something I couldn’t catch to one of her associates, then I heard her say, “We are? Okay.” Then she addressed me in her pleasant Susan Stamberg voice: “All right, Arno. First we’re going to get you to use the keyboard a little bit. I’m going to read you a sentence, and you type it. Ready?” I said I was ready. “ ‘The cure …’ ” she read. I typed. “Okay.” “ ‘… for the greatest part …’ ” I typed. “Got it.” “ ‘… of human miseries …’ ” I typed. “Okay.” “ ‘… is not radical …’ ” “Yep.” “ ‘… but palliative.’ Period.

• From Bold Move

  I should get another degree; perhaps it is my education level that is getting me stuck. I will never get a raise. I am stuck forever in this job. I am such a failure—if I was better, I would have been given a raise. I am worthless. As tears dropped down Janet’s face, I assured her that I had heard many stories similar to hers from my clients and that I could see how distressing these thoughts were to her. I asked her, “When all of those emotions and painful thoughts wash over you, what do you usually do to make yourself feel better?” “I try to push my thoughts away by checking my phone or scrolling through social media. I try not to focus on them. I momentarily feel better, but the thoughts always come back. I wish I could go ahead and ask for that raise already, but I can’t, and it hurts to even think about it.” Janet’s thoughts such as I will never get a raise were so powerful that they were creating anxiety, tears, and discomfort. As a result, Janet did what she could to try to make herself feel better: she pushed them away through distraction. In the short term, we can all distance ourselves from our pesky thoughts. Yet, this cycle had repeated itself for the past three years and it was causing her significant financial strain, which was making her feel even worse about herself as a provider for her children. Janet is not alone. According to a survey conducted by Randstad US in 2020, 60 percent of women have never negotiated their pay,1 and even if they ask for a salary increase, they are significantly less likely to get it compared to men.2 In fact, a recent meta-analysis of studies conducted across the world found that men initiate negotiations 1.5 times more than women.3 And the cost is high. In the United States, data shows that women made 84 percent of what men made in 2020.4 Interestingly, the gender gap in negotiation initiation and pay has been decreasing.5 I’ve actually worked with quite a few men who have also had trouble asking for a raise or negotiating their salaries. At the end of my initial conversation with Janet, she said to me, “Do you ever feel like your brain is just being a butt?” “I do,” I assured Janet. The reality is, I told her, if we were to talk to our friends the way we talk to ourselves, we might not have any friends because they would all walk away! “But, unfortunately, pushing our thoughts away is just like me saying to you, ‘Don’t think about a white elephant.’ What happens?”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  A washbasin, a divan against the wall, two wicker armchairs, and a desk—there was everything I needed. “Is it all right?” Jenifer Hart, my new landlady, sounded nervous. She was the tutor in modern history at St. Anne’s, and I had often seen her in college, striding round in flamboyant clothes, which never quite matched and which seemed to make a defiant statement against age and convention. She must have been in her midfifties, but her straight, shoulder-length hair, which she wore pushed behind her ears, was still golden red, though like so many things in her house, it was beginning to fade. Her tanned face was lined—she wore little makeup—and she gave off a rather fierce, uncompromising aura. Yet now she looked anxious and even vulnerable. I had approached her about the room with some trepidation. Word had gone round that she was offering free lodging in return for rather unusual baby-sitting. This was attractive, since my state grant, though adequate, was not princely. The location was perfect: the large, white house in Manor Place was just minutes away from the English Faculty Library. Mrs. Hart was somewhat alarming; her pupils told fearsome tales of her low boredom threshold and her impatience with anything that she regarded as stupidity. She was also famously left wing, and one of the most radical of the dons. When I had met her in her college suite, I had felt boring, conventional—and religious, something I sensed immediately would be incomprehensible to her. But to my surprise, she had responded eagerly to my inquiries about the room and had been very keen—even desperate—that I should join the household. Had I been of a more suspicious nature, I might have smelled a rat. My own tutors’ reactions to the plan had been less than reassuring. “Lodging with Jenifer Hart? Oh Lord!” Miss Griffiths had cried in obvious dismay. Dorothy Bednarowska had been more restrained, but even she had been unable to suppress the characteristic rictus of the facial muscles that she made involuntarily when confronted with something alarming. “Well, I don’t suppose it will do you any harm,” she had said reluctantly. “For a while, anyway.” So I went to view the room with some misgivings, and when Mrs. Hart had opened her front door, I was greeted by rather a startling spectacle. The hall was painted scarlet, the dining room a violent purple, and the kitchen an electric turquoise—this at a time when white was almost de rigueur in interior decor. And it was clear that housekeeping was not one of my prospective landlady’s priorities. The walls had not seen a lick of paint for years, and were scuffed, scarred, and slightly grubby. Dust coated every object and had accumulated on shelves and skirting boards in peaceful, undisturbed drifts. There was clutter everywhere.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  During this period, while Melissa was away in Palestine on a cure (I had borrowed the money from Justine in order for her to go) we had several narrow escapes. For example, one day we were talking, Justine and I, in the great bedroom of the house. We had come in from bathing and had taken cold showers to get the salt off our skins. Justine sat on the bed naked under the bathroom towel which she had draped round her like a chiton. Nessim was away in Cairo where he was supposed to make a radio broadcast on behalf of some charity or other. Outside the window the trees nodded their dusty fronds in the damp summer air, while the faint huddle of traffic on Rue Fuad could be heard. Nessim’s quiet voice came to us from the little black radio by the bed, converted by the microphone into the voice of a man prematurely aged. The mentally empty phrases lived on in the silence they invaded until the air seemed packed with commonplaces. But the voice was beautiful, the voice of someone who had elaborately isolated himself from feeling. Behind Justine’s back the door into the bathroom was open. Beyond it, a pane of clinical whiteness, lay another door leading to an iron fire-escape — for the house had been designed round a central well so that its bathrooms and kitchens could be connected by a cobweb of iron staircases such as span the engine-room of a ship. Suddenly, while the voice was still talking and while we listened to it, there came the light youthful patter of footsteps on the iron staircase outside the bathroom: a step unmistakably that of Nessim — or of any of the 150,000 inhabitants of the province. Looking over Justine’s shoulder I saw developing on the glass panel of the frosted door, the head and shoulders of a tall slim man, with a soft felt hat pulled down over his eyes. He developed like a print in a photographer’s developing-bowl. The figure paused with outstretched hand upon the knob of the door. Justine, seeing the direction of my glance, turned her head. She put one naked arm round my shoulders as both of us, with a feeling of complete calm whose core, like a heart beating, was a feverish impotent sexual excitement watched the dark figure standing there between two worlds, depicted as if on an X-ray screen. He would have found us absurdly posed, as if for a photograph, with an expression, not of fear but of guiltless relief upon our faces.

• From Bold Move

  I felt a connection with Janet, but we were due back at the conference any minute, so I invited her to meet me for coffee at the hospital the following week so we could talk more and see if I could help her get unstuck. Janet smiled, a sense of momentary relief washing over her face. The following week Janet braved one of Boston’s early winter snowstorms and, over coffee in my office, shared her story with me. A nurse by training, she had transitioned into an administrative position, managing a large practice at the hospital. She had been with the same department for the past ten years and really enjoyed her co-workers. The team was close, and Janet was seen as a competent and well-liked manager. During this time, Janet’s boss had changed many times, and currently she reported to a white man, who she described as kind but intimidating. Janet commented, “I don’t know if it is because we’re so different, but I’m a bit scared of him.” “How do you mean different?” I asked, not wanting to assume. She laughed, diffusing the tension, and gestured to herself, “This isn’t a spray tan here.” She continued, “But there are bigger differences than just the fact that he’s white and I’m Black. My background is in nursing. He’s a physician. I’m a single mother trying to raise three kids and he’s financially well off. It’s like we come from totally different worlds,” she said. I could relate, as I’d often felt quite different from a lot of the men and women that I had worked under throughout my career. Coming from a developing country with a different set of cultural norms, and finding myself often in a precarious financial situation, I could understand how these differences are important. Yet from a clinical perspective, I had the sense that these were not the things that were—deep down—actually preventing her from asking for a raise. I’m certain that she believed they were, but when it comes to avoidance tactics, the true motivations are often hidden from us. I decided to dive beyond the narrative that Janet had been telling herself and asked her to walk me through what it’s like when she considers asking for a raise. “I immediately feel anxious, scared, and even worthless at times.” “So even the idea of asking for a raise starts to make you feel really uncomfortable,” I said. “Do you have a sense of what you are saying to yourself when you feel those emotions?” A long pause was followed by a storm of thoughts that came from Janet’s mouth: I am not working hard enough. I should stay late more often. The quality of my work is not perfect. The mistake that I made in implementing the new billing system means I am sloppy.