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 Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  I helped Casey name the cycle. She was feeling anxious and wanted affirmation from Seth. The more she checked with him, the more uncertain she felt. While Seth would tell her what she wanted to hear, it was harder and harder for her to believe him. Why? Because she couldn’t prove that he loved her, and she couldn’t be certain that he wouldn’t break up with her. It was a classic case of anxious attachment. Something had to give. I invited Casey and Seth to start responding differently. I encouraged Casey to refrain from asking these hot-air questions that she couldn’t get answers to. I invited Seth to a session with Casey and coached him on how to respond when Casey was seeking validation. Rather than telling her what she wanted to hear, he learned to instead respond with “Casey, you know how I feel about you. I’m not going to answer that question because we know it will actually reinforce your anxiety.” I shared with Casey that the validation she had been seeking was not going to satiate her in the relationship—it was chipping away at the relationship. Instead, she needed to see with time and through Seth’s actions that he did in fact love her. She had to practice trusting him. She also needed to accept a hard truth: they may break up someday—and that would be okay. “Always” and “never” are two words that can’t be promised in any relationship (even with marriage), as life is inevitably changing day by day. Even with the best of intentions, nothing is guaranteed. A hard pill to swallow, I know. Now, remember how I told you Casey had trouble expressing emotion? Yeah, after we had these sessions, not so much anymore. The volcano erupted. When I shared these recommended changes in behavior, she got mad. Red cheeks, big eyes, shaking hands—she was hot lava. I had just thrown her world upside down by not guaranteeing that this relationship would last forever. Casey jolted. “So, you’re telling me that I should stop asking my boyfriend if he loves me or not?” “Yep.” “And you’re telling me that he’s supposed to respond by saying that I already know how he feels, and he will let me know if he changes his mind?” “Yep.” I paused. “Do you believe that your boyfriend loves you?” “Well . . . yes.” “How do you know?” “He’s there for me. We have so much fun together. The sex is great. He’s my best friend, really.” “And do you trust that if he did want to end the relationship, he would do so in a respectful way?” “I think so.” I waited a beat. “And let’s be honest. Let’s say your worst fear came true and he did end the relationship. What would you do?” She admitted, “I would be really sad at first. Heartbroken, in fact. But I would also be okay.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  A queer, agnostic, transgender, Latinx woman, she told me that she had barely gotten a few hours of rest because her best friend from college, whom we’ll call Tony, was imprisoned a few months ago because of a reported burglary. According to Jessie, what began as an alcohol addiction for Tony evolved into a cocaine problem. He had begun acting erratically over the past six months and Jessie told me she had been worried sick about him. While she felt that she should help her friend, she said the situation really devolved when she learned that he was arrested for breaking and entering, with a gun. Now that he was in jail and couldn’t afford bail, Tony was all she could think about. Not only was she trying to gather funds for his bail, she also began skipping her classes, ignoring her other friends, and hardly sleeping because she never knew when Tony might call from jail. She told me that she felt like death, but she didn’t want to “let Tony down.” She came to me in hopes that I could help her help her friend. I had another purpose, though: to help her help herself. I realize that many of you, like Jessie, are mini therapists in the making. You could have completed an internship by now with all the hours you’ve done giving therapy sessions at three in the morning. And while it’s beyond generous of you to support your friends and family in this way, it’s not sustainable. That’s why I had to include this chapter. I’m writing this not only so that you can help those around you who are struggling—but also so you can protect your own well-being. When you’re working overtime for the people in your life, it’s a fast- track road to burnout. And while you started out as the lifeguard, you can quickly find yourself drowning if you’re not careful. You’re probably thinking of someone you’re worried about right now as you read this chapter. There is likely no greater pain than watching our friends and family suffer. Sometimes it’s worse than bearing our own burdens. And whether another’s behavior is intentional or unintentional, it rips us to our core. To feel some semblance of control, we often want to jump in and take action because we feel utterly powerless watching destruction right before our eyes. Here’s the thing, though. We can’t control the choices that other people make in their lives. Jessie couldn’t control that Tony robbed someone’s home or that he started using cocaine.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Yale said, “I’m fine. I’m great.” “I’m sitting here doing the crossword, myself.” “Okay.” “I’ll, ah, I’ll thank you if you can give me a six-letter word for ‘harpy.’ I was sitting here the longest time thinking it said ‘happy,’ but no, it’s ‘harpy.’” His father was the slowest talker in the world, a trait that drove Yale crazy in adolescence. “I got nothing.” “What are you up to these days?” There was no way to answer. Yale hadn’t told him about the breakup, just the move. He’d never even told him he’d left the Art Institute last summer; the AIC was something his father had actually heard of, something he took some mote of pride in, and although surely he’d heard of Northwestern as well, Yale had figured he’d leave well enough alone. He could have talked about the Cubs game, but instead he said, “I’m on my way to a parade.” Because now that his father’s voice was wrapping its way around his right ear, now that going to a ball game would have felt tainted by his father’s approval, it was true: He was going to the parade. “What kind of parade?” “A really gay one, Dad. A big gay parade.” Yale read in his father’s silence a kind of sarcasm. Listen to yourself, the silence said. Do you hear how ridiculous that sounds? Yale said, “So I kind of need to run.” He thought his father would hang up, glad for the dismissal, but instead he said, “Listen, have you been following the news on this disease?” Yale found himself stretching the phone cord to the window just so he could make incredulous eye contact with his own reflection. “No, Dad, I haven’t. What disease would that be?” “It’s—are you being ironic with me? I can never tell.” “You know, the parade is starting. I really have to go.” “Alright then.” — By the time he got to Clark, the route was packed and the first few floats had gone by. He wound his way behind people, looking for someone he recognized. At Wellington he looked for Ross and his friends and their fire escape, but not too hard. After two blocks, he spotted Katsu Tatami across the street, and when a few people ran across behind the Anheuser-Busch float, he crossed too. He didn’t know the guys Katsu was standing with, but Katsu was always good for a hug, an enthusiastic greeting. He had to shout in Yale’s ear: “So far so good! You want my soda?”

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Do you mean we’re enemies? Shaking her head, she said we were many species, many bodies. But what am I becoming? I said. I wondered if she’d ever feared I’d hurt her, if she knew how I’d once tried hunting my father. If I ate her someday, she had to forgive me. Ben said she couldn’t forgive anyone if she didn’t have a body. Can bodies cross into other bodies? Ben said I was always asking the wrong questions. I told her I knew about evolution and finches, knew all the concepts we were taught, but she said my tail wasn’t shaped like a line: It was shaped like a life, circling itself, growing backward from tip to root. The sinks outside were overflowing, flooding us to the ankles, water-rings coiling like snakes. Ben said it didn’t take generations to change, to adapt to a new predator or environment. Sometimes one body could do it. She talked like a scientist of survival. I told her that there was no evolutionary line between tigers and people, and if there was, it still meant I was moving backward. There’s no such thing as forward or backward, she said, her finger circling in the air. There was no such thing as progress, just accumulation: A long time ago, she told me, when a man died of exhaustion while building the Great Wall, the man behind him just bricked his body into the wall and kept going. That’s why it’s studded with skulls, she said. Why it’s shaped like a spine. It’s a burial ground, not a building. I asked her if this story was meant to comfort me. She told me not to worry. We’re not alive. We’re just between deaths right now. She laughed and reached around for my tail: It thrummed like an antenna, broadcasting her touch all over my body. If we stayed in here, she said, and the water kept outgrowing us, what do you think would happen? I told her we’d drown, but Ben said I was wrong. We’d grow gills, she said. Holding open the stall door, she walked me to the sinks, water receding around us. It listened to her feet when she told it to leave. She turned off the faucet, her cage bobbing in the sink. The pendant-key punctuated the center of her chest. Lifting the cage with both hands, she offered it to me. If she unlocked it, I wondered, would the shadow-bird leave? Would we see it flee? Ben said she’d let me hold the cage if I let her see my tail whenever she wanted. When I asked her why, she said, I like what it does to my hand. It behaves like it’s befriended something wild. I said she could steal it from me anytime. In her hands, my tail was potential, a hilt waiting to be drawn from me.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  Vitamin D: Studies have shown the effectiveness of vitamin D to help manage anxiety, including for those who experience anxious distress in the midst of a depressive episode. 118,119 Symptoms of deficiency include fatigue, bone and back pain, and hair loss. 120 Given that 1 billion people around the world have low vitamin D, with 42 percent of US adults having a deficiency (and even more worrisome, 63 percent of Latinx adults and 82 percent of African American adults), this is one of the most important supplements to pay attention to. 121,122 To improve your vitamin D intake, you should try to be out in the sun for thirty minutes to three hours, depending on the amount of melanin in your body, and by eating foods rich in vitamin D, including oily fish such as salmon and mackerel. 123,124 If you are lacking in vitamin D, taking a vitamin D supplement can be an essential part of your treatment plan, not only for depression and anxiety symptoms, but also to treat other potential symptoms, including frequent illness/infections. And for you potential mamas who are considering getting pregnant: vitamin D can make a big difference in helping you have a healthy pregnancy, as each 10 nanogram per milliliter increase in preconception vitamin D levels has been associated with a 12 percent lowered risk of miscarriage. 125 Given that supplement level recommendations will vary depending on your demographics as well as the time of year, it’s essential to have your bloodwork data as a baseline and to work with a provider for a tailored approach. 2. Vitamin B: There are eight groups of nutrients in the vitamin B family. Here’s a rundown. a. Vitamin B 12 (also called cobalamin): Deficiencies are correlated with paranoia, depression, poor memory, confusion, and fatigue. While about 6 percent of those younger than sixty have a deficiency, about 20 percent of those over sixty aren’t getting enough. 126 By eating fish, chicken, eggs, milk, cheese, and fortified breakfast cereals, you can meet the mark. However, given how many of these foods are not vegan-friendly, it’s particularly important for vegans to rule out a B 12 deficiency— especially if you are noticing brain fog and malaise. b. Vitamin B 1 (also known as thiamin): Most people get these nutrients when they eat whole grains, pork, fish, legumes (such as black beans), nuts, and seeds. However, deficiencies can occur with alcohol dependence, as well as in those living with HIV/AIDS or diabetes, those who are older, and those who have had bariatric surgery. When the body lacks B 1 , you can experience memory loss, muscle weakness, and heart problems, among other symptoms, such as loss of appetite. 127 c. Vitamin B 2 (also called riboflavin): This deficiency is rare, especially if you eat eggs, lean meats, low-fat milk, green veggies, and fortified cereals and bread. However, some people can be deficient, including vegetarian athletes (especially those who avoid dairy and eggs), pregnant and breastfeeding people, and vegans.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  1 Many of us can relate to Rose and Jack. Chances are, you’re picking up this book because you’re fed up with your anxiety. Whether you’re Rose, too paralyzed to take action, or you’re Jack and you feel like you’re barely clinging on, this book is meant to be the life jacket that can buoy you to give you the support you need. You don’t have to shiver in the water anymore. As a psychologist with a doctorate in clinical psychology and a master’s in marriage and family therapy (and really just as a human being), I get it. I live with anxiety myself. I treat my clients’ anxiety on a daily basis and I’ve seen intimately how challenging (and underrated) anxiety can be. People often talk about anxiety like it’s low-hanging fruit. “Doesn’t everyone have anxiety now?” “Isn’t something wrong with you if you don’t have anxiety?” When I hear comments like these, I know it’s a sign of a gap between a judgment call and the actual lived experience. Because for those who do live with anxiety, it’s no small beast. I think most of us would choose to live anxiety- free if we could. It’s clear to me that we’re all seeking help for our anxiety—look no further than TikTok and Instagram and you’ll see #mentalhealthmatters trending much of the time (and not just during Mental Health Awareness Month in May). When I started posting on my TikTok to shed light on common disorders such as anxiety, panic attacks, and anxious attachment, I had no idea there would be more than two hundred thousand followers trying to better understand why they were struggling and what they could do about it. It’s not that I had the best dance moves (trust me, you can go look for yourself) or that I did great outfits of the day (though I do wear some pretty fun, colorful dresses if I do say so myself). People just genuinely want to feel better, and accessible platforms such as TikTok provide a quick way to get the conversation started. So, if you ever feel like you’re battling your anxiety alone, let me assure you that you definitely aren’t. In fact, if you’re one of the 40 million Americans who experience clinical anxiety, welcome to the club you likely didn’t want to be invited to. I’m going to be telling you some hard truths—but I’m also going to give you some welcome answers to start and stay feeling better. As you’ll soon see, I find that honesty is the best policy, especially when it comes to anxiety. I’m sure I could tell you many things you’d love to hear instead.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Our world inspires a certain level of paranoia. Perhaps it is a measure of intelligence—after all, everyone is being watched and controlled within borders they didn’t determine, exchanging paper someone else told us is valuable for things of actual value, living under a dangerous government since forever. These truths, along with the constant violence and death and ego-based conflict, can make it hard to relax, to rest and sustain ourselves in the longer arc of justice and transformation. So … smoke up. Hot and Heavy Homework Reflect on the pleasures you intentionally practice to soften the physical, emotional, and political pain of modern life. Now. Let me get off this couch. 67 This essay first appeared as adrienne maree brown, “The Pleasure Dome: Weed on, Weed Off,” June 1, 2017, Bitch Media (blog), https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/pleasure-dome-weed-weed.68 Frank Ocean, “Nights,” on Blond (XL Recordings, 2016).69 As a point of vulnerability, I want to share that writing this piece actually made me realize that I had been high in some way since the 2016 election—at least it felt that way. As I wrote these words about taking a break from weed, my body was like “YES LIKE RIGHT NOW.” I took a break, another dip, and have rediscovered a good balance at the time of writing this book.70 I want to emphasize that no one should ever, ever smoke a dollar bill. I am still recovering, twenty years later.71 Harm Reduction Coalition, “Principles of Harm Reduction,” Accessed July 23, 2018, http://harmreduction.org/about-us/principles-of-harm-reduction/.72 Ah, let’s not play games here like this was just one decade. Perhaps that was the low point; only time will tell. In general, I am a high-functioning depressive person. I get extremely hopeless in cycles, I feel restless for the end of everything, and I feel like I need help to see the good, to feel joy. I have come to believe that this is a part of my magic, that I dance with darkness and respect it. I know what it is to need therapy, medicate myself, not be able to get out of bed, and not want to live. And while it isn’t easy, it makes me feel like I can see things whole, and whatever joy I have is grounded in the miraculous and tragic dual nature of the real world.Conditions of PossibilityA Conversation with Monique Tula After years of local level harm reduction work, Monique Tula became the first woman-of-color executive director of the national Harm Reduction Coalition (HRC), working to reduce the harms that come from drug use. I have been honored to facilitate the HRC in this transition, a full-circle moment, as this was my first paid social justice work. Monique and harm reduction are crucial parts of pleasure activism. amb. First of all, can you tell the readers what harm reduction is?

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  I’m not gonna try to fuck you.” Yale asked Roman if he’d thought about going to the Pride parade, which was ten days away. They were starting to sober up; it was three in the morning. “Just being counted matters,” Yale said, and heard how he sounded like Charlie. “Last year we had thirty-five thousand.” Roman rolled toward Yale and grinned, his eyes molelike without his glasses. “You’re saying size matters to you.” “I’m saying we want to top that.” Roman laughed, ran a finger up Yale’s groin. “It’d be good for you. There’s something about seeing some drag queen doing a pole dance in a flatbed right there in the street that makes it easier to go back to work the next day and not worry about being a little faggy.” Not that Yale went to work anymore. “And also—” but Roman sank his teeth into the top of Yale’s ear, moved his hand up his side. “Also, it’s educational.” “You’re educational.” — Yale hadn’t heard from Roman since that night, and meanwhile he’d decided he might not even go to the parade himself. He bought a ticket for the Cubs-Mets game, which wouldn’t start till 3:30 but at least gave him a fairly solid excuse, one he used when Asher called the day before the parade and asked if Yale could lend a hand on the AIDS Foundation of Chicago float. “Actually,” Asher said, “it’s not your hands we want. It’s your cute face. We’re wearing clothes, no Speedos involved. Unless you want to, of course. Who am I to stop you?” Yale would have done just about anything else for Asher, but he couldn’t be in a parade, couldn’t roll down the street past everyone he knew, couldn’t run into Charlie in the staging area. Ross—the redhead who’d been flirting with Yale in the Marina City gym for the past month—said if Yale wanted to hang out, some friends would be watching from a fire escape at Wellington and Clark, with mojitos. Yale didn’t want to lead Ross on, but the setup was appealing. When he first moved to the city he’d been in love with all the fire escapes, kept feeling Audrey Hepburn might appear there with her guitar, her hair wrapped in a towel, that she might sing him “Moon River” and grab his hand and pull him across town. He had a mental list of reasons not to go: He wanted to see Sandberg face off against Gooden. He didn’t want to stand there getting turned on by beautiful shirtless men just to come home and jerk off sadly in the bathroom. He didn’t feel like worrying about how he looked, scanning the crowd constantly for friends and former friends. He did not want to watch the Out Loud float go by.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Our mother bought us snorkel masks to wear outside, as if sipping air through a smaller opening would shrink the scent. We met after school in the backyard and drew holes in the dirt with our toes. The grass was a ghost of its former green, and most of it had been scalped away by the heat and our feet. In the grass we found trash that smelled recently deceased: soda can tabs, beer bottles with a piss-colored liquid living inside it. My brother said we probably wouldn’t find anything else, but I said the point was the hole itself. I’d learned that there were gases trapped in the soil wherever trash was buried, and if we didn’t dig holes for the ground to fart out its gas, this whole city would explode: Houses like knocked-out teeth. Blacktop rising as a crow flock. Tracing three more holes in the dirt, he asked me what color the gas was and I said, The same as our breath. That’s what made it lethal: Its taste camouflaged with our tongues. When it entered your lungs, it became a blade inside you. From the kitchen window, our mother watched as we plotted the rest of our holes. When we came in, she scrubbed us so raw we couldn’t sleep with the sheets on our skin. Still we kept digging, saving the city from its flatulent past. We dug with our hands and waited until evening when the smell of the landfill was only as bad as our breath. My brother kneeled first. He shaped his palms into bowls and flung fistfuls of soil onto a pile behind him. I kneeled to follow him, but my hands dawdled too long in the dirt. My brother was elbow-deep now and sleeved in soil, but I couldn’t go farther than a fist down. Spit on the ground to soften it, he said. I mimicked his mouth, spitting a syllable of saliva into the hole. My brother had learned to spit from my father: tongue recoiling in the mouth, flinging the spit like a whip. Our mother always slapped my brother for it. One time he’d spat in a temple, a coin of spit faceup on the prayer stool, and everybody had turned to look at it. Learn to swallow it, she said. She trained her throat to swallow twice an hour while she slept, and she sometimes wore a bandanna as a muzzle. We’d never seen her drool before, her pillow clean in the mornings.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  She’s working hard to remain calm. “The reality is that I just quit my job, and I can’t get that job back. They’ve already hired someone else. And now you’ve been fired.” “Laid off,” I say, because that sounds better. “Point is, we’re both unemployed, and we have six-year-old twins, and no health insurance, and no income. And we’re about to go on a really expensive vacation.” “Well,” I say, “when you put it like that.” “How else would you put it?” I launch back into my spiel about moving to the mountains, but she cuts me off. None of that is going to happen, and we both know it. We’re not going to spend the summer cruising around the United States in a Winnebago like the Griswolds on some zany adventure. “Look,” I say, “I’ll get another job. I’m going to start hitting the phone today. Right now. I’m going to email everyone I know. I’ve got a bunch of speeches booked, which should keep us going into the fall. And I can pick up some freelance work.” I’m trying to sound confident. But the truth is that I’m fifty-one years old and I have never gone looking for a job before. I’ve always had a job and then moved to a better one. I’ve never had to call my friends and ask them to keep me in mind if they hear of anything. I’ve always been the guy on the other end of that call, and I’ve always felt bad for those friends who were calling me. Sure, I told them, I’ll pass the word around. I’ll keep an eye open. I’m sure you’ll find something. But we all know the reality of our situation. Every year there are fewer jobs in journalism. It’s a game of musical chairs, with a bunch of laid-off old hacks running around and fighting over the few remaining seats. Things are even worse if you’re over fifty. In what now seems like a cruel irony, I learned about this by reading my own magazine. In 2011, Newsweek published a cover story with the attention-grabbing headline THE BEACHED WHITE MALE. The cover depicted a middle-aged white guy in a suit, soaking wet, facedown on a beach at the water’s edge—maybe not dead, but definitely washed up. The article described a whole generation of once-successful men who, having been laid off during the recession, or “Mancession,” as the magazine dubbed it, were now shuffling around in their bathrobes, stunned, emasculated, psychologically destroyed, humiliated in front of their wives and children, drifting through life like castrated zombies. In the new economy, age fifty was the new sixty-five. Hit fifty, and your company would find an excuse to fire you, and good luck trying to find another job. As for filing an age discrimination suit: Forget about it. You wouldn’t stand a chance.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Though petrifying your staff into obedience might help a company meet its goals faster in the short term, Kets de Vries says that rigidity stifles innovation, which in the long term is bad for both the business and its employees. (And that’s to say nothing of ethics or empathy.) During his management consultations, Kets de Vries advises senior execs to ask themselves: Does the company foster individuality and nonconformism to drive breakthroughs? Does it encourage employees to have a life and language of their own? Or does everyone speak in the exact same tone using the exact same verbiage, which sounds suspiciously like that of the person in charge? “Being in a top management position, if you’re not careful, you go into an echo chamber,” Kets de Vries explained. “People are going to tell you what you want to hear, so you start to get away with your madness. And that madness becomes institutionalized very quickly.” I interviewed a former employee of a “sustainable fashion” start-up, initially about her involvement with The Class by Taryn Toomey (a “cult fitness” studio we’ll discuss a bit in part 5), and she told me the only reason she got involved with the workout “cult” in the first place was in response to finally quitting her hellish job. For the three years she worked at the fashion company, its physically stunning, psychologically sadistic leader prevented her from sleeping, earning a living wage, or maintaining outside relationships. Eventually the role sent her into a self-described nervous breakdown, and she left to do some soul-searching —that’s when she found The Class, which wound up being a wholly positive experience for her. “The workout group is nothing like my old job, which took over my entire existence,” she told me. “My boss expected us to treat her company as our religion. It actually kind of ruined my life for a while.” Millions of Americans have worked for a cultlike company at some point, and some of us have even suffered through an atmosphere as tyrannous as Amazon’s. On the illusive ladder of American capitalism, it’s just a few rungs up from a corporation that pays you not in money, but in lies . . . the star- spangled MLM. vi. I said before that an MLM is just a pyramid scheme that hasn’t gotten caught. So how do you catch one? To find the answer, let’s look back at the story of how the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) shut down its very first MLM. In the early 1970s, a shoddy cosmetics company perplexingly named Holiday Magic (it had nothing to do with annual festivities) began fielding a stampede of lawsuits. The business had been founded about a decade earlier by William Penn Patrick, the single most snake-oil-y gasbag of all the direct sales guys I’ve come across.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  You can still love someone and watch them from afar. Give yourself that permission so that you can just keep swimming. CHAPTER NINE THE SELF-CARE STRATEGIES THAT HELP YOU STAY AFLOAT When I met with Suma, a South Asian, Hindu, straight, cisgender woman, I felt a strong connection to her. Similar to my own experience with anxiety, her stress manifested physically. When she talked about feeling trapped in her body and being afraid of when the next unexpected panic attack would strike, I knew how she felt. Part of what upset Suma so much was that there wasn’t a direct trigger for her symptoms. There was no identifiable trauma, no phobias, no social anxiety—just pure anxiety that made her feel like her body was under attack. When there’s no clear cue, as in Suma’s case, this can be even more frustrating, as the unpredictability of symptoms can feel even more distressing. When this is the case, we often come back to the body and how we can restore it. For this reason, this chapter focuses on all the ways that we can improve our anxiety by lovingly caring for our bodies as a self-care practice. As much as the cognitive work makes a difference (which we’ve covered all throughout the book so far), we often have to reconnect to our bodies and minds through physical and emotional healing that goes beyond the textbook. Because so many of us are afraid of our bodies’ reactions to anxiety, rebuilding a relationship with our physicality—where we see our bodies as healers rather than tormentors—is essential. A key reminder: care for clients, including for you, is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Even though Westernized medicine can make it seem like therapy and psychiatry (aka medication) are the two best treatment routes, there are so many other modalities that hold possibilities for healing. While I’m all for evidence- based practices, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and the integration of pharmaceuticals, if it’s clinically indicated, I ultimately like to support what’s going to be most helpful for my client (as long as the client is not at immediate risk for harming themselves or someone else—this is when the most empirically supported interventions are warranted). In most cases, treatment includes the client making an informed decision about what will serve them best. That’s why I’d be remiss if I didn’t include this chapter for you. It’s crucial to consider everything available in your tool kit. Where to begin? We need to start by understanding what our bodies are trying to tell us.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  When the magician snapped his fingers, there was a flash, and a crack, and a puff of purple smoke; and at that the boys put their fingers to their lips, and whistled. I had seen - or felt as if I had seen - a thousand such acts; and I watched this one now, with my cigarette gripped hard between my lips, growing steadily more sick and more uncertain. I remembered sitting in my box at the Canterbury Palace, with my fluttering heart and my gloves with the bows: it seemed a time immeasurably distant and quaint. But, as I had used to do then, I clutched the sticky velvet of my seat, and gazed at where, with a hint of drooping rope and dusty floorboard, the stage gave way to the wings, and I thought of Kitty. She was there, somewhere, just beyond the edge of the curtain, perhaps straightening her costume - whatever that was; perhaps chatting with Walter or Flora; perhaps staring, as Billy-Boy told her of me - perhaps smiling, perhaps weeping, perhaps saying only, mildly, ‘Fancy that!’ - and then forgetting me... I thought all this, and the magician performed his final trick. There was another flash, and more smoke: the smoke drifted as far as the gallery, and left the entire crowd coughing, but cheering through their coughs. The curtain fell, there was another delay while the number was changed, and then a quiver of blue, white and amber, as the limes-man changed the filter across his beam. I had finished my cigarette, and now reached for another. This time, the boys in my row all saw me do it, so I held the case to them, and they each took a fag: ‘Very generous.’ I thought of Diana. Suppose the opera had ended, and she was waiting for me, cursing, beating her programme against her thigh? Suppose she went back to Felicity Place, without me? But then there came music, and the creak of the curtain. I looked at the stage - and Walter was on it. He seemed very large - much larger than I remembered. Perhaps he had grown fatter; perhaps his costume was a little padded. His whiskers he had teased with a comb, to make them stand out rather comically. He wore tartan peg-top trousers and a green velvet jacket; and on his head was a smoking-cap, in his pocket a pipe. Behind him, there was a cloth with a scene on it representing a parlour. Beside him was an armchair that he leaned on as he sang. He was quite alone. I had never seen him in costume and paint before. He was so unlike the figure I still saw, sometimes, in my dreams - the figure with the flapping shirt, the dampened beard, the hand on Kitty — that I looked at him, and frowned: my heart had barely twitched, to see him standing there.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  I stopped there, trying to read each of their faces. They seemed surprised at my outburst, though none of them was as surprised as me. I knew I was on precarious ground; I wasn’t close enough to any of them to be sure my play wouldn’t backfire. At that particular moment, though, I had no other hand to play. The boys outside moved on down the street. Shirley went to get herself more coffee. After what seemed like ten minutes, Will finally spoke up. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think we’ve talked about this same old mess long enough. Marty knows we got problems. That’s why he hired Barack. Ain’t that right, Barack?” I nodded cautiously. “Things still bad out here. Ain’t nothing gone away. So what I wanna know,” he said, turning to me, “is what we gonna do from here on out.” I told him the truth. “I don’t know, Will. You tell me.” Will smiled, and I sensed that the immediate crisis had passed. Angela agreed to give it another few months. I agreed to concentrate more time on Altgeld. We spent the next half hour talking strategy and handing out assignments. On our way out, Mona came up and took me by the arm. “You handled that meeting pretty good, Barack. Seems like you know what you’re doing.” “I don’t, Mona. I don’t have a clue.” She laughed. “Well, I promise I won’t tell nobody.” “I appreciate that, Mona. I sure do appreciate that.” That evening, I called Marty and told him some of what had happened. He wasn’t surprised: several of the suburban churches were already starting to drop out. He gave me a few suggestions for approaching the job issue in Altgeld, then advised me to pick up the pace of my interviews. “You’re going to need to find some new leaders, Barack. I mean, Will’s a terrific guy and all that, but do you really want to depend on him to keep the organization afloat?” I understood Marty’s point. As much as I liked Will, as much as I appreciated his support, I had to admit that some of his ideas were … well, eccentric. He liked to smoke reefer at the end of a day’s work (“If God didn’t want us to smoke the stuff, he wouldn’t have put it on this here earth”). He would walk out of any meeting that he decided was boring. Whenever I took him along to interview members of his church, he’d start arguing with them about their incorrect reading of Scripture, their choice of lawn fertilizer, or the constitutionality of the income tax (he felt that tax violated the Bill of Rights, and conscientiously refused to pay). “Maybe if you listened to other people a little more,” I had told him once, “they’d be more responsive.” Will had shaken his head. “I do listen. That’s the problem. Everything they say is wrong.”

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Getting him to eat felt like a moral triumph, the way having a strange dog come wagging up to you can make you proud, or how a random toddler choosing your knees to climb at a party can seem some innocent and, therefore, final testament to your good character. I was scraping the bottom of the carton when I noticed one side of Daddy’s jaw swollen up like a squirrel’s. He’d been stashing away the shrimp he couldn’t swallow. He’d leaned his far cheek into the pillow to hide it. The ragged gray wad of shrimp I spied between his lips was approaching the size of a golf ball. I cupped my palm under his lip and told him to spit it out. He’d choke falling asleep with that in there, and his eyelids had already drooped to half mast. In fact, while I stood there saying spit , he corked off entirely. His mouth lolled open another notch. The chewed-up shrimp had only to shift sideways about three quarters of an inch before his windpipe blocked off. I shook his shoulder: nothing. “Daddy!” I yelled; his eyes stayed closed, glued, sealed. I finally took aim with my index finger at his mouth’s breathing slot. Maybe he’d stay asleep, I thought, if I poked gently enough across his tongue, which felt warm and foreign as a slug. Then he bit me. Even before his eyes creaked open to thin slits, he clamped down with his slick gums hard enough to hold me by that finger. Like some terrier who’d caught me snitching his biscuit. We stood that way a minute—my finger in his mouth, his black eyes glaring out with no glimmer of recognition. And when I grasped that iron-boned jaw with my other hand as you might grab a horse’s to force it to take a bit, his good hand wrapped around my bicep so tight that in the morning I found the bruised imprint of each finger. Also the next morning, I overheard the visiting nurse asking what in God’s name had Daddy got in his mouth. But he just gave a loose-shouldered shrug, all the while staring at the wall like she’d lost her mind while she scooped the old shrimp out with a tongue depressor. The only other evening I spent alone with Daddy I had to get drunk for. Lecia and the Rice Baron had taken me to their country club summer dance, where I’d stomped through the Cotton-Eyed Joe with various doctors and insurance salesmen, intermittently downing whole goblets of a sinister rum punch. A fellow I called Gomez finally drove me home in a convertible black as the Bat-mobile. Daddy’s eyes lit up when I peeked in on him. “Hey, Pokey,” he said, his words clear as ice. Then, “You fun?” Mother had left the TV on with the volume cranked down. Why I’ll never know, for that summer the local station played nothing after midnight but reruns of old dog races.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The man told me to show my ears in the photo, tucking my hair back with one broad thumb. His hands were like my father’s: bruised nailbeds, knuckles loose as screws. I felt guilty for summoning my father through some other man’s body. We packed in the dark, my mother cursing my father’s cousins, their factory, my father, who must be dead, my father, who must have forgotten us, my father, who hadn’t called back, my father, who must have fished himself another family, another woman whose knees he prayed between. My brother begged her to turn on the lights, but she didn’t want us to see her face, its increasing resemblance to fear. I pretended we lived underground and had lightbulb-heads and were packing for our first trip to the surface. On the plane, I slept with my head leaning against my mother’s and woke with the sun running like a yolk across the window. Buildings toothpicked the sky. It was so humid I could gargle the air and spit it. In our hotel room, my brother and I slept on the floor, my mother on the skin-colored bed. The sheets were so thin they let light into our dreams. Our shadows sharked across the floor. The first night in Jiangsu, I dreamed my mother was kneeling over me, one of her hands balled inside my mouth and the other pressed over my nose, caging my breath in my chest. I woke believing that my tongue had dried into a cricket and leapt out of my mouth, and I crawled to every dust-clotted corner of the room searching for it. In the morning, we took a taxi to the brim of the city, where my father and his two cousins managed the slot-machine factory. Clouds mopping up the sky’s spilled light. We drove down a half-paved street with apartment buildings so tall I thought they’d been built from the sky down. My father was the rain that day. We watched from the taxi as my mother entered each apartment building on the street, repeating my father’s name until someone told us he had left. The slot-machine manufacturer had halted production months ago, and most of the workers had been deported from the city at night, carrying nothing but their teeth. They guessed my father had gone home to the city where he was born, a city west of every named body of water. We took the overnight train to Anhui. My brother and I wanted to go home, our boogers black after two hours of walking outside and breathing. We asked why the boys who begged outside the hotels all had the same parts of their bodies missing: a left hand or both feet or tongues.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had to place a hand before my lips so as not to appear an idiot, smiling to myself as if at nothing.Just as I was about to step into the street, I heard my name called. I turned, and saw Tony, crossing the lobby with his arm raised to catch my eye. It was a relief to have a friend, at last, to smile at. I took the hand away, and grinned like a monkey.‘Hey, hey,’ he said breathlessly when he reached my side, ‘someone’s merry, and I know why! How come girls never look so gay as that, when I give them roses?’ I blushed again, and returned my fingers to my lips, but said nothing. Tony smirked.‘I’ve got a message for you,’ he said then. ‘Someone to see you.’ I raised my eyebrows; I thought perhaps Alice or Freddy were here, come to meet me. Tony’s smirk broadened. ‘Miss Butler,’ he said, ‘would like a word.’My own grin faded at once. ‘A word?’ I said. ‘Miss Butler? With me?’‘That’s right. She asked Ike, the fly-man, who was the girl that sat in the box every night, on her own, and Ike said you was a pal of mine, and to ask me. So she did. And I told her. And now she wants to see you.’‘What for? Oh, Tony, what on earth for? What did you tell her?’ I caught hold of his arm and gripped it hard.‘Nothing, except the truth -’ I gave his arm a twist. The truth was terrible. I didn’t want her to know about the shivering and the whispering, the flame and the streaming light. Tony prised my fingers from his sleeve, and held my hand. ‘Just that you like her,’ he said simply. ‘Now will you come along, or what?’I did not know what to say. So I said nothing, but let him lead me away from the great glass doors with the blue, cool, Canterbury night behind them, past the archway that led to the stalls, and the staircase to the gallery, towards an alcove in the far corner of the foyer, with a curtain across it, and a rope before it, and a sign swinging from the rope, marked Private. Chapter 2 [image "004" file=wate_9781101078198_oeb_004_r1.jpg] I had been back stage at the Palace with Tony once or twice before, but only in the daytime, when the hall was dim and quite deserted. Now the corridors along which I walked with him were full of light and noise.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The heat mirages our morning: the sun a severed head, the sky bleeding out from it. By the time we park at another motel, we’ve hallucinated a vulture plucking at a baby’s rib cage (Ma), a Tayal spear wearing a pink wig (Jie), a military of small men dressed in furry purple vests (Ba), and a shark with toddler legs (me). At the motel, we fall asleep side by side by side by side on the queen bed with camouflage sheets. _ Thirst thorns my throat. When I cough myself awake, I leave the bed and walk alone to the ice machine in the hall, shoveling jewels of it into my mouth with my bare hands, choking on the cold. I feel an urge to find the car and pet its muzzle, to confirm we’ve got a way to leave. The parking lot looks like an iced-over lake and I’m afraid to step onto it. Our eggplant car is still there, still hot to the touch like a fever. The car parked beside it—too close—is also bruise-purple, but unlike ours there’s no dent in the side, no piss-jars on the dashboard, no pigeon pancaked on the windshield. The bumper’s been brushed like teeth and the moon reads me the license plate. TEXAS . I should say: My sister doesn’t star in this part of the story, but I need you to know I can see her always, see her face in the reflection of the window like it’s the moon she’s become. But I don’t listen when the moon shakes its head, tells me to turn back. I go closer to the car. At first I think I hear the engine revving, but there’s no one in the front seat. Then I look to the backseat and there’s a boy on his back, mouth open, brandishing his tongue and snoring so loud, I think it’s the sky making that sound. I step back from the car when I see him wake up. He’s Chinese. The car and his beardlessness and his eyes halving open like seeds. He swings out of the backseat. Asks my name. Asks in guoyu: _______________? I tell it. I speak with Ma’s accent, wince at how millet-whipped and field-born it sounds next to his, how full of oxshit my mouth is. He asks if I’m alone. He slides his hand into his pocket and I duck, but he takes out a cigarette. I say my name. I say no. He asks if I am Chinese. I say we’re speaking Chinese. He laughs and his teeth are bastard stars, brighter than anything the night owns, no lineage to their light. I sit in his lap in the backseat. He kisses me a collar of bruises, a shadow to clasp around my neck.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When we lowered the cage into the 口 , it took an hour for the hole to heal around it. Beneath the dirt, we heard the high whine of bars being wrenched, teethed apart, scoured of rust. I was worried about the shadow-bird suffocating while it was buried so far beneath the sky, but Ben said it was worth killing what was inside. We’d already sacrificed an entire goose. I told her not to remind me: These letters had too many casualties already. The 口 didn’t open for four days, and I told Ben to be patient: Metal was metabolized more slowly than meat. Ben said I should tell the holes a story: They’d open their ears to listen, and then we could reach into them and search. But I said I didn’t have any stories, especially if they were about Ama. She was the voice and I was the ear. Then tell one of your ama’s stories, Ben said. Every other night, my mother used the new landline to call Agong, but Ama was the one who picked up. Agong’s mind had unmarried all its memories, and sometimes he called to tell us the Japanese were invading and we should all find a well to hide in. The nights Ama made him sleep on the sidewalk, he’d duck under a chili bush and slug into the soil, awaiting whatever army was morning. When I was the one who picked up the phone, Ama gave me marriage advice: No mainland men, she said. Agong and my father were born in neighboring provinces, and look how they were now: My husband is gone in the head and your father is gone everywhere else. She said men were synonymous with missing. Then she told me to ward off boys by holding a skinned ginger root between my knees while I slept. I stole the ginger from my mother’s cabinet. It swelled with my sweat and chafed me hairless, but I ground myself against it until my crotch burned and it prickled to piss the next day. My mother said Ama was corrupting me, but the cure worked. Boys in the neighborhood veered their bikes away from me, and even my brother said his tongue burned whenever he spoke to me. Other times, Ama told me about stealing the neighbor’s chickens, slaughtering and skinning and cooking them so that there was no evidence of the crime. Ama was the one who taught me the laws of ownership: It’s yours if you were the one to birth it, she said. Or the one to kill it.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Next day, rather appropriately, I got my hair cut off, and changed my name. The hair I had barbered at a house in Battersea, by the same theatrical hairdresser who cut Kitty’s. He worked on me for an hour, while she sat and watched; and at the end of that time I remember he held a glass to his apron and said warningly: ‘Now, you will squeal when you see it - I never cropped a girl before who didn’t squeal at the first look,’ and I trembled in a sudden panic. But when he turned the glass to show me, I only smiled to see the transformation he had made. He had not clipped the hair as short as Kitty‘s, but had left it long and falling, Bohemian-like, quite to my collar; and here, without the weight of the plait to pull it flat and lank, it sprang into a slight, surprising curl. Upon the locks which threatened to tumble over my brow he had palmed a little macassar-oil, which turned them sleek as cat’s fur, and gold as a ring. When I fingered them - when I turned and tilted my head - I felt my cheeks grow crimson. The man said then, ‘You see, you will find it queer,’ and he showed me how I might wear my severed plait, as Kitty wore hers, to disguise his barbering. I said nothing; but it was not with regret that I had blushed. I had blushed because my new, shorn head, my naked neck, felt saucy. I had blushed because - just as I had done when I first pulled on a pair of trousers - I had felt myself stir, and grow warm, and want Kitty. Indeed, I seemed to want her more and more, the further into boyishness I ventured. Kitty herself, however, though she also smiled when the barber displayed me, smiled more broadly when the plait was re-affixed. ‘That’s more like it,’ she said, when I stood and brushed my skirts down. ‘What a fright you looked in short hair and a frock!’ Back at Ginevra Road we found Walter waiting for us, and Mrs Dendy dishing up lunch; and it was here that I was given a new name, to match my bold new crop. For our debut at Camberwell we had thought that our ordinary names would do as well as any, and had been billed by the chairman as ‘Kitty Butler and Nancy Astley’. Now, however, we were a hit: Walter’s manager friend had offered us a four-week contract, and needed to know the names he should have printed on the posters.