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 Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  If you say, “I want to run sixteen miles a week” or “I’d like to raise my GPA by half a grade in the next semester,” you’ll make more progress toward achieving those things than if you say, “I’d like to run more” or “I want to try harder in school.” But just because there are a lot of benefits to setting goals doesn’t mean that there isn’t a downside to them as well. As you might already suspect, clearly defined finish lines should come with a warning: Danger, you may experience escalation of commitment. Maurice Schweitzer of the Wharton School and Lisa Ordóñez, then of the University of Arizona, along with several other scholars including Max Bazerman, Adam Galinsky, and Bambi Douma, coauthored a number of papers making the case that goals have a dark side. They point to numerous negative consequences of goal setting, several of which interfere with rational quitting behavior. In particular, they note the pass-fail nature of goals, their inflexibility, and how pursuing them leads to ignoring other opportunities that might be available. The point the authors are echoing is that, while goals do help us to be grittier, grit isn’t always a virtue. As you already know, grit is good for getting you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, but grit also gets you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile. In part, what makes goals effective is that they get you to focus on the finish line and motivate you to keep going. But the duality is that goals also keep you from quitting in a bad situation because they focus you on the finish line and motivate you to keep going. Why? In part, because they are graded as pass-fail. To understand why the pass-fail nature of goals can impede progress and increase escalation of commitment, consider this thought experiment. Which feels worse? If you never try to run a marathon, or if you make the attempt and have to stop after sixteen miles? In the first case, you never train for a marathon, never start one, and never finish one. You run zero miles. In the second case, you decide to try, you train, you start, and sixteen miles in you have to quit. I think that we all share the intuition that the latter case would feel worse, even though that version of you trained for distance running and actually ran 16 miles of a 26.2-mile race, compared with the version of you that never got off the couch. The reason it feels worse is that if you don’t try, if you never start the race, there is no failing to reach the finish line because you never set that as a goal for yourself in the first place. The pass-fail nature of goals impedes your progress because it stops you from starting things for fear of being unable to complete them.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  There’s a choice to be made. “I don’t understand,” I tell Mary. We sit in the darkening living room, smoking and sipping our cups of whiskey. Inside my head I keep thinking Uh-oh, over and over. I’m in a rattled condition; I can’t calm down and figure this out. “I think we should brace ourselves in case something bad has happened,” I say to Mary. She nods. “Just in case. It won’t hurt to be braced.” She nods again. I realize that I don’t know what braced means. You hear it all the time but that doesn’t mean it makes sense. Whiskey is supposed to be bracing but what it is is awful. I want either tea or beer, no whiskey. Mary nods and heads into the kitchen. Within an hour there are seven women in the dim living room, sitting. Switching back and forth between CNN and the special reports by the local news. There is something terrifying about the quality of the light and the way voices are echoing in the room. The phone never stops ringing, ever since the story hit the national news. Physics, University of Iowa, dead people. Names not yet released. Everyone I’ve ever known is checking in to see if I’m still alive. California calls, New York calls, Florida calls, Ohio calls twice. All the guests at a party my husband is having call, one after the other, to ask how I’m doing. Each time, fifty times, I think it might be Chris and then it isn’t. It occurs to me once that I could call his house and talk to him directly, find out exactly what happened. Fear that his mother would answer prevents me from doing it. By this time I am getting reconciled to the fact that Shan, Gang Lu, and Dwight were killed. Also an administrator and her office assistant. The Channel 9 newslady keeps saying there are six dead and two in critical condition. They’re not saying who did the shooting. The names will be released at nine o’clock. Eventually I sacrifice all of them except Chris and Bob; they are the ones in critical condition, which is certainly not hopeless. At some point I go into the study to get away from the terrible dimness in the living room, all those eyes, all that calmness in the face of chaos. The collie tries to stand up but someone stops her with a handful of Fritos. The study is small and cold after I shut the door, but more brightly lit than the living room. I can’t remember what anything means. The phone rings and I pick up the extension and listen. My friend Michael is calling from Illinois for the second time. He asks Shirley if I’m holding up okay. Shirley says it’s hard to tell. I go back into the living room. The newslady breaks in at nine o’clock, and of course they drag it out as long as they can.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  because we do not see the connection between problems in our lives and our constant misreading of people’s moods and intentions and the endless missed opportunities that accrue from this. The first step, then, is the most important: to realize you have a remarkable social tool that you are not cultivating. The best way to see this is to try it out. Stop your incessant interior monologue and pay deeper attention to people. Attune yourself to the shifting moods of individuals and the group. Get a read on each person’s particular psychology and what motivates them. Try to take their perspective, enter their world and value system. You will suddenly become aware of an entire world of nonverbal behavior you never knew existed, as if your eyes could now suddenly see ultraviolet light. Once you sense this power, you will feel its importance and awaken to new social possibilities. I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. . . . I myself become the wounded person. —Walt Whitman 3 See Through People’s Masks The Law of Role-playing People tend to wear the mask that shows them off in the best possible light—humble, confident, diligent. They say the right things, smile, and seem interested in our ideas. They learn to conceal their insecurities and envy. If we take this appearance for reality, we never really know their true feelings, and on occasion we are blindsided by their sudden resistance, hostility, and manipulative actions. Fortunately, the mask has cracks in it. People continually leak out their true feelings and unconscious desires in the nonverbal cues they cannot completely control—facial expressions, vocal inflections, tension in the body, and nervous gestures. You must master this language by transforming yourself into a superior reader of men and women. Armed with this knowledge, you can take the proper defensive measures. On the other hand, since appearances are what people judge you by, you must learn how to present the best front and play your role to maximum effect. The Second Language One morning in August 1919 seventeen-year-old Milton Erickson, future pioneer in hypnotherapy and one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, awoke to discover parts of his body suddenly paralyzed. Over the next few days the paralysis spread. He was soon diagnosed with polio, a near epidemic at the time. As he lay in bed, he heard his mother in another room discussing his case with two specialists the family had called in. Assuming Erickson was asleep, one of the doctors told her, “The boy will be dead by morning.” His mother came into his room, clearly trying to disguise her grief, unaware that her son had overhead the conversation. Erickson kept asking her to move the chest of drawers near his bed over here, over there. She thought he was delusional, but he had his reasons: he wanted to distract her from her anguish, and he wanted the mirror on the chest positioned just right. If he

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  a law of human nature, when we go so far in our denial, the paradoxical effect takes hold of us in the negative direction, making our life more constrained and deathlike. We became aware of our mortality quite early on in childhood, and this filled us with an anxiety that we cannot remember but that was very real and visceral. Such anxiety cannot be wished away or denied. It sits in us as adults in a powerfully latent form. When we choose to repress the thought of death, our anxiety is only made stronger by our not confronting the source of it. The slightest incident or uncertainty about the future will tend to stir up this anxiety and even make it chronic. To fight this, we will tend to narrow down the scope of our thoughts and activities; if we don’t leave our comfort zones in what we think and do, then we can make life rather predictable and feel less vulnerable to anxiety. Certain addictions to foods or stimulants or forms of entertainment will have a similar dulling effect. If we take this far enough, we become increasingly self-absorbed and less dependent on people, who often stir up our anxieties with their unpredictable behavior. We can describe the contrast between life and death in the following manner: Death is absolute stillness, without movement or change except decay. In death we are separated from others and completely alone. Life on the other hand is movement, connection to other living things, and diversity of life forms. By denying and repressing the thought of death, we feed our anxieties and become more deathlike from within—separated from other people, our thinking habitual and repetitive, with little overall movement and change. On the other hand, the familiarity and closeness with death, the ability to confront the thought of it has the paradoxical effect of making us feel more alive, as the story of Flannery O’Connor well illustrates. By connecting to the reality of death, we connect more profoundly to the reality and fullness of life. By separating death from life and repressing our awareness of it, we do the opposite. What we require in the modern world is a way to create for ourselves the positive paradoxical effect. The following is an attempt to help us accomplish this, by forging a practical philosophy for transforming the consciousness of our mortality into something productive and life enhancing. A Philosophy of Life Through Death The problem for us humans is that we are aware of our mortality, but we are afraid to take this awareness further. It is like we are at the shore of a vast ocean and stop ourselves from exploring it, even turning our back to it. The purpose of our consciousness is to always take it as far as we can. That is the source of our power as a species, what we are called to do. The philosophy we are adopting

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Not so long ago, the desire to feel passionate about one’s husband would have been considered a contradiction in terms. Historically, these two realms of life were organized separately—marriage on one side and passion most likely somewhere else, if anywhere at all. The concept of romantic love, which came about toward the end of the nineteenth century, brought them together for the first time. The central place of sex in marriage, and the heightened expectations surrounding it, took decades more to arrive. The social and cultural transformations of the past fifty years have redefined modern coupledom. Alan and Adele are beneficiaries of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, women’s liberation, the availability of birth control pills, and the emergence of the gay movement. With the widespread use of the pill, sex became liberated from reproduction. Feminism and gay pride fought to define sexual expression as an inalienable right. Anthony Giddens describes this transition in The Transformation of Intimacy when he explains that sexuality became a property of the self, one that we develop, define, and renegotiate throughout our lives. Today, our sexuality is an open-ended personal project; it is part of who we are, an identity, and no longer merely something we do. It has become a central feature of intimate relationships, and sexual satisfaction, we believe, is our due. The era of pleasure has arrived. These developments, in conjunction with postwar economic prosperity, have contributed to a period of unmatched freedom and individualism. People today are encouraged to pursue personal fulfillment and sexual gratification, and to break free of the constraints of a social and family life heretofore defined by duty and obligation. But trailing in the shadow of this manifest extravagance lies a new kind of gnawing insecurity. The extended family, the community, and religion may indeed have limited our freedom, sexual and otherwise, but in return they offered us a much-needed sense of belonging. For generations, these traditional institutions provided order, meaning, continuity, and social support. Dismantling them has left us with more choices and fewer restrictions than ever. We are freer, but also more alone. As Giddens describes it, we have become ontologically more anxious. We bring to our love relationships this free-floating anxiety. Love, beyond providing emotional sustenance, compassion, and companionship, is now expected to act as a panacea for existential aloneness as well. We look to our partner as a bulwark against the vicissitudes of modern life. It is not that our human insecurity is greater today than in earlier times. In fact, quite the contrary may be true. What is different is that modern life has deprived us of our traditional resources, and has created a situation in which we turn to one person for the protection and emotional connections that a multitude of social networks used to provide. Adult intimacy has become overburdened with expectations.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  My belief, reinforced by twenty years of practice, is that in the course of establishing security, many couples confuse love with merging. This mix-up is a bad omen for sex. To sustain an élan toward the other, there must be a synapse to cross. Eroticism requires separateness. In other words, eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. In order to commune with the one we love, we must be able to tolerate this void and its pall of uncertainties. With this paradox to chew on, consider another: desire is often accompanied by feelings that would seem to cramp love’s style. Aggression, jealousy, and discord come to mind, for starters. I will explore the cultural pressures that shape domesticated sex, making it fair, equal, and safe, but also producing many bored couples. I’d like to suggest that we might have more exciting, playful, even frivolous sex if we were less constrained by our cultural penchant for democracy in the bedroom. To buttress this notion, I take the reader on a detour into social history. We’ll see that contemporary couples invest more in love than ever before; yet, in a cruel twist of fate it is this very model of love and marriage that is behind the exponential rise in the divorce rate. Here it behooves us to question whether traditional marital structures can ever meet the modern mandate, especially when “till death do us part” entails a life span double that of past centuries. The magic elixir that’s meant to make this possible is intimacy. We’ll get to the bottom of this by looking through various lenses, but here it’s worth pointing out that the stereotype of women as entirely romantic and men as sexual conquistadors should have been dispelled a long time ago. The same goes for any ideas that cast women as longing for love, essentially faithful, and domestically inclined, and men as biologically non-monogamous and fearful of intimacy. As a result of social and economic changes that have occurred in recent western history, traditional gender lines have been circumvented, and these qualities are now seen in both men and women. While stereotypes can hold considerable truth, they fall short of capturing the complexities of contemporary relationships. I seek a more androgynous approach to love. As a couples therapist, I have inverted the usual therapeutic priorities. In my field we are taught to inquire about the state of the union first and then ask how this is manifested in the bedroom. Seen this way, the sexual relationship is a metaphor for the overall relationship. The underlying assumption is that if we can improve the relationship, the sex will follow. But in my experience, this is often not the case.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  But Marshall Sahlins’ theoretical survey of a wide range of anthropological literature on the topic of “kinship” once more would make it plain that, in fact, most human beings have not understood themselves to exist as someone in particular in this manner. While the specific features of a given person’s “flesh” obviously would play some role in defining who that person is, the same flesh has not always or even usual y determined this person’s operative or governing identity in a given social context. That is why, to cut to the chase, Daniel Boyarin in A Radical Jew essential y misconstrues, in my opinion, the significance of Paul’s discourse about himself as a Jew in Christ. Because Boyarin basical y equates the later rabbinical emphasis on the enduring opacity of the written sign aka the letter of the law including the practice of circumcision with a decidedly (post-) modern focus on the physical body as the locus for having a specific social identity together with other practices of signification, Boyarin has no choice but to understand Paul’s displacement of the telling nature of his own flesh as the result of his adoption of a Hellenistic “universalizing” hermeneutic. But Paul’s own sense of himself as someone who obviously was Ioudaios is not unlike Boyarin’s account of a “carnal Israel.” 23 For both Paul and Boyarin, being Ioudaios is a function of the flesh. Where Boyarin and Paul would differ from one another is Boyarin’s apparent assumption that such an embodied identity—being “Jewish”—cannot coexist with another that claims “in Christ there is no Jew or Greek.” For Boyarin, it seems that there can only be the truth of the flesh, viz. its refusal, whereas, for Paul, there would be both that truth and another that neither contested nor observed it.24 Why does Boyarin insist as he does—both traditional y and nervously—on the role of the flesh for being Jewish? There is likely more than one reason for this emphasis. What makes it traditional is the degree to which Boyarin reiterates what the rabbinical reasoning enshrined in the Talmudim actual y teaches. Boyarin’s nervousness in reaffirming this perspective has everything to do with the way in which that reasoning now inevitably becomes entangled with the recent history of the Jews—both before and after 1948—in which such a definition of being “Jewish” has tended to support a view of the Jews as constituting a separate “race” of human being.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  take-profit order would tell them to, in order to lock up a sure win, regardless of whether continuing to hold that position would be a winning decision. When they have a win on paper, they don’t have any interest in recruiting luck into the equation any further, risking losing gains that they could put in their pocket. (I hope it’s becoming very clear how bad the advice “quit while you’re ahead” really is, because it’s encouraging our natural tendency to be irrational in these situations already.) On the other hand, when traders are losing, they cancel their stop-loss orders, preferring to gamble that the position will recover and they won’t have to turn their loss on paper into one that’s realized, a decision that carries with it the risk of accumulating bigger and bigger negative returns. Our goal, obviously, should be to persist when we have a positive expected value, regardless of whether we have already won or lost to a prior course of action. Because these decisions are made under uncertainty, we rarely know for sure whether sticking or quitting is the best choice. In the same way that it’s easier for the cab drivers to see if they’ve met a daily goal, it’s easier for any of us to see whether we’re ahead or behind so we use that signal to determine whether or not to persevere. The result is that we’ll quit when we’re ahead, even if we’re giving up good opportunities to win more. If we’re behind, we don’t want to quit, even if persisting—to try to get to the other side of zero—is more likely to make things worse. I saw this routinely in poker. When most players were offered the slightest pretense to quit a game when they were ahead, they couldn’t get their chips off the table and over to the cashier fast enough. But it’s also true that when they were in the losses, they were superglued to the seat. Many times, I saw otherwise skilled poker players lose money in a game and refuse to quit when they were drunk, tired, angry, or just not capable of playing well. This quit-while-you’re-ahead strategy costs poker players real money, causing them to minimize the hours when they’re playing well, because that’s correlated with winning, and maximize the hours they’re playing poorly, because that’s correlated with losing. Make no mistake, this is costing you money too. Whether it’s in the stock market or some other investment, this behavioral tendency is affecting your

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  My aunt runs her thumb over his bald spot. “The paint’s wearing off his head,” she says definitively. “Throw him out and get her a new one.” Thus spake Bernice. “No,” I say, shaking my head vigorously. I get right up in Aunt Bernie’s face. I shake my head again, harder. She holds Hal out of my reach. I do one short bloodcurdling scream and she hands him over. My mother, the one who is not taking credit for the bald spot on his head, lights a cigarette nervously and exhales. Bernie is the oldest of five brothers and sisters. My own big sister Linda is playing jacks on the kitchen floor and every time I move she calls out She’s getting my jacks . My mother believes her. One more time and I’m going to be sat right down in a chair. Aunt Bernie is still waiting for a reply. Her eyebrows are in the middle of her forehead. “Listen,” my mother tells her. “She will scream until we’re all in the asylum, you included.” Bernie snorts, takes a cigarette and lights it. Smoke pours out her nose. “She may run you,” Bernie says dryly, “but she doesn’t run me.” Her own daughters are in the living room standing in separate corners. The crime was cursing. It’s time for Hal’s thumb to be sucked. “She’s got that thing in her mouth,” Bernie says. “Don’t put that in your mouth,” my mother tells me in a stagey, I’m-the-mother voice. I stare at her until she reaches over and gives his hand a yank. It doesn’t move. “She’s biting on it,” Bernie says. “I don’t know what’s got into her today,” my mother says nervously. She lights another cigarette and gives me a desperate glare. Linda’s rubber ball bounces one, two, three, four times. Hal’s hand drops back down to his side. “Okay then,” my mother says. When they put me down for my nap Bernie looks around the bedroom and says she doesn’t know why they’ve got me in a crib. “It’s either a crib or a leash,” my mother says shortly. When they leave I cry the minimum amount and then put my feet through the bars. Hal is lying with his head on the pillow and the blanket up to his chin. I put him down at the bottom where he belongs and then I go down there with him. The ceiling is white and has sparkles just like in the bathroom. If I pee in this bed it doesn’t matter but I don’t have to pee right now. I put my face next to Hal’s and close my eyes. The ceiling sparkles appear against my eyelids, like stars. Hal’s got his arm under me. In my sleep I show my girl cousins how to tie shoes, just like my dad showed me. Make a bunny, cross over, push one ear through, and pull. It’s supposed to be a bow but it unravels, just like always.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 33. Legal scholar Ruthann Robson calls this a “dual theoretical demand,” and adds, “the demand, of course, is in many cases more than dual. As Black lesbian poet Pat Parker writes in her poem For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend: ‘The first thing you do is forget that i’m Black / Second, you must never forget that i’m Black.’”34. It should be noted that Alice Mitchell was hardly the first woman to create such public confusion over her gender as it related to both her passions and her shocking act of violence. In 1879, when Lily Duer shot her friend Ella Hearn for rejecting her love, a headline in the National Police Gazette read in part, “A Female Romeo: Her Terrible Love for a Chosen Friend of Her Own Alleged Sex [emphasis mine] Assumes a Passionate Character.” Sometime before the murder, a witness reported an exchange in which Lily said, “Ella, why will you not walk out with me? Do you not love me?” “Oh, yes, I love you,” Ella responded, “but I am afraid of you.”35. It should be noted that the word battered (as in: battered wife, battered woman, battered lesbian), while woefully imprecise and covering only a fraction of abuse experiences, was the preferred term in this era. It is, of course, a specific legal term with specific legal implications, and I have never thought of myself as a “battered” anyone. The fact that the expression persisted for so long, despite the fact that the lesbian conversation in particular focused on many kinds of abuse that were not explicitly physical, is the perfect example of how inadequate this conversation has been—discouraging useful subtlety. (Other ways in which the conversation remains inadequate: devaluing the narratives of nonwhite victims, insufficiently addressing nonmonosexuality, rarely taking noncisgendered people into account.)36. In a 1991 article about a white lesbian in Boise, Idaho, who successfully used “battered-wife syndrome” as a defense for killing her abusive girlfriend, the reporter emphasized that the defendant was a “diminutive 4-foot-10.” The prosecutor in the case speculated that the reason for the acquittal was that the abused wife “seemed more heterosexual,” and the abuser “more ‘lesbian.’”Dream House as UndeadI think about Debra Reid so much—incarcerated, unpardoned—how powerless she must have felt. Even after Jackie was gone, she was still there. When Debra was on trial for her murder, Debra’s brother brought her a dress to wear. Her first thought was, “Oh God, Jackie going to kill me if she saw me with this one.”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  In those months, hazy from lack of sleep and raw with anxiety, I felt like a calculator with someone’s finger over the solar panel—fading in and out, threatening to shut off altogether. Joel, though, seemed to run on his own hunger. I wanted to be like that. I wept the last time I saw him. I was going to college, but I didn’t want to be so far apart. He assured me he was just a phone call away. “Plus,” he said, “DC isn’t that far. Maybe I can come visit.” At school, I had my first kiss, my first grope in the dark. I felt strange afterward: elated and sad and content and like an adult. When it was over, I went back to my dorm room. It was after midnight. I took my phone into the hallway so my roommate wouldn’t overhear, and I called Joel. He asked me what had happened. I told him, one detail after another. He didn’t refuse any of them; just listened until I was done. “What should I do?” I asked him, the question slipping out of my mouth before I could stop it. Until that moment I’d been, secretly, excited, bolstered with the newness of a man’s stubble across my face, hands that went where I wanted them to. But in Joel’s silence, which carried a whiff of disapproval, I recalled the sin of it. For the first time, he didn’t seem to know what to say. Where there had always been smooth advice that felt right and good and clear, now there was reticence. Hesitation. “Ask for forgiveness,” he said, finally. A few weeks later, Joel stopped responding to my calls. I went about my normal routine, but his silence hovered around me. Was he angry about my hookup? Was he—jealous? I panicked. Maybe he had lost interest in me. Maybe I’d crossed some invisible line, committed some unforgivable act. I sent him a few emails, spaced at what I hoped were ordinary intervals. He didn’t respond. A few weeks later, I was sitting in my dorm room on my brown corduroy comforter, trying to decide whether to go to the dining hall, when my phone rang. I told my roommate to go ahead; I’d follow in a second. My mother’s voice was restrained, slightly chilly. “Pastor Jones has been fired from the church,” she said. “What?” “The rumor is, he was having an affair with a parishioner,” she said. “A woman he was giving marriage counseling to.”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as the First Thanksgiving You arrive in Bloomington just before the holiday to learn that she has invited her entire graduate cohort over for Thanksgiving. 24 You stare at her in disbelief. “All of them?” you ask. You count the number of people in your head. “But you have, like, two chairs,” you say. “Only one small table. You haven’t even really unpacked.” She does not say anything. “You told them it’s potluck style, right? They’re bringing their own side dishes, and we just have to do, like, a bird or something?” “No,” she says. “No. That would be rude. We are taking care of people.” “Who is going to take care of us?” you say. “I’m broke.” “Don’t be such a fucking bitch,” she says. This is how you find yourself at the Kroger’s at 11 p.m., alone, picking up groceries and trying to remember how you ended up there. You pay for all of it. Back at the house you discover that she has only a handful of pans, too, and you defrost the Cornish game hens and baste them in oil and salt and pepper, and at some point you realize you’ll have to cut them in half. You’re not normally squeamish about meat but you find yourself balking at the idea of cracking through those backbones, pressing glistening spatchcocks down onto the aluminum foil. “Help me,” you say. She takes off her shirt and bra and cuts each of them with a pair of kitchen shears. The blades bite and open the birds from thigh to throat. The sound of it is terrible. It reminds you of the time you were ten feet from a lion in South Africa and it was tearing the skin off a zebra leg, and the caveman part of your brain was screaming RUN RUN RUN . She pulls out the spines and turns the birds over; presses them into the pan like open books. You are still cooking when people arrive, still cooking as people are laughing and eating off paper plates standing up and not quite looking at you. 24 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Type C745, Taboo: entertaining strangers.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Forge a battle-tested group. It is essential that you know your group well, its strengths and weaknesses and the maximum you can expect of it. But appearances can be deceiving. In their day-to-day work, people can seem motivated, connected, and productive. But add some stress or pressure or even a crisis, and suddenly you see a whole other side of them. Some begin to think more about themselves and disconnect from the group spirit; others become far too anxious and infect the group with their fears. Part of the reality you need to be on top of is the actual strength of your team. You want to be able to gauge the relative inner toughness of people before you are thrust into a crisis. Give various members some relatively challenging tasks or shorter deadlines than usual, and see how they respond. Some people rise to the occasion and even do better under such stress; consider such people a treasure to hoard. Lead the team itself into an action that is novel and slightly riskier than usual. Observe carefully how individuals react to the slight amount of chaos and uncertainty that unfold from this. Of course, in the aftermath of any crises or failures, use such moments as a way to review people’s inner strength or lack of it. You can tolerate a few fearful types who have other virtues, but not too many. In the end, you want a group that has been through a few wars, dealt with them reasonably well, and now is battle-tested. They do not wilt at the sign of new obstacles and in fact welcome them. With such a group, you can slowly expand the limits of what you can ask of them, and the members feel a powerful upward pull to meet challenges and prove themselves. Such a group can move mountains. — Finally, we like to focus on the psychological health of individuals, and how perhaps a therapist could fix any problems they might have. What we don’t consider, however, is that being in a dysfunctional group can actually make individuals unstable and neurotic. The opposite is true as well: by participating in a high-functioning reality group, we can make ourselves healthy and whole. Such experiences are memorable and life-changing. We learn the value of cooperating on a higher level, of seeing our fate as intertwined with those around us. We develop greater empathy. We gain confidence in our own abilities, which such a group rewards. We feel connected to reality. We are brought into the upward pull of the group, realizing our social nature on the high level it was intended for. It is our duty as enlightened humans to create as many such groups as possible, making society healthier in the process. Madness is something rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages it is the rule. —Friedrich Nietzsche 15 Make Them Want to Follow You The Law of Fickleness Although styles of leadership change with the times, one constant

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  the emotion, the stronger it gets, which makes us focus even more on it, and so on and so forth. Our minds tunnel into the emotion, and everything reminds us of our anger or excitement. We become reactive. Because we are unable to bear the tension this brings, high-grade emotion usually culminates in some rash action with disastrous consequences. In the middle of such an attack we feel possessed, as if a second, limbic self has taken over. It is best to be aware of these factors so that you can stop the mind from tunneling and prevent the releasing action that you will always come to regret. You should also be aware of high-grade irrationality in others, to either get out of their way or help bring them back to reality. Trigger Points from Early Childhood In early childhood we were at our most sensitive and vulnerable. Our relationship to our parents had a much greater impact on us the further back in time we go. The same could be said for any early powerful experience. These vulnerabilities and wounds remain buried deep within our minds. Sometimes we try to repress the memory of these influences, if they happen to be negative—great fears or humiliations. Sometimes, however, they are associated with positive emotions, experiences of love and attention that we continually want to relive. Later in life, a person or event will trigger a memory of this positive or negative experience, and with it a release of powerful chemicals or hormones associated with the memory. Take, for example, a young man who had a distant, narcissistic mother. As an infant or child, he experienced her coldness as abandonment, and to be abandoned must mean he was somehow unworthy of her love. Or similarly, a new sibling on the scene caused his mother to give him much less attention, which he equally experienced as abandonment. Later in life, in a relationship, a woman might hint at disapproval of some trait or action of his, all of which is part of a healthy relationship. This will hit a trigger point— she is noticing his flaws, which, he imagines, precedes her abandonment of him. He feels a powerful rush of emotion, a sense of imminent betrayal. He does not see the source of this; it is beyond his control. He overreacts, accuses, withdraws, all of which leads to the very thing he feared—abandonment. His reaction was to some reflection in his mind, not to the reality. This is the height of irrationality. The way to recognize this in yourself and in others is by noticing behavior that is suddenly childish in its intensity and seemingly out of character. This could center on any key emotion. It could be fear—of losing control, of failure. In this case, we react by withdrawing from the situation and the presence of others, like a child curling up into a ball. A sudden illness, brought on by the intense fear, will

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  One cupboard has rice cakes, spices, and vegetable oil, another has cans of things, boxes of cereal, and an envelope of mushroom soup, another has pots and pans, the refrigerator has mayonnaise and a jar of green olives. The sight of the pimientos makes me sick for a minute, I have to lean over and think of something else. When I say green olives to Elizabeth she immediately says, “Don’t look at the pimientos.” There is a basket in the middle of the kitchen table that holds two bananas, a paper clip, a packet of sugar substitute, a blue marble, and a ballpoint pen. “Perfect,” she says. She wants me to eat a banana. “Any one can eat a banana,” she says smoothly. “People give them to babies , they’re so easy to eat.” “I’ll throw up if I look at it,” I tell her. My heart is pounding again. “Oh no you won’t,” she tells me. “A rice cake would make you throw up; bananas don’t make people sick, else they wouldn’t give them to babies.” I can’t argue with her logic, but I can’t look at the bananas either. “I’m going to call you back in exactly half an hour. You take one bite every five minutes.” I give her the phone number, set the telephone down on the kitchen table, and peel a banana without looking at it. Thirty minutes later the phone rings. “I ate it,” I tell her. Actually I ate half of it. She has me take the phone in the bathroom and inventory the medicine cabinet. I do so obediently, the banana sitting in my stomach like a wad of clay. “Midol; emery board; Ramada Inn soap; Nyquil; unidentifiable pills way too big to take; sunscreen; sunscreen; eyeliner; generic aspirin; Bic razor, crusty.” I sit down on the edge of the tub. The medicine cabinet has made me panicky again. “Perfect,” she says. “This is what you do now: put your swimming suit on and walk on the beach for one and a half hours, okay? Then come back and drink two doses of Nyquil and lie down on the couch. You don’t have to sleep or anything, just lie down.” She reiterates this. “In fact, it’s actually better if you don’t sleep.” She’s using reverse psychology on me. The beach is empty, except for some old cans and a broken fishing pole. A bloated fish lies half buried in the sand, one tarnished eye staring placidly up at the sun. I step over it and make my way down the beach at the water’s edge. Water is soothing, Elizabeth told me, water is soothing, water is soothing. I feel calm all of a sudden, looking at the water and the sky and the fins of sharks circling about two hundred yards out. “Those are dolphins,” I say out loud.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as MusicalYou do not realize how much you sing until she tells you to stop singing.26 It seems that you sing everywhere: in the shower, washing the dishes, getting dressed. You sing musicals and hymns and old songs from childhood (from church, from school, from Girl Scouts). You make up songs, too, with lyrics for whatever is happening at the time. She sings along to music in the car, but only when the music is playing. You ask her to sing to you, without music, but she refuses. During a rare moment of clarity, you tell her, sassily, that if she can’t accept your singing, she can’t accept you. It is supposed to be a joke, sort of, but it lands flat. “Maybe,” she says, her voice cold down to the pith. [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 26. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C481, Taboo: singing.Dream House as Cautionary TaleOne weekday, when you drive back from the Dream House, you notice you’re low on gas as you blow past the Illinois-Iowa border. Your GPS tells you there is a gas station off a lonely, wind-strewn exit, and as soon as you get off you sense the mistake. It looks like a long country road; just cornfields punctuated with barns and houses. You keep driving; surely a gas station will creep up over the horizon? But every time you crest a hill, you just see more country roads. Should you turn back? Perhaps a station is just around the next turn? Twilight falls away, and suddenly the landscape flattens and is swallowed by darkness. You pull the car over and consult your phone, but there is no signal. You sit there, breathing deeply. What would your dad say? What would anyone have done in this situation before cell phones? Should you walk? Should you go to someone’s front door? You just want to be home. You have been screaming for a whole minute before you become fully aware of it. You are pounding the steering wheel—your poor car, she has never done anything except your bidding—and howling, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” You don’t know why you are crying. Everyone gets lost. Dream House as RaptureAs a kid, you read those Left Behind books, and even watched the wooden, incoherent movie with Kirk Cameron. Cheap thrillers with apocalyptic themes and biblical righteousness: Could there have been anything else so perfectly constructed for your teenage self?

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Only the purest and most fervent revolutionaries could be admitted to the Red Guards, and competition was fierce to join their ranks. Because of his father’s illustrious past, Jianhua became a member of the Red Guards, and now he basked in the admiring glances of fellow students and local citizens who noticed the bright red armband that never left him. There was one wrinkle, however, in these exciting events: On a visit home to see his family in the nearby town of Lingzhi, Jianhua discovered that local students had accused his father of being a revisionist. He cared more about farming and economics than about making revolution, said the students. They had gotten him dismissed from his government position; he had had to suffer through various struggle meetings in the jet-plane position. The family was in disgrace. Although he loved and admired his father and worried for him, he could not help but feel anxious that, if news of this disgrace reached his school, he might lose his red armband and be ostracized. He would have to be careful when talking about his family. When he returned to school several weeks later, he noticed some radical changes that had already occurred: Fangpu had consolidated power. He had formed a new group called the East-Is-Red Corps; he and his team had kicked out Chairman Deng and were now running the school themselves. They had started their own newspaper, called Battlefield News , to promote and defend their actions. Jianhua also learned that another teacher had died under suspicious circumstances. One day, Fangpu visited Jianhua and invited him to be a star reporter for Battlefield News . Fangpu looked different—he had put on weight, was not so pale, and was trying to grow a beard. It was a tempting offer from his friend, but something made Jianhua put him off, and Fangpu did not like this, although he tried to disguise his annoyance with a forced smile. Fangpu was beginning to frighten Jianhua. Students were now joining the East-Is-Red Corps en masse, but within a few weeks a rival group, calling themselves the Red Rebels, emerged on campus. Their leader was Mengzhe, a student whose parents were peasants and who advocated revolution that was more tolerant, based on reason and not violence, which he felt was the purer form of Maoism. He gained some adherents, including Jianhua’s older brother, Weihua, who was a student at YMS. Mengzhe’s growing popularity infuriated Fangpu; he called him a royalist, a sentimentalist, and secret counterrevolutionary. He and his followers destroyed the Red Rebels’ office and threatened to do worse. It would certainly cause a complete rift with Fangpu, but Jianhua contemplated joining the Red Rebels. He was attracted to their idealism. Just as the tension between the two sides was escalating into outright war, a representative from the Chinese military arrived on campus and announced that the army was now in charge.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  All of a sudden I feel fond of the squirrels and fond of Caroline and fond of myself for heroically calling her to help me. The phone rings four times. It’s the husband, and his voice over the answering machine sounds frantic. He pleads with whoever Jo Ann is to pick up the phone. “Please? I think I might be freaking out,” he says. “Am I ruining my life here, or what? Am I making a mistake? Jo?” He breathes raggedly and sniffs into the receiver for a moment, then hangs up with a muffled clatter. Caroline stares at the machine like it’s a copperhead. “Holy fuckoly,” she says, shaking her head. “You’re living with this crap?” “He wants me to reassure him that he’s strong enough to leave me,” I tell her. “Else he won’t have fun on his bike ride. And guess what; I’m too tired to.” Except that now I can see him in his dank little apartment, wringing his hands and staring out the windows. He’s wearing his Sunday hairdo with a baseball cap trying to scrunch it down. In his rickety dresser is the new package of condoms he accidentally showed me last week. Caroline lights another cigarette. The dog pees and thumps her tail. I need to call him back because he’s suffering. “You call him back and I’m forced to kill you,” Caroline says. She exhales smoke and points to the phone. “That is evil shit,” she says. I tend to agree. It’s blanket time. I roll the collie off onto the floor and put the fresh ones down, roll her back. She stares at me with the face of love. I get her a treat, which she chews with gusto and then goes back to sleep. I carry the blankets down to the basement and stuff them into the machine, trudge back up the stairs. Caroline has finished smoking her medicine and is wearing the leather gloves which go all the way to her elbows. She’s staring at the ceiling with determination. The plan is that I’m supposed to separate one from the herd and get it in a corner. Caroline will take it from there. Unfortunately, my nerves are shot, and when I’m in the room with her and the squirrels are running around all I can do is scream. I’m not even afraid of them, but my screaming button is stuck on and the only way to turn it off is to leave the room. “How are you doing?” I ask from the other side of the door. All I can hear is Caroline crashing around and swearing. Suddenly there is a high-pitched screech that doesn’t end. The door opens and Caroline falls out into the hall, with a gray squirrel stuck to her glove. Brief pandemonium and then she clatters down the stairs and out the front door and returns looking triumphant. The collie appears at the foot of the stairs with her head cocked and her ears up.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Eric has his red flashlight and charts, I have my sweatshirt zipped and a Walkman with two pairs of headphones. It’s his turn to choose a tape so I’m waiting for something discordant and spooky but when he pushes the button it’s one of my favorites. Thank you , I mouth to him. He smiles, closes his eyes, and takes my hand. Side by side. He moves into the solitude of headphones and constellations. I am perched on planet Earth, Milky Way galaxy, who knows what universe. Way up there, satellites are parked with their motors running, and vivid rings of plasma do laps around Saturn. Way down here, there is only the terrible arch of the sky, the sagging moon, and nothing else. The earphones make my head feel like a hollow tube, full of horns and drums and a voice that echoes like green glass. I am alone inside my own skin and the edges of everything have begun to darken slightly, curling and browning, the beginnings of disintegration. Inside my chest a heart begins knocking to get out. I am alone down here, and up there, clinging to the spoke of a satellite, looking upward at the dark velvet, and downward at the dark velvet. There is nothing. Pockmarked and surly, the moon steps back and drops the curtain, darkens the theater for the stars. The clock is halted, the desert gives up its heat. A finger-size lizard with infrared spots and oval eyes finds itself, one second too late, in the damp cotton of a mouth. Power lines gleam and bounce their signals on the ground, startling the brain waves of small mammals, putting thoughts in their heads. Something swims through the medium of sand and surfaces, pinches hard and holds on. In the endless black of deep space a small comet hurtles along, tossing iceballs and dirt behind it, on a perpetual path, around and around and around, pointless and energetic. Propelled by the force of its combustion, the comet passes within a light year of Sirius, burning out of control. Under the press of gravity and air, inside the earth’s atmosphere, the coyote reads the signals in the ground, whirls, stops, and sprays a bush. He begins loping again, without awareness, the desire widening, a dark basin, until he cries as he runs, low and controlled. They are somewhere. The moon is gone and Eric has fallen asleep beside me. Planets and stars. I know only the ones that everyone knows: the sun, the moon, the dippers, Gemini and Cancer. They move into formation, still and distant as dead relatives, outlining the shape of my mother’s mouth. Nothing moves. Inside my head images emerge and retreat, emerge and retreat. I have to open my eyes. In the vivid blackness overhead a diamond falls through the sky, trailing its image, a split-instant of activity. By the time I realize I’ve seen it, the sky has recovered. I can’t breathe in this emptiness.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  What’s interesting for me in Ratu’s description is that there’s no arc to this narrative—no ascending plot, no unfolding, no climax, no closure. In fact, there’s no story to the story at all. Sex is separated from the story that brought it into being. “There is a deliberate attempt to keep emotions out of sex, and not just for the boys,” Ratu elaborates. “The girls as well as the boys speak of love on one hand and sex on the other, as though they have nothing to do with each other.” She pauses, “Though I suspect that a lot of my girlfriends would rather be in relationships, whether or not they want to admit it.” Far be it from me to disparage the liberating expression of casual or recreational sex. An erotic encounter can span a range of interpersonal intensities without being disaffiliated. But this particular type of sexual activity seems less an expression of liberation than an acting out of underlying anxiety. To my surprise, Ratu agreed with this idea completely. “The drinking and the sex, of course they go together. They’re both things we know we’re not supposed to be doing.” As I listened to Ratu, I wondered how this new sociology of sex would manifest itself later in their committed relationships. “What about love and marriage?” I asked her. “Does that ever come up?” “We see commitment as a life sentence. I know especially for many of my male friends it’s a terrifying thought. They can’t imagine having the same sexual partner for more than a week, let alone ten years.” Then Ratu says more seriously, “For the women it’s different. They can see the appeal. Some really seem to want it, though a lot of us take on the stereotypical male fear and see monogamy as a restriction. Commitment means sacrificing your own goals and ambitions for something that you can’t control and that you could potentially fail at. At least that’s how we think of it now. Relationships are a loss of independence. When you let another person in, romantically, you make less room for yourself.” “So relationships are about what you lose, not what you gain?” I ask. “Exactly.” “And romance?” “Hah. There was none in high school. The few couples here at college stand out as almost weird, like they’re married or something.” I am intrigued by Ratu’s portrayal of relationships. It had always seemed to me that coupling (or at least the dream of romance) enlarges us, and is about what you can discover with someone. At least, I was convinced of that at her age. Ratu and her friends seem to find more security in an MBA than in the power of a sustaining, loving bond. Why do they feel this way?