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 How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Because belief in the classical view affects your life in ways you might not realize. Think about the last time you went through airport security, where taciturn agents of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) X-rayed your shoes and evaluated your likelihood as a terrorist threat. Not long ago, a training program called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques) taught those TSA agents to detect deception and assess risk based on facial and bodily movements, on the theory that such movements reveal your innermost feelings. It didn’t work, and the program cost taxpayers $900 million. We need to understand emotion scientifically so government agents won’t detain us —or overlook those who actually do pose a threat—based on an incorrect view of emotion. 6 Now imagine that you’re in a doctor’s office, complaining of chest pressure and shortness of breath, which may be heart attack symptoms. If you’re a woman, you’re more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety and sent home, whereas if you’re a man, you’re more likely to be diagnosed with heart disease and receive lifesaving preventive treatment. As a result, women over age sixty-five die more frequently of heart attacks than men do. The perceptions of doctors, nurses, and the female patients themselves are shaped by classical view beliefs that they can detect emotions like anxiety, and that women are inherently more emotional than men . . . with fatal consequences. 7 Belief in the classical view can even start wars. The Gulf War in Iraq was launched, in part, because Saddam Hussein’s half-brother thought he could read the emotions of the American negotiators and informed Saddam that the United States wasn’t serious about attacking. The subsequent war claimed the lives of 175,000 Iraqis and hundreds of coalition forces. 8 We are, I believe, in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of emotion, the mind, and the brain—a revolution that may compel us to radically rethink such central tenets of our society as our treatments for mental and physical illness, our understanding of personal relationships, our approaches to raising children, and ultimately our view of ourselves. Other scientific disciplines have seen revolutions of this kind, each one a momentous shift away from centuries of common sense. Physics moved from Isaac Newton’s intuitive ideas about time and space to Albert Einstein’s more relative ideas, and eventually to quantum mechanics. In biology, scientists carved up the natural world into fixed species, each having an ideal form, until Charles Darwin introduced the concept of natural selection. Scientific revolutions tend to emerge not from a sudden discovery but by asking better questions. How are emotions made, if they aren’t simply triggered reactions? Why do they vary so much, and why have we believed for so long that they have distinctive fingerprints? These questions in and of themselves can be delightfully interesting to ponder.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “Did he ask where we were going?” “Oh, he knows that” (mocking me). “Anyway,” I said, giving up, “I have seen his face now. He is not pretty. He looks exactly like a relative of mine called Trapp.” “Perhaps he is Trapp. If I were you—Oh, look, all the nines are changing into the next thousand. When I was a little kid,” she continued unexpectedly, “I used to think they’d stop and go back to nines, if only my mother agreed to put the car in reverse.” It was the first time, I think, she spoke spontaneously of her pre-Humbertian childhood; perhaps, the theatre had taught her that trick; and silently we travelled on, unpursued. But next day, like pain in a fatal disease that comes back as the drug and hope wear off, there it was again behind us, that glossy red beast. The traffic on the highway was light that day; nobody passed anybody; and nobody attempted to get in between our humble blue car and its imperious red shadow—as if there were some spell cast on that interspace, a zone of evil mirth and magic, a zone whose very precision and stability had a glass-like virtue that was almost artistic. The driver behind me, with his stuffed shoulders and Trappish mustache, looked like a display dummy, and his convertible seemed to move only because an invisible rope of silent silk connected it with our shabby vehicle. We were many times weaker than his splendid, lacquered machine, so that I did not even attempt to outspeed him. O lente currite noctis equi! O softly run, nightmares! We climbed long grades and rolled downhill again, and heeded speed limits, and spared slow children, and reproduced in sweeping terms the black wiggles of curves on their yellow shields, and no matter how and where we drove, the enchanted interspace slid on intact, mathematical, mirage-like, the viatic counterpart of a magic carpet. And all the time I was aware of a private blaze on my right: her joyful eye, her flaming cheek. A traffic policeman, deep in the nightmare of crisscross streets—at half-past-four P.M. in a factory town—was the hand of chance that interrupted the spell. He beckoned me on, and then with the same hand cut off my shadow. A score of cars were launched in between us, and I sped on, and deftly turned into a narrow lane. A sparrow alighted with a jumbo bread crumb, was tackled by another, and lost the crumb. When after a few grim stoppages and a bit of deliberate meandering, I returned to the highway, our shadow had disappeared. Lola snorted and said: “If he is what you think he is, how silly to give him the slip.” “I have other notions by now,” I said. “You should—ah—check them by—ah—keeping in touch with him, fahther deah,” said Lo, writhing in the coils of her own sarcasm. “Gee, you are mean,” she added in her ordinary voice.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I have a memo here: between July 5 and November 18, when I returned to Beardsley for a few days, I registered, if not actually stayed, at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes. This figure includes a few registrations between Chestnut and Beardsley, one of which yielded a shadow of the fiend (“N. Petit, Larousse, Ill.”); I had to space and time my inquiries carefully so as not to attract undue attention; and there must have been at least fifty places where I merely inquired at the desk—but that was a futile quest, and I preferred building up a foundation of verisimilitude and good will by first paying for an unneeded room. My survey showed that of the 300 or so books inspected, at least 20 provided me with a clue: the loitering fiend had stopped even more often than we, or else—he was quite capable of that—he had thrown in additional registrations in order to keep me well furnished with derisive hints. Only in one case had he actually stayed at the same motor court as we, a few paces from Lolita’s pillow. In some instances he had taken up quarters in the same or in a neighboring block; not infrequently he had lain in wait at an intermediate spot between two bespoken points. How vividly I recalled Lolita, just before our departure from Beardsley, prone on the parlor rug, studying tour books and maps, and marking laps and stops with her lipstick! I discovered at once that he had foreseen my investigations and had planted insulting pseudonyms for my special benefit. At the very first motel office I visited, Ponderosa Lodge, his entry, among a dozen obviously human ones, read: Dr. Gratiano Forbeson, Mirandola, NY. Its Italian Comedy connotations could not fail to strike me, of course. The landlady deigned to inform me that the gentleman had been laid up for five days with a bad cold, that he had left his car for repairs in some garage or other and that he had checked out on the 4th of July. Yes, a girl called Ann Lore had worked formerly at the Lodge, but was now married to a grocer in Cedar City. One moonlit night I waylaid white-shoed Mary on a solitary street; an automaton, she was about to shriek, but I managed to humanize her by the simple act of falling on my knees and with pious yelps imploring her to help. She did not know a thing, she swore. Who was this Gratiano Forbeson? She seemed to waver. I whipped out a hundred-dollar bill. She lifted it to the light of the moon. “He is your brother,” she whispered at last. I plucked the bill out of her moon-cold hand, and spitting out a French curse turned and ran away.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  However… All wrong! It was too servile. Her letter wasn’t “kind” and why should I toady to her by thanking her? Better be self-confident and assertive: I have just received your letter asking me to submit poems for consideration… Too egotistical! (I crumpled up another sheet of paper.) Never, I once read, begin a letter with the personal pronoun. Besides, how could I say I had “just received” her letter when I had been holding it for a year? Try again. Your letter of November 12, 1967, has been on my mind for a long time. I am sorry to be such a poor correspondent but… Too personal. Does she want you to cry on her shoulder about your neurotic letter-writing problems? Does she care? Finally, two years later, after many more attempts, I drafted a disgustingly submissive, meek, and apologetic letter to the editor in question, tore it up ten times before mailing, retyped it eleven times, retyped my poems fifteen times (they had to be letter perfect, one typo and I threw away the page—and I had never learned to type) and sent the damned manila envelope off to New York. By return mail, I received a really warm letter (which even my paranoia couldn’t misinterpret), a notice of acceptance, and a check. How long do you suppose it would have taken me to get the next letter out if I had received a rejection slip? This was the dazzlingly self-confident creature who began treatment with Dr. Happe in Heidelberg. Gradually I learned how to sit still at my desk long enough to work. Gradually I learned how to send off manuscripts and write letters. I felt like a stroke victim learning penmanship all over again, and Dr. Happe was my guide. He was mild and patient and funny. He taught me to stop hating myself. He was as rare a psychoanalyst as he was a German. It was I who kept saying dumb things like: “Oh well, I might as well give up this nonsense of writing and just have a baby.” And it was he who was always pointing out the falseness of such a “solution.” I hadn’t seen him for two and a half years, but I had sent him my first book of poems and he had written me about it. “Zo,” he said, like the comic-book German he wasn’t, “I see you no longer have trouble writing letters….” “No, but I certainly have lots of other trouble…” and I spilled out my whole confused story of what had happened since we arrived in Vienna. He wasn’t going to interpret it for me, he said. He was only going to remind me of what he’d said many times before: “You’re not a secretary; you’re a poet. What makes you think your life is going to be uncomplicated? What makes you think you can avoid all conflict? What makes you think you can avoid pain? Or passion?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  On the whole she seemed to me better adapted to her surroundings than I had hoped she would be when considering my spoiled slave-child and the bangles of demeanor she naïvely affected the winter before in California. Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry. As I lay on my narrow studio bed after a session of adoration and despair in Lolita’s cold bedroom, I used to review the concluded day by checking my own image as it prowled rather than passed before the mind’s red eye. I watched dark-and-handsome, not un-Celtic, probably high-church, possibly very high-church, Dr. Humbert see his daughter off to school. I watched him greet with his slow smile and pleasantly arched thick black ad-eyebrows good Mrs. Holigan, who smelled of the plague (and would head, I knew, for master’s gin at the first opportunity). With Mr. West, retired executioner or writer of religious tracts—who cared?—I saw neighbor what’s his name, I think they are French or Swiss, meditate in his frank-windowed study over a typewriter, rather gaunt-profiled, an almost Hitlerian cowlick on his pale brow. Weekends, wearing a well-tailored overcoat and brown gloves, Professor H. might be seen with his daughter strolling to Walton Inn (famous for its violet-ribboned china bunnies and chocolate boxes among which you sit and wait for a “table for two” still filthy with your predecessor’s crumbs). Seen on weekdays, around one P.M., saluting with dignity Arguseyed East while maneuvering the car out of the garage and around the damned evergreens, and down onto the slippery road. Raising a cold eye from book to clock in the positively sultry Beardsley College library, among bulky young women caught and petrified in the overflow of human knowledge. Walking across the campus with the college clergyman, the Rev. Rigger (who also taught Bible in Beardsley School). “Somebody told me her mother was a celebrated actress killed in an airplane accident. Oh? My mistake, I presume. Is that so? I see. How sad.” (Sublimating her mother, eh?) Slowly pushing my little pram through the labyrinth of the supermarket, in the wake of Professor W., also a slow-moving and gentle widower with the eyes of a goat. Shoveling the snow in my shirt-sleeves, a voluminous black and white muffler around my neck. Following with no show of rapacious haste (even taking time to wipe my feet on the mat) my schoolgirl daughter into the house. Taking Dolly to the dentist—pretty nurse beaming at her—old magazines—ne montrez pas vos zhambes. At dinner with Dolly in town, Mr. Edgar H. Humbert was seen eating his steak in the continental knife-and-fork manner. Enjoying, in duplicate, a concert: two marble-faced, becalmed Frenchmen sitting side by side, with Monsieur H. H.’s musical little girl on her father’s right, and the musical little boy of Professor W. (father spending a hygienic evening in Providence) on Monsieur G. G.’s left. Opening the garage, a square of light that engulfs the car and is extinguished. Brightly pajamaed, jerking down the window shade in Dolly’s bedroom. Saturday morning, unseen, solemnly weighing the winter-bleached lassie in the bathroom. Seen and heard Sunday morning, no churchgoer after all, saying don’t be too late, to Dolly who is bound for the covered court. Letting in a queerly observant schoolmate of Dolly’s: “First time I’ve seen a man wearing a smoking jacket, sir—except in movies, of course.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I folded myself into a booth, took a little pill, and for about twenty minutes tussled with space-spooks. A quartet of propositions gradually became audible: soprano, there was no such number in Beardsley; alto, Miss Pratt was on her way to England; tenor, Beardsley School had not telephoned; bass, they could not have done so, since nobody knew I was, that particular day, in Champion, Colo. Upon my stinging him, the Roman took the trouble to find out if there had been a long distance call. There had been none. A fake call from some local dial was not excluded. I thanked him. He said: You bet. After a visit to the purling men’s room and a stiff drink at the bar, I started on my return march. From the very first terrace I saw, far below, on the tennis court which seemed the size of a school child’s ill-wiped slate, golden Lolita playing in a double. She moved like a fair angel among three horrible Boschian cripples. One of these, her partner, while changing sides, jocosely slapped her on her behind with his racket. He had a remarkably round head and wore incongruous brown trousers. There was a momentary flurry—he saw me, and throwing away his racket—mine!—scuttled up the slope. He waved his wrists and elbows in would-be comical imitation of rudimentary wings, as he climbed, bow-legged, to the street, where his gray car awaited him. Next moment he and the grayness were gone. When I came down, the remaining trio were collecting and sorting out the balls. “Mr. Mead, who was that person?” Bill and Fay, both looking very solemn, shook their heads. That absurd intruder had butted in to make up a double, hadn’t he, Dolly? Dolly. The handle of my racket was still disgustingly warm. Before returning to the hotel, I ushered her into a little alley half-smothered in fragrant shrubs, with flowers like smoke, and was about to burst into ripe sobs and plead with her imperturbed dream in the most abject manner for clarification, no matter how meretricious, of the slow awfulness enveloping me, when we found ourselves behind the convulsed Mead twosome—assorted people, you know, meeting among idyllic settings in old comedies. Bill and Fay were both weak with laughter—we had come at the end of their private joke. It did not really matter. Speaking as if it really did not really matter, and assuming, apparently, that life was automatically rolling on with all its routine pleasures, Lolita said she would like to change into her bathing things, and spend the rest of the afternoon at the swimming pool. It was a gorgeous day. Lolita!

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She turned to express her thanks to Lord Gregory, and again Beauty was struck by her bright ruddy face. Her braids were done with tiny pearls and thin strands of blue ribbon. But Beauty, almost lost in her contemplation of all this, was suddenly shocked to realize the Lady was looking at her. "Oooooh, yes, it is the Prince's lovely one," she said, and now she advanced, and Beauty felt the Lady's hand lifting her face. "And how sweet she is, how truly beautiful." Beauty shut her eyes, trying to restrain her heaving breaths. She did not believe she could endure the imperious touch of this young Lady. And yet there was nothing she could do. "O, I should so like to have her take Princess Lizetta's place, it would be a treat for everyone," said the Lady. "But that is impossible, my Lady," said Lord Gregory. "The Prince is most possessive of her. I cannot allow her to participate in such a spectacle." "But surely we'll see more of her. Will she be run on the Bridle Path?" "I feel certain, in time," said Lord Gregory. "There is no accounting for the whim of the Prince. But here, you may examine her if you wish. There is no rule prohibiting it." He lifted Beauty by her wrists and forced her hips forward with the handle of the paddle. "Open your eyes and keep them down," he whispered. Beauty could not bear to see this lovely Lady's hands as they moved towards her. But Lady Juliana touched her breasts, and then her smooth stomach. "Why she is radiant and so full of tender spirit." Lord Gregory laughed softly. "Yes, she is, and you are so discerning to value it." "They turn out all the better for that," said Lady Juliana with quiet wonder. She pinched Beauty's cheek as she had Princess Lizetta's secret lips. "O, what I would give for a quiet hour alone with her in my chambers." "In time, in time," said Lord Gregory. "Yes, and I bet she fights the paddle so, with her tender spirit." "Only with her spirit," said Lord Gregory. "She is obedient." "I can see that. Well, my girl, I must leave you. Be confident that you are exquisite. I wish I had you over my knee. I'd paddle you until sundown. You'd play a lot of little games running from me in the garden, you would." And then she kissed Beauty warmly on the mouth, and left as quickly as she had come, in a flurry of burgundy velvet and flying braids. Just before Beauty took the sleeping potion from Leon she begged to know the meaning of what she had heard.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  There is no winning the past. No number of forewords will make me at peace with the years between Fear of Flying and now. Writing about her and her legacy just makes me even more uncomfortable than I was before. This foreword should be a celebration of her work, of my mother’s place in the pantheon of second-wave feminists, but I fear it’s not. Perhaps this is just my own personal failure, but my mother used to butcher that Ernest Hemingway quote about sitting at the typewriter and opening a vein. Here’s every nepo baby’s open secret—no matter how hard we work, no matter how good our work might be, the tormenting gift of celebrity and notoriety passed down from our parents nullifies everything we do. Some of us admit this. Most of us don’t. So it’s not without a good deal of trepidation that I sit down fifty years later to write the foreword to a book that has become larger than me and larger than her. I never knew my mother before her outsized success. By the time I was old enough to know what was going on, Fear of Flying was very much a part of my mom’s life and legacy. I was born inside the house of her fame and have never gotten outside of it. The year 1973 was a big year for women and sexual freedoms. The United States Supreme Court decided that “A person may choose to have an abortion until a fetus becomes viable, based on the right to privacy contained in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The right to choose, the right to end a pregnancy, and the advent of oral contraception in the 1960s changed the game for women. Sex and pregnancy were no longer inextricably linked. Fear of Flying was a piece of this new zipless freedom. But progress hasn’t been a straight line for American women. In the decades since Fear of Flying was published, a lot of the things my mother and her peers thought would happen have not. Women are still not close to equality with men. Women of color make about sixty cents to every dollar a white man makes. There is no Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Women are not protected. The world of free love and equality that my mom and her peers dreamed of shimmered briefly on the horizon but never came fully into being. There were backlashes and whiplashes and Ronald and Nancy Reagan pulling the solar panels off the White House. We never got the equality we were promised.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “Some day, Lo, you will understand many emotions and situations, such as for example the harmony, the beauty of spiritual relationship.” “Bah!” said the cynical nymphet. Shallow lull in the dialogue, filled with some landscape. “Look, Lo, at all those cows on that hillside.” “I think I’ll vomit if I look at a cow again.” “You know, I missed you terribly, Lo.” “I did not. Fact I’ve been revoltingly unfaithful to you, but it does not matter one bit, because you’ve stopped caring for me, anyway. You drive much faster than my mummy, mister.” I slowed down from a blind seventy to a purblind fifty. “Why do you think I have ceased caring for you, Lo?” “Well, you haven’t kissed me yet, have you?” Inly dying, inly moaning, I glimpsed a reasonably wide shoulder of road ahead, and bumped and wobbled into the weeds. Remember she is only a child, remember she is only— Hardly had the car come to a standstill than Lolita positively flowed into my arms. Not daring, not daring let myself go—not even daring let myself realize that this (sweet wetness and trembling fire) was the beginning of the ineffable life which, ably assisted by fate, I had finally willed into being—not daring really kiss her, I touched her hot, opening lips with the utmost piety, tiny sips, nothing salacious; but she, with an impatient wriggle, pressed her mouth to mine so hard that I felt her big front teeth and shared in the peppermint taste of her saliva. I knew, of course, it was but an innocent game on her part, a bit of backfisch foolery in imitation of some simulacrum of fake romance, and since (as the psychotherapist, as well as the rapist, will tell you) the limits and rules of such girlish games are fluid, or at least too childishly subtle for the senior partner to grasp—I was dreadfully afraid I might go too far and cause her to start back in revulsion and terror. And, as above all I was agonizingly anxious to smuggle her into the hermetic seclusion of The Enchanted Hunters, and we had still eighty miles to go, blessed intuition broke our embrace—a split second before a highway patrol car drew up alongside. Florid and beetle-browed, its driver stared at me: “Happen to see a blue sedan, same make as yours, pass you before the junction?” “Why, no.” “We didn’t,” said Lo, eagerly leaning across me, her innocent hand on my legs, “but are you sure it was blue, because—” The cop (what shadow of us was he after?) gave the little colleen his best smile and went into a U-turn. We drove on. “The fruithead!” remarked Lo. “He should have nabbed you.” “Why me for heaven’s sake?” “Well, the speed in this bum state is fifty, and—No, don’t slow down, you, dull bulb. He’s gone now.” “We have still quite a stretch,” I said, “and I want to get there before dark. So be a good girl.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I pulled up—near a precipice. She folded her arms and put her foot on the dashboard. I got out and examined the right rear wheel. The base of its tire was sheepishly and hideously square. Trapp had stopped some fifty yards behind us. His distant face formed a grease spot of mirth. This was my chance. I started to walk towards him—with the brilliant idea of asking him for a jack though I had one. He backed a little. I stubbed my toe against a stone—and there was a sense of general laughter. Then a tremendous truck loomed from behind Trapp and thundered by me—and immediately after, I heard it utter a convulsive honk. Instinctively I looked back—and saw my own car gently creeping away. I could make out Lo ludicrously at the wheel, and the engine was certainly running—though I remembered I had cut it but had not applied the emergency brake; and during the brief space of throb-time that it took me to reach the croaking machine which came to a standstill at last, it dawned upon me that during the last two years little Lo had had ample time to pick up the rudiments of driving. As I wrenched the door open, I was goddam sure she had started the car to prevent me from walking up to Trapp. Her trick proved useless, however, for even while I was pursuing her he had made an energetic U-turn and was gone. I rested for a while. Lo asked wasn’t I going to thank her—the car had started to move by itself and—Getting no answer, she immersed herself in a study of the map. I got out again and commenced the “ordeal of the orb,” as Charlotte used to say. Perhaps, I was losing my mind. We continued our grotesque journey. After a forlorn and useless dip, we went up and up. On a steep grade I found myself behind the gigantic truck that had overtaken us. It was now groaning up a winding road and was impossible to pass. Out of its front part a small oblong of smooth silver—the inner wrapping of chewing gum—escaped and flew back into our windshield. It occurred to me that if I were really losing my mind, I might end by murdering somebody. In fact—said high-and-dry Humbert to floundering Humbert—it might be quite clever to prepare things—to transfer the weapon from box to pocket—so as to be ready to take advantage of the spell of insanity when it does come.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Friend Farlow, who was a lawyer of sorts and ought to have been able to give me some solid advice, was too much occupied with Jean’s cancer to do anything more than what he had promised—namely, to look after Charlotte’s meager estate while I recovered very gradually from the shock of her death. I had conditioned him into believing Dolores was my natural child, and so could not expect him to bother his head about the situation. I am, as the reader must have gathered by now, a poor businessman; but neither ignorance nor indolence should have prevented me from seeking professional advice elsewhere. What stopped me was the awful feeling that if I meddled with fate in any way and tried to rationalize her fantastic gift, that gift would be snatched away like that palace on the mountain top in the Oriental tale which vanished whenever a prospective owner asked its custodian how come a strip of sunset sky was clearly visible from afar between black rock and foundation. I decided that at Beardsley (the site of Beardsley College for Women) I would have access to works of reference that I had not yet been able to study, such as Woerner’s Treatise “On the American Law of Guardianship” and certain United States Children’s Bureau Publications. I also decided that anything was better for Lo than the demoralizing idleness in which she lived. I could persuade her to do so many things—their list might stupefy a professional educator; but no matter how I pleaded or stormed, I could never make her read any other book than the so-called comic books or stories in magazines for American females. Any literature a peg higher smacked to her of school, and though theoretically willing to enjoy A Girl of the Limberlost or the Arabian Nights, or Little Women, she was quite sure she would not fritter away her “vacation” on such highbrow reading matter.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Recategorization is a tool of the emotion expert. The more concepts that you know and the more instances that you can construct, the more effectively you can recategorize in this manner to master your emotions and regulate your behavior. For instance, if you’re about to take a test and feel affectively worked up, you might categorize your feeling as harmful anxiety (“Oh no, I’m doomed!”) or as helpful anticipation (“I’m energized and ready to go!”). The head of my daughter’s karate school, Grandmaster Joe Esposito, advises his nervous students before their black belt test: “Make your butterflies fly in formation.” He is saying yes, you feel worked up right now, but don’t perceive it as nervousness: construct an instance of “Determination.” Recategorization of this kind can bring tangible benefits to your life. Numerous studies have looked at performance on math tests such as the GRE and found that students achieve higher scores when they recategorize anxiety as merely a sign that the body is coping. People who recategorize anxiety as excitement show similar effects, with better performance and fewer classic symptoms of anxiety when speaking in public and even when singing karaoke. Their sympathetic nervous system still creates those jittery butterflies, but with fewer of the proinflammatory cytokines that lower performance and generally make people feel crappy, so they perform better. Studies have shown that remedial math students at community colleges can improve their exam grades and their final course grade through effective recategorization. This significant development can change the trajectory of a person’s life, given that a college degree can be the difference between financial success and a lifelong struggle to make ends meet.29 If you can categorize your discomfort as helpful, say, when you’re exercising hard, you can cultivate greater stamina. The U.S. Marine Corps has a motto that embodies this principle: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” Whenever you exercise just until you feel unpleasant and then stop, you’re categorizing your physical sensations as exhaustion. You’ll always exercise below your threshold, despite the health benefits of continuing. Through recategorization, however, you can continue exercising and feel even better later, as you reap the benefits of a stronger, healthier body. The more you do it, the more you tune your conceptual system toward longer exercise in the future.30

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  My nerves were frayed and fragile, like tattered silk. Sleep had not yet solved my crankiness, my impatience, my memory. It seemed like everything now was somehow linked to getting back what I’d lost. I could picture my selfhood, my past, my psyche like a dump truck filled with trash. Sleep was the hydraulic piston that lifted the bed of the truck up, ready to dump everything out somewhere, but Trevor was stuck in the tailgate, blocking the flow of garbage. I was afraid things would be like that forever. • • • MY LAST RENDEZVOUS WITH Trevor had been on New Year’s Eve, 2000. I invited him to come to the party with me in DUMBO. I’d sensed he was between girlfriends. “I’ll come for a while,” he agreed. “But there are other parties I’m already committed to. I’ll stay at yours for an hour and then I’ll have to leave, so don’t get sensitive about it.” “That’s fair,” I said, though my feelings were already hurt. He had me meet him in the lobby of his building in Tribeca. He very rarely asked me to come up to his apartment. I think he thought that seeing the place would make me want to marry him. In truth, I thought his apartment made him seem pathetic—status seeking, conformist, shallow. It reminded me of the loft Tom Hanks rents in Big, huge windows along three walls, high ceilings—only instead of pinball machines and trampolines and toys, Trevor had filled the apartment with expensive furniture—a narrow gray velvet sofa from Sweden, a huge mahogany secretary, a crystal chandelier. I assumed some ex-girlfriend had picked it all out for him, or multiple ex-girlfriends. That would have explained the mismatched aesthetic. He worked as a portfolio manager in the Twin Towers, had freckles, loved Bruce Springsteen, and yet the wall above his bed was decorated with horrifying African masks. He collected antique swords. He liked cocaine and cheap beer and top-shelf whiskey, always owned the latest video game system. He had a waterbed. He played acoustic guitar, badly. He owned a gun he kept in a safe in his bedroom closet. I buzzed him when I got to his building and he came down wearing a tuxedo under a long black coat with tasteful navy satin accents. I knew then that inviting him to the party had been a mistake. He clearly had somewhere more important to be, and was going to go there to be with someone more important than me after my hour with him was up. He pulled on his gloves, hailed a taxi. “Whose party is this again?” A video artist represented by Ducat had invited me to her party because I’d handled an important rights situation when Natasha was overseas. All I’d really done, in fact, was send a fax. “She’s going to be projecting live births from a video feed some guy set up in a village hospital in Bolivia,” I told Trevor in the cab.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I’m sorry I’m so inarticulate. I can’t name it then, but I feel the words at least eroding my voice. I sense that “at least” marks an end to the story I’m supposed to tell, that I am supposed to say something gracious in response—“thank goodness”—or else nothing more at all. “At least” curbs my telling too much truth. It’s a blunt instrument wielded to club a reckless retelling into submission. The story ends here. But the truth is, I have no story—nothing I can corral into a coherent narrative. 4. One wants a teller in a time like this.1 5. That which is not a coherent narrative appears everywhere: in the classrooms where I stop talking; in the school-mandated therapist’s office, where we face off in silence for forty-five minutes each week; in food, which I eat too much of or not at all. When my best friend comes up behind me and wraps me in a hug, the anger darts up my chest and I instinctively push him away, hard. A few days later, I show up at his house inexplicably shaking after another friend ran up behind me as I was walking home from the library. “What happened?” he asks. “Nothing,” I tell him. “It was nothing.” 6. You know that moment when you trip and you are poised with equal possibility to fall flat on your face and to take the next step, and your heart shoots up into your throat? Every second feels split—normality and catastrophe equally plausible. The assumptions I once cobbled into a day no longer hold. There is not a man hiding behind that tree. No one will break into my apartment and kill me while I sleep. I will be able to sleep until the morning. I will be here in the morning. The stones that composed the ground on which I’ve always walked have come loose, swirling unpredictably around my head. (And here, I feel myself saying it: “At least I have ground.”) 7. Eventually, I go to a small liberal arts college in New England. It’s beautiful—which is true and also something people say over and over when they don’t want to talk about other truths like the relationship between the institution’s vast resources and the rampant poverty in the postindustrial towns that surround us, or how the brochures boast that we don’t have frats, but the culture of fraternities clings instead to sports teams. 8. A friend is assaulted by an adjunct professor. The deans tell her to keep it quiet. A sophomore is pressing charges against a student who raped her at a party. The school takes no measures to keep him away from her. Her friends take turns sleeping in her room. Their grades drop. Their relationships become strained. These are the stories we tell each other, quietly. 9.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Based on the evidence, it appears that anxiety, like depression, is a constructed category in the same fashion as emotion, pain, and stress. The misery you feel in anxiety and depression tells you that something is seriously wrong with your body budget. Either your brain is trying to secure a deposit, ramping up unpleasant affect, or it’s attempting to reduce your need for the deposit by remaining still, resulting in fatigue. Your brain may categorize these sensations as anxiety, depression, or, for that matter, pain or stress or emotion. To be clear, I am not saying that major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders are interchangeable. I’m suggesting that every category of mental illness is a diverse population of instances, and certain collections of symptoms could reasonably be categorized equally well as an anxiety disorder or as depression. There’s also the issue of severity—some of Helen Mayberg’s severely depressed patients, such as those who are near-catatonic, would clearly not be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. However, some of her other patients who are in agony might reasonably be diagnosed with anxiety, chronic stress, or even chronic pain. In general, moderately severe depression and anxiety can have overlapping symptom profiles with one another, and with chronic stress and chronic pain, and also with chronic fatigue syndrome.39 These observations provide a solution to the mystery that opened chapter 1: why did test subjects in my graduate school experiments seem unable to distinguish between anxious and depressed feelings? One reason we’ve covered already is emotional granularity: some of my subjects could probably construct more finely tailored emotions than others could. But now a second reason comes to light: that “Anxiety” and “Depression” are concepts for categorizing similar sensations. When my subjects were feeling unpleasant, I handed them rating scales to report their feeling, but only in terms of anxiety and depression. People will use whatever measure you give them to describe how they feel. If someone feels crappy and you give her only an anxiety scale, she’ll report her feelings using words for anxiety. She might even come to feel anxious as the words prime her to simulate an instance of “Anxiety.” Alternatively if you hand her a depression scale, she’ll report her feeling using words for depression and might likewise end up feeling depressed. This would explain my mysterious results. Concepts like “Anxiety” and “Depression” are highly variable and malleable. Words on questionnaires can influence people’s categorizations, just like the basic emotion method influences perceptions with its list of emotion words.40

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I am anticipating a little, but I cannot help running my memory all over the keyboard of that school year. In meeting my attempts to find out what kind of boys Lo knew, Miss Dahl was elegantly evasive. Lo who had gone to play tennis at Linda’s country club had telephoned she might be a full half hour late, and so, would I entertain Mona who was coming to practice with her a scene from The Taming of the Shrew. Using all the modulations, all the allure of manner and voice she was capable of and staring at me with perhaps—could I be mistaken?—a faint gleam of crystalline irony, beautiful Mona replied: “Well, sir, the fact is Dolly is not much concerned with mere boys. Fact is, we are rivals. She and I have a crush on the Reverend Rigger.” (This was a joke—I have already mentioned that gloomy giant of a man, with the jaw of a horse: he was to bore me to near murder with his impressions of Switzerland at a tea party for parents that I am unable to place correctly in terms of time.) How had the ball been? Oh, it had been a riot. A what? A panic. Terrific, in a word. Had Lo danced a lot? Oh, not a frightful lot, just as much as she could stand. What did she, languorous Mona, think of Lo? Sir? Did she think Lo was doing well at school? Gosh, she certainly was quite a kid. But her general behavior was—? Oh, she was a swell kid. But still? “Oh, she’s a doll,” concluded Mona, and sighed abruptly, and picked up a book that happened to lie at hand, and with a change of expression, falsely furrowing her brow, inquired: “Do tell me about Ball Zack, sir. Is he really that good?” She moved up so close to my chair that I made out through lotions and creams her uninteresting skin scent. A sudden odd thought stabbed me: was my Lo playing the pimp? If so, she had found the wrong substitute. Avoiding Mona’s cool gaze, I talked literature for a minute. Then Dolly arrived—and slit her pale eyes at us. I left the two friends to their own devices. One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby casement window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unstained rectangles and its asymmetrical position—a knight’s move from the top—always strangely disturbed me.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  now this is rare, in fact, unprecedented in my professional experience— you’ve been misdiagnosed. You might be suffering from something, how shall I put this . . . psychosomatic. Running that risk, I believe we should be conservative.” “I’ll try the Infermiterol,” I said curtly. “Good. And eat a high-dairy meal each day. Did you know that cows can choose to sleep standing up or lying down? Given the option, I know what I’d pick. Have you ever made yogurt on the stove? Don’t answer that. We’ll save the cooking lesson for our next meeting. Now write this down because I have a feeling you’re too psychotic to remember: Saturday, January twentieth, at two o’clock. And try the Infermiterol. Bye-bye.” “Wait,” I said. “The Ambien.” “I’ll call it in right away.” I hung up and looked at my phone. It was only Sunday, January 7. I went to the bathroom and took stock of the medicine cabinet, counting out all my pills on the grimy tile floor. In all, I had two Ambien but thirty more on the way, twelve Rozerem, sixteen trazodone, around ten each of Ativan, Xanax, and Valium, Nembutal, and Solfoton, plus single digit amounts of a dozen random medications that Dr. Tuttle had prescribed only once “because refilling something this peculiar might trigger speculation by the insurance wizards.” In the past, this supply of medication would have been enough for a month of moderate sleeping, nothing too deep if I was conservative with the Ambien. But I knew in my heart that they were all useless now—a collection of foreign currency, a gun with no bullets. The Infermiterol had made all other drugs moot. Maybe it was radiating detoxifying energy into everything on the shelves, I thought, and although I knew that was nonsense, I put all the pills back in the medicine cabinet, but left the Infermiterol bottle out on the dining table, its blue plastic top flashing like a neon light as I looked through the mail. I took a few Nembutal and shot back the dregs of a bottle of Dimetapp.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Having babies uses you up, he says. And I want to be an artist. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.” Because I wouldn’t have known how to say it then, but Steve’s finger in my cunt felt good. At the same time, I knew that soft, mushy feeling to be the enemy. If I yielded to that feeling, it would be goodbye to all the other things I wanted. “You have to choose,” I told myself sternly at fourteen. Get thee to a nunnery. So, like all good nuns, I masturbated. “I am keeping myself free of the power of men,” I thought, sticking two fingers deep inside each night. Dr. Schrift didn’t understand. “Ackzept being a vohman,” he hissed from behind the couch. But at fourteen all I could see were the disadvantages of being a woman. I longed to have orgasms like Lady Chatterley’s. Why didn’t the moon turn pale and tidal waves sweep over the surface of the earth? Where was my gamekeeper? All I could see was the swindle of being a woman. I would roam through the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking for one woman artist to show me the way. Mary Cassatt? Berthe Morisot? Why was it that so many women artists who had renounced having children could then paint nothing but mothers and children? It was hopeless. If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you turned. Either you drowned in domesticity (and had Walter Mittyish fantasies of escape) or you longed for domesticity in all your art. You could never escape your femaleness. You had conflict written in your very blood. Neither my good mother nor my bad mother could help me out of this dilemma. My bad mother told me she would have been a famous artist but for me, and my good mother adored me, and wouldn’t have given me up for the world. What I learned from her I learned by example, not exhortation. And the lesson was clear: being a woman meant being harried, frustrated, and always angry. It meant being split into two irreconcilable halves. “Maybe you’ll do better than me,” my good mother said. “Maybe you’ll do both, darling. But as for me, I never could.” A TEN Freud’s House It is really a stillborn thought to send women into the struggle for existence exactly as men. If, for instance, I imagined my sweet, gentle girl as a competitor, it would only end in my telling her, as I did seventeen months ago, that I am fond of her and that I implore her to withdraw from the strife into the calm uncompetitive activity of my home. —Sigmund Freud drian dropped us off at the hotel without a word and roared off in the Triumph to get lost.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  And during this lull in the drama of sleep, I entered a stranger, less certain reality. Days slipped by obliquely, with little to remember, just the familiar dent in the sofa cushions, a froth of scum in the bathroom sink like some lunar landscape, craters bubbling on the porcelain when I washed my face or brushed my teeth. But that was all that went on. And I might have just dreamt up the scum. Nothing seemed really real. Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds. I didn’t talk to myself in my head. There wasn’t much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream. Three IN NOVEMBER, however, an unfortunate shift occurred. The carefree tranquility of sleep gave way to a startling subliminal rebellion—I began to do things while I was unconscious. I’d fall asleep on the sofa and wake up on the bathroom floor. Furniture got rearranged. I started to misplace things. I made blackout trips to the bodega and woke up to find popsicle sticks on my pillow, orange and bright green stains on my sheets, half a huge sour pickle, empty bags of barbecue-flavored potato chips, tiny cartons of chocolate milk on the coffee table, the tops of them folded and torn and gummy with teeth marks. When I came to after one of these blackouts, I’d go down to get my coffees as usual, try a little chitchat on the Egyptians in order to gauge how weirdly I’d acted the last time I was in there. Did they know that I’d been sleepwalking? Had I said anything revealing? Had I flirted? The Egyptians were generally indifferent and returned the standard chitchat or flat out ignored me, so it was hard to tell. It concerned me that I was venturing out of the apartment while unconscious. It seemed antithetical to my hibernation project. If I committed a crime or got hit by a bus, the chance for a new and better life would be lost. If my unconscious excursions went only as far as the bodega around the corner, that was okay, I thought. I could live. The worst that could happen was I’d make a fool of myself in front of the Egyptians and would have to start going to the deli a few blocks farther down First Avenue. I prayed that my subconscious understood the value of convenience. Amen.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  You’re having to work that much harder just to hold your mind centered. It’s effort wasted, I’m afraid. If you let your mind drift, you’d find you can adapt quite easily to the deviated reality. But the instinct for self-correction is powerful. Oh, is it powerful. Proper medication should soften the impulse. You had no idea about your facial deviation?” “No,” I answered, and raised my hands to touch my eyes. She reached down into a paper shopping bag and pulled out four sample bottles of Infermiterol. “Double your dosage. These are ten milligram tablets. Take two,” she said, and slid the boxes across her desk. “If vanity is going to keep you up at night, let me just say, it’s a very minor slant.” • • • IN THE CAB HOME, I looked at myself in the reflection of the tinted windows. My face was perfectly aligned: Dr. Tuttle was obviously crazy. In the gold-tone doors of the elevator up to my apartment, I still looked good. I looked like a young Lauren Bacall the morning after. I’m a disheveled Joan Fontaine, I thought. Unlocking the door to my apartment, I was Kim Novak. “You’re prettier than Sharon Stone,” Reva would have said. She was right. I went to the sofa, clicked the TV on. George Walker Bush was taking his oath of office. I watched him squint and give his monologue. “Encouraging responsibility is not a search for scapegoats; it is a call to conscience.” What the hell did that mean? That Americans should take the blame for all the ills of the world? Or just our own world? Who cared? And then, as though I’d summoned her with my mundane cynicism, Reva was knocking on my door once again. I answered somewhat gratefully. “Well, I scheduled the abortion,” she said, rushing past me into the living room. “I need you to tell me I’m doing the right thing.” “I ask you to be citizens: Citizens, not spectators; citizens, not subjects; responsible citizens building communities of service and a nation of character.” “This Bush is so much cuter than the last. Isn’t he? Like a rascal puppy.” “Reva, I’m not feeling well.” “Well, neither am I,” she said. “I just want to wake up and it all be over, and I never have to think about this again. I’m not going to tell Ken. Unless I feel like I should. But only after. Do you think he’ll feel bad? Oh, I feel sick. Oh, I feel terrible.” “Do you want something to take the edge off?” “God, yes.” I pulled one of the Infermiterol samples Dr. Tuttle had given me from the pocket of my fur coat.