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 Another Country (1962)

  They stared at each other and his face made her frightened all over again. “Where did he go?” she asked. “I don’t know. I figured he’d gone to Harlem. He just disappeared.” “Vivaldo, she’s coming here this afternoon.” “Who is?” “His sister, Ida. I told her that I left him with you and that you would be here this afternoon.” “But I don’t know where he is . I was in the back, talking to Jane—and he said he was going to the head or something—and he never came back.” He stared at her, then at the window. “I wonder where he went.” “Maybe,” she said, “he met a friend.” He did not trouble to respond to this. “He should have known I wasn’t just going to dump him. He could have stayed at my place, I ended up at Jane’s place, anyway.” Cass watched him as he banged his cigarette out in the ashtray. “I have never,” she said, mildly, “understood what Jane wanted from you. Or, for that matter, what you wanted from her.” He examined his fingernails, they were jagged and in mourning. “I don’t know. I just wanted a girl, I guess, someone to share those long winter evenings.” “But she’s so much older than you are.” She picked up his empty glass. “She’s older than I am.” “That hasn’t got anything to do with it,” he said, sullenly. “Anyway, I wanted a girl who—sort of knows the score.” She considered him. “Yes,” she said, with a sigh, “that girl certainly knows how to keep score.” “I needed a woman,” Vivaldo said, “she needed a man. What’s wrong with that?” “Nothing,” she said. “If that’s really what both of you needed.” “What do you think I was doing?” “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know. Only, I’ve told you, you always seem to get involved with impossible women—whores, nymphomaniacs, drunks—and I think you do it in order to protect yourself—from anything serious. Permanent.” He sighed, smiled. “Hell, I just want to be friends.” She laughed. “Oh, Vivaldo.” “You and I are friends,” he said. “Well—yes. But I’ve always been the wife of a friend of yours. So you never thought of me—” “Sexually,” he said. Then he grinned. “Don’t be so sure.” She flushed, at once annoyed and pleased. “I’m not talking about your fantasies.” “I’ve always admired you,” he said soberly, “and envied Richard. ” “Well,” she said, “you’d better get over that.” He said nothing. She rattled the ice around in his empty glass. “Well,” he said, “what am I going to do with it? I’m not a monk, I’m tired of running uptown and paying for it——” “For it’s uptown that you run,” she said, with a smile. “What a good American you are.” This angered him. “I haven’t said they were any better than white chicks.” Then he laughed. “Maybe I better cut the damn thing off.” “Don’t be such a baby.

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

  But you know, it happened quite naturally—by accident, really. When he was little, he used to sit next to me at breakfast while I read the paper, so to keep him quiet and give him something to do, I taught him to pick out all the Os and then the As and so on, and then, all of a sudden, he started reading all by himself.” My job would be to look after Jacob while Nanny was off duty. That meant that I would take care of him after supper on Wednesday evenings, when Nanny went off to visit a friend, and Jenifer and I would share him on Saturday, which was Nanny’s half day. Jenifer would take him during the afternoon and give him his supper, and then I would take him to my room until it was time for bed. Because of his epilepsy, I would have to sit with him while he went off to sleep, until Jenifer came to bed, at about 10:30 p.m. I was startled to hear that for years she had shared a large attic room at the top of the house with Jacob, who was absolutely terrified of the dark and could not sleep alone because of his night terrors and seizures. Herbert, Jenifer’s husband, slept in his study next to the drawing room, a small, chronically disordered lair that was almost entirely filled with a massive homemade stereo system, constructed out of large wooden crates by Alan Ryan, the Harts’ former son-in-law, who was about to take up a fellowship at New College. Even though he was now divorced from Joanna, I was told that Alan was still very much a part of the family—an idea that I found intriguing. In my Catholic family, divorce was a cataclysm that led to permanent estrangement. “And,” Jenifer continued, “I wonder if you would mind relieving Nanny, who usually sits with him, when I am especially late—out at a dinner or something. Only if you’re free, of course,” she added hastily. “You can read up there. Jacob will go to sleep with the bedside light on, and you can sit on my bed until I come up.” It had sounded quite manageable when Jenifer had run through the job description in her peaceful college rooms. But now that I was about to meet Jacob, I was not so sure. “I hope you’re not worried about all this,” Jenifer said, clearly anxious herself, as she settled opposite me on the white sofa with her own goblet of sherry. “There’s no need to be. In fact, it’s very important that you don’t show any nervousness, because he’ll pick it up in a second, and then it really will be impossible.” I smiled with what I hoped looked like confidence, but I was afraid that I might be instinctively repelled by Jacob.

• From Another Country (1962)

  And, with the merest of glances at Eric and Vivaldo, “I think you might have had enough practice by now.” Ida looked into his eyes with an unreadable smile, which yet held some hint of the vindictive. She crushed out her cigarette, adjusted her shawl, and rose, demurely. “I’m glad you think I’m ready,” she said. “Keep your fingers crossed for me, sugar,” she said to Vivaldo, and stepped up on the stand. She was not announced; there was merely a brief huddle with the piano-player; and then she stepped up to the mike. The piano-player began the first few bars, but the crowd did not take the hint. “Let’s try it again,” said Ida, in a loud, clear voice. At this, heads turned to look at her; she looked calmly down on them. The only sign of her agitation was in her hands, which were tightly, restlessly clasped before her—she was wringing her hands, but she was not crying. Somebody said, in a loud whisper, “Dig, man, that’s the Kid’s kid sister.” There were beads of sweat on her forehead and on her nose, and one leg moved out, trembling, moved back. The piano-player began again, she grabbed the mike like a drowning woman, and abruptly closed her eyes: You Made me leave my happy home. You took my love and now you’ve gone, Since I fell for you. She was not a singer yet. And if she were to be judged solely on the basis of her voice, low, rough-textured, of no very great range, she never would be. Yet, she had something which made Eric look up and caused the room to fall silent; and Vivaldo stared at Ida as though he had never seen her before. What she lacked in vocal power and, at the moment, in skill, she compensated for by a quality so mysteriously and implacably egocentric that no one has ever been able to name it. This quality involves a sense of the self so profound and so powerful that it does not so much leap barriers as reduce them to atoms—while still leaving them standing, mightily, where they were; and this awful sense is private, unknowable, not to be articulated, having, literally, to do with something else; it transforms and lays waste and gives life, and kills. She finished her first number and the applause was stunned and sporadic. She looked over at Vivaldo with a small, childish shrug. And this gesture somehow revealed to Eric how desperately one could love her, how desperately Vivaldo was in love with her. The drummer went into a down-on-the-levee-type song, which turned out to be a song Eric had never heard before: Betty told Dupree She wanted a diamond ring.

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

  And so it began. I embarked on years of psychiatric sessions during which we raked over the memories of my unexceptional childhood. No doubt this conformed to the orthodoxy of the day, and in many cases I am sure that this is an effective way to treat the problems of adult life. But in my case, it simply did not work. The anxiety attacks, the terror, and the occasional loss of consciousness continued, and each hallucinatory episode pushed me further away from the rest of the world, making it even more impossible for me to get onto that merry-go-round. When I wrote Beginning the World, I used the conversations with Dr. Piet as a narrative device to explain what I thought was happening to me psychologically. But the truth is that I remember very little about them. I desperately wanted the treatment to work and cooperated as fully as I could, but Freud, I believe, once said that if you are suffering from toothache, you cannot engage in any productive analysis. You cannot even fall in love. Against the background of these strange periodic attacks, which Dr. Piet dismissed as mere symptoms of a deeper malaise, these psychiatric sessions felt as though we were conducting an esoteric discussion of medieval history while the house was on fire. I wish that Dr. Piet had allowed me to discuss my experiences in the convent. If I could have talked to him about the novitiate, the loneliness, the strain of the last few years of religious life, or my ambivalent feelings about it all, then maybe I could have begun to process the experience. But Dr. Piet usually deflected any such discussion. He saw it as a distraction, a smoke screen that enabled me to hide from my real problems. “You see, in the convent, you were safe,” he would tell me earnestly. “You were not challenged in any way. It was a secure, quiet existence—far from the madding crowd, if you like. You didn’t have to face up to emotional or sexual issues. You were in abeyance. You had, as it were, crawled back to the womb.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  The more graphic and specific my sexual imagery grew, the more the relatively simple idea of strapping the vibrating Butterfly onto her became, by contrast, tame and gentle and uninvasive—the very least I could do for her. Her neck-holes, her back, had the definite look of a vibrator-lover, anyway. I let her check out her book (she and the library man had a moment of feeling eye contact, as I had expected) and walk out onto the street, and then I brought the universe down and got out the Butterfly. My plan was to put it on her as she walked home, because I thought that she would feel it less, perhaps, if she was in a state of movement than if she was sitting down. But I had to be sure that it wouldn’t startle her—I wasn’t interested in disturbing her or making her feel she was losing her sanity. Consequently I had to test the product out on myself: I kicked off my pants and underpants, and, placing a Handi Wipe between the pleasure-nubbins of the machine and my scrotum so that I wouldn’t be exposing Ms. Henna to any of my germs when I did finally strap it on her, I stepped into its straps and pulled it snugly in place. I walked around the lobby of the library with it on, looking at the high corners of the room and concentrating on what it felt like. I was surprised to find that, though fairly tight, the black straps around my ass and thighs weren’t perceptible at all as I walked. What was perceptible, unfortunately, was the width of the Butterfly itself between my thighs. Perhaps if the bulk of my genitalia weren’t in the way the device would have nestled more comfortably, but even then it might be instantly apparent to the woman that something was there. I recalled reading a news item about a large woman who shoplifted portable TVs by walking out with them between her legs; but it wouldn’t do here to have a shape that the woman could feel as she walked. But all was not lost—I found that when I was sitting down, even with my legs crossed, it was as if the rubbery shape of the Butterfly didn’t exist. My body adjusted instantly to its presence. I put the two free Sonic-brand batteries in the pink plastic battery case and turned the dial until the vibration started. On full, the noise was appallingly loud. She would hear it. Even at the lowest level, which is where I would have it when I put it on her (so that it would remain below the threshold of consciousness, would be a vibration that was perceptible only as a change of mood, not as an actual physical signal), it made a sound that was not so much a buzz as a kind of low chuckling. My only hope now, I realized, was that she wasn’t going to walk home, but was going to take the bus or the subway, where the transit noise would mask its noise. As for the feeling of the Butterfly on my own equipment: it was not positively unpleasant, but didn’t feel at all wonderful, either (maybe the Handi Wipe was part of the problem), which I was on the whole pleased about, since it made the fact that women come so hard with vibrators all the more mysterious and womanly and different from male pleasure.

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

  I would pack my suitcases, all ready to fly off for a period of shooting, and then—sometimes when I was actually waiting for the taxi to take me to Heathrow—I would get a call telling me that the filming had been indefinitely postponed. Sometimes a trip was curtailed in midschedule, which meant that I spent my days zigzagging erratically, back and forth between London, Israel, and Europe. When we were able to shoot, the money came piecemeal, and there was always a bad moment at the end of the day when Joel and the producer, with their hearts in their mouths, went to the bank to see if the latest installment of funds had arrived to get us through the next twenty-four hours. Joel asked John to send in a British producer to supervise the finances, but John, for his own reasons, refused to do this. All this was very bad for the book, because the repeated interruptions damaged my concentration. Books need solid blocks of time, not a week here or a fortnight there. When I did get a sustained period to work on the manuscript, I had to work too fast, and all around the clock, because I was under pressure from the publishers to make sure that the book would be in print when the television series was screened. I felt strained, ill used, and miserably aware that I was cutting corners, not doing as good a job as I wished. One night I felt so distraught that the whole house seemed to be shaken by the strong winds blowing outside. I got little sleep, but was at my desk as usual early the next morning. Shortly after nine o’clock, my mother telephoned. “How are you getting on?” she asked, with obvious trepidation. “Oh, not too bad,” I replied wearily. “I’ve just finished the third draft of chapter three, and the first chapter—” “No, no, no!” she interrupted impatiently. “The storm! How is your house?” It was the night of the great hurricane of October 1987. “Oh!” I said wonderingly as she recited the catalogue of disasters—people killed, power lines down, trees uprooted, Kew Gardens irretrievably damaged, houses destroyed—and I then looked out at the devastation in my own street. “I thought it was a little windy!” By the summer of 1988 we had shot all my pieces to camera, but the production had come to a standstill. The company had exhausted its credit and we could neither film nor buy essential footage. Channel 4 declared the series bankrupt and pulled out. Three years’ work had gone down the drain, and my television career was in ruins. I felt abandoned. Joel had cracked under the strain, gone back to drink, and finished in a rehabilitation center.

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

  On the first anniversary of the fatwa there was yet more media ferment. I had written a short opinion piece in the books section of The Sunday Times, showing that Rushdie’s portrait of “Mahound” corresponded exactly with Islamophobic myths that had first been promoted by the Crusaders. On the day that the essay was published, I looked bleakly through the newspapers. My little contribution seemed a minnow beside the more authoritative articles by the literary heavyweights, and I felt suddenly overcome by a cold, pervasive dread. By failing to live up to our own standards of tolerance and compassion, by assuming that all Muslims were as vengeful as the ayatollah and that their religion was inherently violent and evil, we were laying up a store of trouble for ourselves in the future. Rightly or wrongly, many Muslims throughout the world believed that the West despised them. The tone of these articles would confirm them in their suspicions, and provoke some to extremism. Of course, we must defend the principle of free speech, but after Auschwitz we could not afford to indulge an old crusading prejudice which was manifestly untrue. Rushdie’s portrait of “Mahound” performed an important function in his novel. It was presented as fiction and delusion, as part of the theme of distortion and “monsterization.” But the writers who were denouncing Islam so vehemently in the papers this morning presented their views as hard, incontrovertible fact. Most of their readers would not know the true story of Muhammad, and many would probably accept verbatim this inaccurate depiction of Islam, thus compounding the problem. The trouble was, I said to myself as I sadly returned to the pile of newspapers, there was no accessible life of the Prophet to act as a counternarrative. The traditional Muslim biographies of Muhammad were written in a foreign idiom that could appeal only to a believer from the Arab world or the Indian subcontinent. It really was too bad that nobody had written a life of the Prophet to which Western people could relate.

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

  After the fiasco of the Crusades, my confidence was at such low ebb that these objections really struck home. I could already hear the ridicule and scorn of the reviewers. The general assumption was that nobody in the late twentieth century should take God seriously—least of all me. After all, this wretched God had lured me into a convent; his mythical perfection had made me chronically dissatisfied with myself; and his apparent indifference toward me had left me feeling spurned and hopeless. Who needed him? I had often declared that I had finished with God, and was much the better for it. Yet still, despite all the evidence I had so painfully amassed to the contrary, at some inchoate, unconscious level, I felt that God and I had unfinished business—even though I didn’t believe that he existed. Writing Through the Narrow Gate had reawakened that old longing for a more intense existence, shot through with transcendent meaning. This had quickly been submerged in the skeptical climate of the television world, but had surfaced occasionally at infrequent intervals. I remembered my drive from Jerusalem to Jericho, watching the sunrise over the surrounding desert. I saw again the Orthodox Jews arguing so passionately about God in the yeshiva, and the Muslim cleric studying the Koran in the al-Aqsa Mosque. I recalled my emotional identification with Saint Paul at Tre Fontane, when my voice had wobbled—just a little bit—when I had quoted his words “Now we see as through a glass darkly— but then, face-to-face!” Even though I considered faith a chimera, religion could still catch me unawares. Whatever my friends thought, God was not—quite—a joke. If I wanted to stay in the swing of things in London, it would be much more sensible to write a life of Fanny Burney. But despite the dismal predictions of the publishers, something in me refused to give up my God book. Maybe, like the mariner, I was moving toward a salvation of sorts “unaware,” my unconscious mind reaching out for what it knew I needed. In deciding to write about God, therefore, I knew that I was setting off on a lonely path, even though, in a sense, that was the last thing I wanted. On the other hand, I reflected, when I had come to an apparent dead end in the past, my life had sometimes taken a turn for the better. “Because I do not hope to turn again,” Eliot had reflected in Ash-Wednesday, “consequently I rejoice.” Like the mariner in his doomed ship, I seemed hopelessly adrift right now, but this had happened to me every five or six years with uncanny regularity.

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

  It can be a matter of trial and error, and at first, in my case it was often error. It was some years before my doctor brought me into hospital and, by carefully monitoring the dosage, found some truly effective medication. I had been advised to conceal my condition from the authorities. My doctors warned me that even though we lived in an enlightened age, the condition still carried a stigma, and that epileptics often found it difficult to gain employment. As I had been appointed to the post before my epilepsy had been diagnosed, I did not have to lie directly, but I just kept quiet about my disease. I was beginning to learn that virtually the only people who reacted to my problem in a balanced way were those with a medical training or those who had some firsthand experience of epilepsy. One of these was Sally, whose older sister had been a lifelong sufferer. Sally had come into the English department in my second year at the school. We became friends after I had a seizure during the staff Christmas lunch. This had been so mild that it was easy to pass it off as a faint, due to end-of-term exhaustion, but Sally knew at once what had happened. It was useful to have an ally. Teachers tend to pick up all kinds of germs and fevers from the children, and high body temperature can bring on an epileptic attack. This meant that whenever I caught one of these viruses, it took me a lot longer to recover than my colleagues. I had to take a great deal of sick leave, and this did not go unnoticed. Nor did the fact that I so often looked haggard and ill. School teaching is an extremely exhausting job: it is like doing a one-woman show, in which you are onstage for about seven hours every day. By the end of term, we all looked at death’s door. At coffee time we no longer laughed and chattered, and the head had no need to complain about the noise. We all sat around silently, staring into space like zombies. Sometimes—horror of horrors—we actually forgot to record our purchases in the Biscuit Book. My particular difficulty was that my drugs were debilitating, and this increased my natural weariness. Fatigue is one of the things that trigger my seizures, as does sleep deprivation. So it all became a vicious cycle. The more tired I was, the less resistance I had and the more flu bugs I caught from the children; the more seizures I had, the more exhausted I became.

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

  My job would be to look after Jacob while Nanny was off duty. That meant that I would take care of him after supper on Wednesday evenings, when Nanny went off to visit a friend, and Jenifer and I would share him on Saturday, which was Nanny’s half day. Jenifer would take him during the afternoon and give him his supper, and then I would take him to my room until it was time for bed. Because of his epilepsy, I would have to sit with him while he went off to sleep, until Jenifer came to bed, at about 10:30 p.m. I was startled to hear that for years she had shared a large attic room at the top of the house with Jacob, who was absolutely terrified of the dark and could not sleep alone because of his night terrors and seizures. Herbert, Jenifer’s husband, slept in his study next to the drawing room, a small, chronically disordered lair that was almost entirely filled with a massive homemade stereo system, constructed out of large wooden crates by Alan Ryan, the Harts’ former son-in-law, who was about to take up a fellowship at New College. Even though he was now divorced from Joanna, I was told that Alan was still very much a part of the family—an idea that I found intriguing. In my Catholic family, divorce was a cataclysm that led to permanent estrangement. “And,” Jenifer continued, “I wonder if you would mind relieving Nanny, who usually sits with him, when I am especially late—out at a dinner or something. Only if you’re free, of course,” she added hastily. “You can read up there. Jacob will go to sleep with the bedside light on, and you can sit on my bed until I come up.” It had sounded quite manageable when Jenifer had run through the job description in her peaceful college rooms. But now that I was about to meet Jacob, I was not so sure. “I hope you’re not worried about all this,” Jenifer said, clearly anxious herself, as she settled opposite me on the white sofa with her own goblet of sherry. “There’s no need to be. In fact, it’s very important that you don’t show any nervousness, because he’ll pick it up in a second, and then it really will be impossible.” I smiled with what I hoped looked like confidence, but I was afraid that I might be instinctively repelled by Jacob. Would he look dull and drooling? I had never done anything like this and had no idea how I would cope. How would I occupy a brain-damaged child for hours at a time, week after week? As if reading my thoughts, Jenifer only increased my anxiety as she gave me some last-minute advice.

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

  The old lady was so obviously lonely that I didn’t have the heart to cut her off. When she wasn’t regaling me with lugubrious stories, she would descend upon me in a fury because she had inspected my flat earlier in the day and found a cobweb or an undusted shelf. This impertinent surveillance enraged me. I’d had enough of that kind of supervision in the convent and it was not good for me to experience it here, when I was making a bid for independence. But I managed to make a life for myself in London. Richard and Jackie frequently invited me to join them and their partners in a visit to the theater, a dinner, or a walk in the country. I started to entertain the handful of my former classmates who were now living in London. I would meet Rebecca for lunch or spend an evening with Charlotte in her room in Kilburn. There were visits to Jane in the Lake District and trips home for weekends in Birmingham. These last became more frequent as the work on my thesis drew to a close, because a woman in my mother’s office was typing it for me. It made sense for me to review the typescript in my parents’ home, so that my mother could take any corrections in to work with her on Monday morning. I was starting to feel more relaxed with my family. As I no longer looked skeletal and ill, they were not so worried about me, and the shared project of my thesis brought us all together. I had made a niche for myself in the world, something that had once seemed to be beyond my powers. True, I still experienced occasional moments of terror when my brain cracked open and the world became suffused with dread, but in other ways I could feel that my mind really was coming back to life. There were times when I still encountered the familiar emptiness, but sometimes I could feel a text calling to me and I was able to reply. I noticed that this tended to happen when there was some pressure. If I had a lecture to prepare for the following day, for example, I found that the thoughts and arguments would come while I was actually writing the piece, which took on a new life. Sometimes I needed another critic to start me off, but then I discovered that I could continue by myself and that, almost without realizing it, I was supplementing his insights with some of my own. It was like learning to ride a bicycle.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The conductor and a couple of stage-hands had hold of the roughs, and were trying to pull them into the wings. Another stage-hand stood nearby, dazed, and with a bleeding nose.We had Walter with us, for we had arranged to eat with him later, after the show. Now he looked at the scene before us, aghast.‘My God,’ he said. ‘You cannot go on with them in such a mood as this.’As he spoke, the manager came running. ‘Not go on?’ he said, appalled. ‘They must go on, or there will be a riot. It is entirely because they did not go on when they were meant to that the damn trouble - excuse me, ladies - started.’ He wiped his forehead, which was very damp. From the stage, however, there were signs that the scuffling, at last, was subsiding.Kitty looked at me, then nodded. ‘He’s right,’ she said to Walter. Then, to the manager: ‘Tell them to put our number up.’The manager pocketed his handkerchief and stepped smartly away before she could change her mind; but Walter still looked grave. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked us. He glanced back towards the stage. The roughs had been successfully carried off, and the singer had been placed in a chair in the wing across from us and given a glass of water. His clogs must have been thrown back on to the stage, or else some kind soul had delivered or retrieved them; at any rate, they now stood rather neatly beneath his chair and beside his bruised and naked feet. There were still some shrieks and whistles, however, from the hall.‘You don’t have to do it,’ Walter went on. ‘They may hurl something; you might get hurt.’Kitty straightened her collar. As she did so we heard the great roar, and the thunder of stamping feet, that told us that our number had gone up. In a second, rising doggedly over the din, there came the first few bars of our opening song. ‘If they hurl something,’ she said quickly, ‘we’ll duck.’ Then she took a step, and nodded for me to follow.And after all the fuss, indeed, they received us very graciously.‘Wot cheer, Kitty?’ someone shouted, as we danced our way into the beam of the limes. ‘Did you lose your way in the fog, then, or what?’‘Shocking awful traffic,’ she called back - the first verse was about to begin, and she was slipping further into character with every step she took -‘but not so bad as a road my friend and I were a-walking on the other afternoon. Why, it took us quite half a day to get from Pall Mall to Piccadilly...’ And effortlessly, seamlessly - and with me beside her, closer and more faithful than a shadow - she led us into our song.When that was over we headed back into the wing, to where Flora, our dresser, waited with our suits.

• From Wild (2012)

  Jonathan and I spotted each other the moment I entered; he waved at me from his unreachable place on a raised platform, working the lights. I got a glass of wine and stood sipping it in what I hoped was an elegant way, listening to the band near the low wall where I’d met Jonathan the night before. They were a fairly famous bluegrass band from the Bay Area. They dedicated a song to Jerry Garcia. The music was good, but I couldn’t focus on it because I was trying so hard to seem content and perfectly at ease, as if I would be at this very club listening to this very band whether Jonathan had invited me to or not, and, most of all, to be neither looking nor not looking at Jonathan, who was looking at me every time I looked at him, which then made me worry that he thought I was always looking at him because what if it was only a coincidence that every time I looked at him he was looking at me and he wasn’t actually looking at me always, but only in the moments that I looked at him, which would compel him to wonder, Why is this woman always looking at me? So then I didn’t look at him for three whole long bluegrass songs, one of which featured an improvisational, seemingly endless fiddle solo until the audience clapped in appreciation and I couldn’t take it anymore and I looked and not only was he looking at me, but he also waved again. I waved back. I turned away and stood extra still and upright, acutely aware of myself as an object of hot and exquisite beauty, feeling Jonathan’s eyes on my 100-percent-muscle ass and thighs, my breasts held high by the sweet bra beneath my slim-fitting shirt, my extra-light hair and bronze skin, my blue eyes made even bluer by the Plum Haze lipstick—a feeling which lasted for about the length of one song, at which point it reversed itself and I realized that I was a hideous beast with tree-bark-plucked-dead-chicken flesh on my hips and a too-tan, chawed-up face and weather-beaten hair and a lower abdomen that—in spite of all the exercise and deprivation and the backpack strap that for two months had squeezed it into what you’d guess would be oblivion—still had an indisputably rounded shape unless I was lying down or holding it in. In profile, my nose was so prominent a friend had once observed that I was reminiscent of a shark. And my lips—my ludicrous and ostentatious lips! Discreetly, I pressed them to the back of my hand to obliterate the Plum Haze while the music bleated on. There was, thank God, an intermission. Jonathan materialized by my side, squeezing my hand solicitously, saying he was glad I’d come, asking if I wanted another glass of wine.

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

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

• From Wild (2012)

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

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

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

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

  need to sound confident, show no signs of anxiety, in other words be perfect —you will not make progress. You must create an expansive mind-set to go with your expansive strategy. Something like, I can sometimes be boring or sound stupid. I don’t need to hit the bull’s-eye; I just need to be on the target. Will you really believe this? Not at this point. You’ve been thinking with the perfectionist monkey mind-set for most, if not all of your life. You can, however, adopt a mind-set that seems truer, even if you do not trust it yet. The gardener who faithfully waters and weeds will see the seed sprout and grow into a lush plant. In the same way you, as you repeat your expansive strategy, will come to believe the mind-set you’ve been cultivating. The beautiful thing about expansive mind-sets and strategies is that they maintain cycles of expansion. Not having to hit the bull’s-eye every time opens up the whole target. There’s no limit to where you’ll be able to go. There’s a big world out there! Of course, thinking about a bigger world is going to mean greater anxiety. If you are feeling anxious right now, good! That means you are getting it. Yes, you will be more anxious when you drop a safety strategy and replace it with an expansive strategy. But in the short run, becoming more anxious is exactly what you need. You are standing up to your monkey mind by saying, I choose to be more anxious. I am willing to be imperfect. You are discrediting the perception of threat, something your monkey mind definitely notices because it means your monkey gets no banana! When you do this over and over again, your anxiety alarms will decrease and you will become more comfortable being yourself in social situations. You will also learn how to deal with occasional rejection, which makes you much more resilient. While all this may sound challenging, be assured that even my most anxiety-ridden clients have changed their strategies. So can you. I’ll be addressing the issue of handling anxiety through this transition in more detail in the next chapter. Right now, I want to present to you what some common expansive mind-sets and strategies can look like and how they work. The rule of thumb is that expansive mind-sets and strategies are, for the most part, the opposite of what you have been thinking and doing. You’ve been playing it safe; now you’re going to look for trouble. Let me

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

  consequences for future mistakes, would certainly make him feel uncomfortable in the short term, but if she repeated her mistake in the future, firing her would be easier, and at least he would have his justification for the firing documented in her personnel record. Eric decided that probation for the employee was the best option, especially if he combined it with more training to help prevent future mistakes. With an action plan in place, Eric was ready for step 4 of the Five-Step Problem Solving exercise, which was to take action. But he still felt uneasy. He had hoped that he would be able to come up with the perfect solution that would not threaten his friendship with the employee’s husband, nor cause any further loss of customers for his company. This was Eric’s perfectionist monkey mind-set at work. When problem solving there is never a perfect solution. If there were, it wouldn’t be a problem! If the action Eric chose to take didn’t solve the problem, I explained, he could go back to step 4 and pick another action. Until then it wouldn’t be useful to think about the others. For now, he should focus on the action he’d chosen to employ. Eric said he felt a little better, but he was concerned that he would continue to worry. Having decided on a course of action did not mean Eric’s monkey would not continue to chatter away; in fact we were both sure it would. So I introduced him to my favorite all-purpose tool to answer monkey chatter. Thank the Monkey Like all my clients, when dealing with anxious thoughts, Eric’s instinct was to block them out. When that didn’t work he’d argue back, coming up with rationales for why there was no need to worry. And like all of us, Eric seldom had much success. The monkey is a force of nature, and like with all irrepressible forces, what we resist persists. You cannot ignore, suppress, or debate with the monkey! To the monkey, your attempts to not think about the perceived threat will only confirm the threat, guaranteeing more chatter. To send the monkey the message you want to send it, that I am aware of this problem and I can handle it, you must give it full voice.

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

  Samantha’s Over-responsibility For Samantha, mother of an alcoholic son, the cycle of anxiety was gut-- wrenching. As I noted before, the perceived threat was real. Her only son was in jeopardy of losing his job, his home, his life, and there isn’t a parent on earth who wouldn’t feel anxious about that. But Samantha was depleting her savings trying to cover for his expenses and paying for his unsuccessful rehabs. She had high blood pressure and she wasn’t sleeping well. Her doctor told her she needed to take better care of herself or she wouldn’t be of much use to anybody. The question was, thirty years after the birth of her son, how was Samantha maintaining such a high level of maternal anxiety? To answer that, let’s start with the most common threat perception in Samantha’s daily life. When she hadn’t heard from her son in a while, images often popped into her head—horror scenes like her son passed out on the floor with blood flowing out of his ear. These images are normal, perfectly harmless, and no indication that the threat is any more imminent than it was before she had the image. But when the monkey sees these images it sounds the alarm, sending Samantha into a painful state of apprehension. She’s immediately hijacked. What if he is passed out and needs medical attention? If I don’t do something he could die. What Samantha does next is automatic. She calls him to check on him. If she hears his voice, she’ll know he’s okay and she can stop feeling this way. This is Samantha’s safety strategy. She’s keeping her son safe, and as soon as she hears his voice—even though he sounds irritated and is short with her—- she feels she can breathe again. The crisis is canceled—or rather, postponed. By calling her son for confirmation that he is alive and well, Samantha is telling her monkey that the threat perception is real, that her son could indeed have been passed out and bleeding. In effect she told her monkey, Thanks for the heads up! Making me anxious really got my attention and saved my son. Be sure to do the same thing next time I get a thought like that! Here it is all in one picture. Feeding her monkey fueled the cycle and each turn not only reinforced the perception of threat, but also reinforced her monkey mind-set. Her monkey logic said Because I called my son, he is alive, supporting her monkey’s belief that she was responsible for keeping him alive. Can you identify an anxiety cycle of your own? It’s a powerful exercise to visualize any cycle you are trapped in. First, download a blank Anxiety Cycle chart like the one below at http://www.newharbinger.com/35067.

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

  unfortunately that is often the case. As I said in chapter 1, the monkey mind monitors everything going on in your head and body—not only what you take in with your senses from the outside but what you are thinking and feeling on the inside. When you are thinking anxious thoughts and feeling negative emotion for an extended duration, or at a high level of intensity, such as in a panic attack, your monkey mind notices that too, and will misperceive it as a threat. You may interpret this anxiety about your anxiety as losing control, as going crazy, or as death itself. Your reaction? I need to relax to get rid of this threatening sensation. In the introduction, I described my own experience with panic attacks, specifically how the relaxation exercises my therapist prescribed did nothing to ease my attacks. We didn’t realize that trying not to feel anxious sensations —even the extremely uncomfortable ones like the pounding heart, dizziness, tightness in chest, tingling or numbness, nausea, blushing, sweating, or shaking you feel during a panic attack—only confirms the perception that they are dangerous. I have nothing against relaxing. Relaxation is essential for our overall health, both mental and physical. But if you are trying to relax because you are afraid of anxiety itself and see your anxious sensations as a threat, it is a safety strategy. This is a problem because you are feeding your monkey mind. If you reinforce what you are trying to decrease, you are trapped, and have little to look forward to except more of the same. How we try to relax varies from person to person. You might take a warm bath, go for a hike, pour a glass of wine, watch a movie, talk with a friend, pick up a book, or even meditate. Your behavior itself isn’t nearly as important as your motive and the message you are sending to your monkey. If your relaxation is an attempt to reduce or avoid anxious thoughts and feelings, that message is, You are right, little monkey, feeling anxious is dangerous. Thank you for alerting me that I need to relax. The more you try to relax, the more impossible relaxing becomes. Here are a few common activities we often employ to relax. They may be harmless in and of themselves, but when they are used to ward off negative emotion and uncomfortable physical sensations, they are safety strategies.