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 Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  “I was just like, ‘Okay, I am going to take time off and really explore this because I do not feel good about having sex that I don’t enjoy.’ I didn’t feel good about not having autonomy and some semblance of power,” she told me. “Now is the first time I feel like, ‘Oh, I’m having sex because I’m choosing, and I’m enjoying the sex that I’m choosing.’ Do you know how empowering that is, that I enjoy choosing to have sex, and that I enjoy it? I chose a partner who wants me to be empowered. Too many women and trans folks are not conditioned to feel empowered and in control.” I live alone with my Chihuahua, Bucatina, and we are both anxious. The shelter told me she was rescued from a Texas puppy mill, where at the age of three and a half she’d already had at least two litters. She has PTSD and so do I. Our first few weeks together, I would occasionally host an on-again, off-again hookup for sex and companionship. He and I were both extremely careful recluses (it was early pandemic) who figured that we, too, deserved human contact, just like people who lived with partners. Bucatina does not bark. When she is scared—from triggers such as clapping, fireworks, and skateboarding youths—she trembles so fiercely that she forgets to breathe. The last time this friend came to my apartment for sex, and the last time I had sex before kicking off the longest dry spell of my adult life, was the first time I had sex with Bucatina in the apartment. It was already distressing enough to her that a strange man sat next to me on the couch seat she had clearly claimed by repeatedly vomiting on the cushion. But when the man and I migrated to the bed, she tried to hop in, perching her little head on the corner of the mattress and pushing her snout into the mix as best she could. When the man lowered himself on top of me, Bucatina barked hysterically. How is a dog to know what human sex looks like, and that it is not murder? Without the proper conceptual framework, the scene looked violent; I get it. We continued having sex, assuming she would eventually calm down, but she didn’t. I hopped on top and that seemed to placate her, though the trembling continued. I could now count at least five things preoccupying my brain while getting dicked: 1) Traumatizing Bucatina. 2) My neck acne, now on full display due to the position. 3) My shoddily built bed frame, which would indeed collapse moments later. 4) That time twenty years ago at summer camp when I tried out referring to my period as “my PD” to make it seem cool that I’d had it. 5) Hunger for SunChips.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  So beLIEVE me, I would never romanticize the days of schlepping myself to hookup bars in hopes of meeting day traders because I couldn’t afford my own well drinks. In many respects, the normalization of dating apps like Hinge, Tinder, and OkCupid have upgraded my sexual experiences: I can meet people I’m more compatible with, at least on paper, and more easily filter out those with views I find reprehensible (fitness is NOT, in fact, “life”). The apps expanded my sexual options beyond just people I approached because I was wasted, and not being wasted for all my sexual experiences has done wonders for quality. For LGBTQIA+ people, who have historically had smaller pools of potential partners, the apps revolutionized dating and hooking up, making it safer, easier, and, for many people, more pleasurable, and online forums have long made dating more accessible for disabled people. Feeld, a remarkably inclusive dating app that surged during the pandemic, filled a great need for polyamorous and/or kinky people, while welcoming all kinds of daters, swingers, and casual fuckers with “alternative” sexual preferences. Progress, I dare say, is good. Generally. There is, of course, a catch. The apps empower us all to feel like Olivia Colman in The Favourite, selecting the partners we find most pleasing with the fatigued swipe of a finger. Like Colman, we feel that if we just keep looking, it’s possible we could connect with Emma Stone, or at least the guys I date do. (They’re delusional!!) But has the dating app revolution given us better relationships? Are we having better sex? Are we more romantically fulfilled because we dodged the bullet of getting coffee with a man who holds trout in photos? I don’t have the answers to these questions. I just know I’m miserable. Smartphones have solved many of the trickiest parts of our sex lives—finding people, screening people, allowing horny but tired people to stay in their homes while coordinating sex opportunities—but they’ve also complicated our experience of sex. The perception of unlimited choice has made us more anxious about finding the perfect partner or relationship, since we have more information up front, offering us the illusion of agency. This “paradox of choice,” as American psychologist Barry Schwartz would call it, and infinite swiping mentality can leave us feeling more responsible for curating super fulfilling, orgasmic romantic lives, and even more disappointed when our experiences don’t measure up. We (I) think that our ability to screen out Patriots fans will help us (me) find more compatible partners, but that’s not necessarily true. Maybe the love of my life is a Patriots fan and I will never know because these apps empower me to block and report them with a tap of the thumb. We feel like we have unlimited options, the people we have sex with feel like they have unlimited options, and we are all anxious about it.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  2. Be thoughtful about the porn you consume. Like all media, porn shapes how we experience the world and our bodies, and it can color our expectations of sex. Seek out ethically made, feminist porn—ideally porn that puts dollars directly into the pockets of sex workers—that shows all bodies are worthy of pleasure. Think beyond porn that centers cis, able-bodied, heteronormative sex, or porn that reinforces norms that don’t serve you. “Most people get their sex education from porn; that’s a fact that we can’t divorce ourselves from,” said the author and sex educator Gabrielle Alexa Noel. “When it comes to perception of who is and isn’t sexy, I think porn can collaboratively participate in that.” Consider spending money on independently made porn that supports creators directly, or choose a few OnlyFans accounts to support every month. 3. Remain curious and critical of dating apps, social media, and the internet in general. Noel’s book, How to Live with the Internet and Not Let It Run Your Life, is a great primer for becoming an informed, critical consumer of the internet, which can help protect your self-image and mental health. Digital media has the potential to positively shape sexual culture, if we remain critical consumers; people can access information about sexual health and build affirming communities on social media platforms. “These platforms can strengthen ideas around the rigidness of sexual orientation by encouraging us to display our orientation labels and to organize ourselves around them,” writes Noel. “But they also make it more acceptable to identify as someone who isn’t heterosexual.” 4. Follow sex-positive, LGBTQIA+-friendly sex educators. Not only will this make you more comfortable thinking and talking about sex, but you will likely learn very useful things about sexual wellness that you certainly didn’t learn in school, thanks to sex-positive influencers and educators. Also: unfollow people who make you feel horrible about yourself. 5. Detox when possible. Even if you can’t take a complete break from your smartphone, see if you can take weeklong breaks (or longer!) away from dating and social media apps that are causing you more anxiety than joy. It is as natural as the cycles of the moon to delete and redownload dating apps. When evaluating aspects of your digital media consumption that feel unhealthy, you needn’t take an abstinence-only approach; it’s unrealistic and will make you feel bad when you inevitably open Instagram on Safari as a workaround. Give yourself grace. 4 THE POWER OF SEX CLEANSES, DRY SPELLS, AND AVOIDING SEX ALTOGETHER “I didn’t have sex for a full year and a half between 2017 and 2018. And I was so happy. I didn’t shave my legs, or my whole body really, I was just satisfied with work and roller derby and my friends. I was truly fulfilled and happy without sex.” —thirty-one-year-old cis bi woman

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  There God promises his newly rescued people that they will be his “treasured possession,” “a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (19:5–6). The priestly vocation consists of summing up the praises of creation before the Creator; the royal vocation, in turn, means reflecting God’s wisdom and justice into the world. This is a direct outworking of Genesis 1:26–28, where humans are created in the divine image. The book of Revelation picks up this theme exactly where Israel’s scriptures left off. It says—shockingly, of course—that the ancient vocation had been renewed in a new and revolutionary way through the death of the Messiah. Once we get the goal right (the new creation, not just “heaven”) and the human problem properly diagnosed (idolatry and the corruption of vocation, not just “sin”), the larger biblical vision of Jesus’s death begins to come into view. A short aside may be needed at this point. Some readers may feel anxious about both elements of the vocation I am describing, the “royal” bit and the “priestly” bit. Let me say a word about each. For many people, not least those who got rid of monarchs in the eighteenth century, the very idea of kings or queens seems outdated, antiquated, unnecessary, and quite possibly abusive. People often ask me why I continue to talk about the “kingdom of God” when kingdoms in general have been such a disaster, making a few people rich and proud and a great many people poor and downtrodden. My normal answer is that things were like that in the first century too, if anything worse (think of Herod; think of Caesar!), but that Jesus went on talking about God becoming king anyway. Why did he do that? Answer: Because the perversion of human rule is just that, a perversion. We ought not to let the perversion rob us of the good news; and the good news is not only that God is sorting out the world, but that his rule is a different kind of rule entirely from those that give monarchs a bad name. Prophetic passages such as Isaiah 11 and psalms such as Psalm 72 demonstrate that when God is faced with the corruption of monarchy, he promises not to abolish monarchy, but to send a true king to rule with utter justice, making the poor and needy his constant priority. The human vocation to share that role, that task, is framed within the true justice and mercy of God himself. So too with “priesthood.” This word makes many people think of corrupt hierarchies, organizing “religion” for their own purposes and threatening dire, and indeed “divine,” punishments for any who step out of line. Again, the abuse does not invalidate the proper use.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  You always were a bad influence.” But she smiled when she said it, soft and flirting. “Do me a favor, Ray baby? I’m out of cigs, could you run down to the store and get me a carton?” She flashed him her flat wide smile. “I need some beer anyway,” he said. “You want to come, Astrid?” As if her smile couldn’t stretch anymore, it sprang back to the center, then she stretched it again. “You can go yourself, can’t you, big boy? Astrid needs to help me for a minute.” Pluck, pluck, tearing the baby spiders off with the dead leaves. Ray got his jacket and ducked out under the waterfall of water coming off the corrugated steel porch roof, the jacket pulled up to cover his head. “You and me need to talk, missy,” Starr said to me as Ray closed the cab door to the truck and started the motor. Reluctantly, I followed her back into the house, into her bedroom. Starr never talked to the kids. Her room was dark and held the smell of unwashed grown-ups, dense and loamy, a woman and a man. The bed was unmade. A kid’s room never smelled like that, no matter how many were sleeping there. I wanted to open a window. She sat down on the unmade bed and reached for the pack of Benson and Hedges 100s, saw it was empty, threw it away. “You’re having a good time here, aren’t you,” she said, peering into the drawer of the bedside table, rummaging inside. “Making yourself at home? Getting comfortable?” I traced the flower pattern on her sheets, it was a poppy. My fingers followed the aureole, and then the feelers in the middle. Poppy, the shape of my mother’s undoing. “A little too darn comfortable, I’d say.” She shut the drawer, the little ring of the pull clicking. She tugged the blanket up, so I couldn’t trace the flower anymore. “I may not be some genius, but I’m getting your game. Believe me, it takes one to know one.” “One what?” I couldn’t help but be curious about what I was that Starr recognized in herself. “Going after my man.” She straightened out a cigarette butt from the plaid beanbag ashtray on the nightstand and lit it. I had to laugh. “I wasn’t.” That was what she saw? Bang bang bang, Lord almighty? “I didn’t.” “Always hanging around, handling his ‘tools’—‘What’s this for, Uncle Ray?’ Playing with his guns? I’ve seen the two of you. Everybody asleep except the two of you, cuddling up, just as sweet as you please.” She exhaled the stale butt-smoke into the close, humid air. “He’s old,” I said. “We’re not doing anything.” “He’s not that old,” Starr said. “He’s a man, missy. He sees what he sees and he does what he can.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  These spurious emotions override (and are, unfortunately, often confused with) the spontaneously arising ones. Exercise 4: Mindful Chewing The jaw is one of the places that most people carry considerable tension. There are reasons for this. The following exercise may serve to illuminate both reasons for this typical “holding pattern” and what may lie on the other side of it, as it dissolves: At your next meal, or with a crisp apple in hand, take a good “aggressive” bite into a food that you desire. Really, take a good bite out of it and then begin chewing deliberately. Continue chewing, slowly, mindfully, until the food turns to liquid. As you do this, become aware of other sensations and reactions in your body. If you feel the urge to swallow, try to restrain it—to “play the edge” of feeling the urge to swallow, when it arises, and continue to focus on gently chewing. This may be difficult and uncomfortable, so be patient. Note any impulses you might have such as the urge to swallow, tear, vomit, or associations to things going on in your life—present or past. If reactions such as nausea or anxiety become too strong, please don’t push yourself. Make written notes of your reactions. Exercise 5: Goldfish Jaw Attend to the tension in your jaw and mouth. Notice whether your lips and teeth are touching. Slowly begin to part your lips and slightly drop your chin and lower jaw. Notice any impulses or urges. Next, infinitesimally slowly, begin opening and closing your mouth as though you were a goldfish. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, increase the range of your opening and closing. When you come to a point of resistance, gently back off and then slowly move back into the resistance. Do this several times, finding a rhythm. Likely, you will have a strong urge to yawn. Gently try to resist this and move into the feeling of yawing without actually giving into a full yawn. This process will almost surely be maddening, but try to stay with it as best as you can. Note times when you have an urge to shake or tremble or if it brings up emotional feelings or images. Note also if you seem to be fighting or bracing against it or to surrender into it. Again record your experience and compare it as you repeat this exercise over time. Exercise 6: Shoulders Most people also carry considerable tension in their shoulders. Here is a simple exercise to explore the nature of these tensions: Take some time to explore the sense of tension in your shoulders. Note which shoulder is more tense. Now, keep your awareness on that tension. Then imagine that this tension is increasing. As it increases, note how that tension would “want to move” the shoulder.

• From Understanding the Old Testament (2019)

  Understanding the old testament 28 In chapter 17, it has been 24 years since God’s initial promise. This chapter provides the clearest listing of the three promises of the Abrahamic covenant: progeny, land, and an ongoing relationship between God and Abraham’s descendants. Additionally, in chapter 17, God asks of Abraham and his male descendants that they be circumcised. It reads in verse 14 as if failure to do so negates the covenant. Not being circumcised removes that specific individual from the unconditional covenant with the nation. Chapter 22 There occurs an important story in chapter 22, after Abraham and Sarah have had their promised child, Isaac. Judaism calls this the Akedah, or the “binding” of Isaac. It involves a rigorous task that God asks of Abraham: the sacrifice of Isaac. However, God is not testing Abraham to see if he has faith. In a certain sense, God is testing Abraham to show Abraham how much faith he himself has. In a second sense, the story is testing God to show how faithful he is. In a third sense, the test is to show Israelite readers something about both Abraham and God. One should not read this story and conclude that God is a heartless tyrant who doesn’t understand human love and affection. In verse 2, God first says that Abraham loves Isaac. Still, there is a problem with God’s command. The command stands in conf lict with the promise: How can Abraham have descendants through Isaac if Isaac is dead? If Abraham obeys God, Isaac dies. If Isaac dies, God didn’t keep his promise of descendants through Isaac. If God can’t keep his promise, why should Abraham obey him? It’s a logical paradox. However, Abraham takes action to prepare to sacrifice Isaac. Just before he does so, though, “the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.’”

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But Stephen would feel herself growing more rigid with every kind word and gallant allusion. Openly hostile she would be feeling, as poor Captain Ramsay or some other victim was manfully trying to do his duty. In such a mood as this she had once drunk champagne, one glass only, the first she had ever tasted. She had gulped it all down in sheer desperation—the result had not been Dutch courage but hiccups. Violent, insistent, incorrigible hiccups had echoed along the whole length of the table. One of those weird conversational lulls had been filled, as it were, to the brim with her hiccups. Then Anna had started to talk very loudly; Mrs. Antrim had smiled and so had their hostess. Their hostess had finally beckoned to the butler: ‘Give Miss Gordon a glass of water,’ she had whispered. After that Stephen shunned champagne like the plague—better hopeless depression, she decided, than hiccups! It was strange how little her fine brain seemed able to help her when she was trying to be social; in spite of her confident boasting to Raftery, it did not seem able to help her at all. Perhaps is was the clothes, for she lost all conceit the moment she was dressed as Anna would have her; at this period clothes greatly influenced Stephen, giving her confidence or the reverse. But be that as it might, people thought her peculiar, and with them that was tantamount to disapproval. And thus, it was being borne in upon Stephen, that for her there was no real abiding city beyond the strong, friendly old gates of Morton, and she clung more and more to her home and to her father. Perplexed and unhappy she would seek out her father on all social occasions and would sit down beside him. Like a very small child this large muscular creature would sit down beside him because she felt lonely, and because youth most rightly resents isolation, and because she had not yet learnt her hard lesson—she had not yet learnt that the loneliest place in this world is the no-man’s-land of sex. CHAPTER 9 1 S ir Philip and his daughter had a new common interest; they could now discuss books and the making of books and the feel and the smell and the essence of books—a mighty bond this, and one full of enchantment. They could talk of these things with mutual understanding; they did so for hours in the father’s study, and Sir Philip discovered a secret ambition that had lain in the girl like a seed in deep soil; and he, the good gardener of her body and spirit, hoed the soil and watered this seed of ambition. Stephen would show him her queer compositions, and would wait very breathless and still while he read them; then one evening he looked up and saw her expression, and he smiled: ‘So that’s it, you want to be a writer. Well, why not?

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  MINIATURE SATYAGRAHA Though I thus took part in the war as a matter of duty, it chanced that I was not only unable directly to participate in it, but actually compelled to offer what may be called miniature Satyagraha even at that critical juncture. I have already said that an officer was appointed in charge of our training, as soon as our names were approved and enlisted. We were all under the impression that this Commanding Officer was to be our chief only so far as technical matters were concerned, and that in all other matters I was the head of our Corps, which was directly responsible to me in matters of internal discipline; that is to say, the Commanding Officer had to deal with the Corps through me. But from the first the Officer left us under no much delusion. Mr. Sorabji Adajania was a shrewd man. He warned me. ‘Beware of this man,’ he said. ‘He seems inclined to lord it over us. We will have none of his orders. We are prepared to look upon him as our instructor. But the youngsters he has appointed to instruct us also feel as though they had come as our masters.’ These youngsters were Oxford students who had come to instruct us and whom the Commanding Officer had appointed to be our section leaders. I also had not failed to notice the high-handedness of the Commanding Officer, but I asked Sorabji not to be anxious and tried to pacify him. But he was not the man to be easily convinced. ‘You are too trusting. Those people will deceive you with wretched words, and when at last you see through them, you will ask us to resort to Satyagraha, and so come to grief, and bring us all to grief along with you,’ said he with a smile.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  In the expanding silence, Phoebe pulled up her legs. She turned aside, but I still heard the panic thrum. I cracked the window open. I drove. The traffic had slowed to a standstill. I bullied hesitating cars. I shoved into each hint of a rift. I pushed; I lunged, while Phoebe’s left foot jigged. The key to driving fast in traffic is to act as if everyone else has more to lose. I willed Phoebe to complain. I wanted the fight, but since she kept quiet, I couldn’t start arguing without also being in the wrong. Before long, traffic opened out. The wheels rushed across wet asphalt, a sound like film reel unwinding. The trip rolled back, as though it hadn’t happened. In a short while, we’d hurtled past the speed limit. Do you want to know why I have to be on time? Sure, I said, but she fell silent again, a hand lighting on my thigh, until I turned off the highway, into Noxhurst. Since school reopened, she said, Jejah had begun holding group confessions. Each person talked about his life, and hers, inviting questions, criticism. It was optional. If she wasn’t explaining this well, it was because she hadn’t taken a turn, not yet. She would, tonight. It was on the schedule. I might have noticed she’d been writing, at times—well, that was what she’d been doing. Drafting thoughts. It would be rude to be late. I parked in front of the house, and I asked what she hoped to tell them. I’ll talk about my mother, she said. If I can. I don’t think I’ve told you how she died, the details. That night, I insisted on driving, but I wasn’t good at it. I hadn’t practiced enough. She didn’t like me to drive. In the last mile, going home, I was blinded by headlights. I swerved, then I hit a truck head-on. But she pitched her body in front of mine, taking the impact. I didn’t even have to go to the hospital. Will, I think you were right. It could help, talking about it. The door chimed open. I felt the light brush of a kiss, soft lips sliding, and then she left. I watched as she walked up the path, the front door swinging wide to let her in. –

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Long hours now spent waiting for the scans, waiting for the EEGs, sitting in frigid waiting rooms turning the pages of The Wall Street Journal and AARP The Magazine and Neurology Today and the alumnae magazines of the Columbia and Cornell medical schools. Sitting in frigid waiting rooms once again producing the insurance cards, once again explaining why, the provider’s preference notwithstanding, the Writers Guild-Industry Health Plan needs to be the primary and Medicare the secondary, not, despite my age—my age is now an issue in every waiting room—vice versa. Sitting in frigid waiting rooms once again filling out the New York–Presbyterian questionnaires. Sitting in frigid waiting rooms once again listing the medications and the symptoms and the descriptions and dates of previous hospitalizations: just make up the dates, just take a guess and stand by it, for some reason “1982” always comes to mind, well, fine, “1982” it is, “1982” will have to do, there can be no way to get the answer to this question right. Sitting in frigid waiting rooms trying to think of the name and telephone number of the person I want notified in case of emergency. Whole days now spent on this one question, this question with no possible answer: who do I want notified in case of emergency? I think it over. I do not want even to consider “in case of emergency.” Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else. I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not. I mean, think back: what about that business with the folding metal chair in the rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street? What exactly was I afraid of there? What did I fear in that rehearsal room if not an “emergency”? Or what about walking home after an early dinner on Third Avenue and waking up in a pool of blood on my own bedroom floor? Might not waking up in a pool of blood on my own bedroom floor qualify as an “emergency”? All right. Accepted. “In case of emergency” could apply. Who to notify. I try harder. Still, no name comes to mind. I could give the name of my brother, but my brother lives three thousand miles from what might be defined in New York as an emergency. I could give Griffin’s name, but Griffin is shooting a picture. Griffin is on location. Griffin is sitting in the dining room of one or another Hilton Inn—a few too many people at the table, a little too much noise—and Griffin is not picking up his cell. I could give the name of whichever close friend in New York comes first to mind, but the close friend in New York who comes first to mind is actually, on reflection, not even in New York, out of town, out of the country, away, certainly unreachable in the best case, possibly unwilling in the worst.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  His door was partially open and she had walked right in to find Dr. Lash speaking into a dictating machine. When she had told him why she’d returned, he had removed the cassette from the tape recorder on the table next to the patient’s chair and given it to her. “See you next week,” he had said. Clearly he’d forgotten to turn off the tape recorder when she’d left his office the first time, and it had been recording for some time before the tape ran out. Turning the volume all the way up, Myrna heard faint noises: possibly coffee mugs clinking as he cleared them from his desk. Then his voice again as he phoned someone to arrange a tennis appointment. Footsteps, the scrape of a chair. And then something more interesting. Much more interesting. “This is Dr. Lash dictating notes for countertransference seminar. Notes on Myrna, Thursday, 28 March.” Notes on me? I can’t believe it. Straining to hear, clutched with anxiety and curiosity, she leaned forward, closer to the speaker. Suddenly the car swerved and she almost lost control. She pulled over to the side of the highway, hurriedly ejected the tape, took her Walkman from the glove compartment, inserted the tape, rewound it, put on the headphones, eased back onto the freeway, and turned the volume all the way up. “This is Dr. Lash dictating notes for countertransference seminar. Notes on Myrna, Thursday, 28 March. Typical, predictable, frustrating hour. She spent most of the session whining as usual about the lack of single available men. I get more and more impatient . . . irritable—lost it for a moment and made an inappropriate remark: ‘Do you see “Dating Bureau” on my T-shirt?’ Really hostile thing for me to do—very unlike me—can’t remember last time I’ve been so disrespectful to a patient. Am I trying to drive her away? I never say anything supportive or positive to her. I try, but she makes it hard. She gets to me . . . so boring, rasping, crass, narrow. All she ever thinks about is making her two million in stock options and finding a man. Nothing else . . . narrow, narrow, narrow . . . no dreams, no fantasies, no imagination. No depth. Has she ever read a good novel? Ever said something beautiful? Or interesting . . . just one interesting thought? God, I’d love to see her write a poem—or try to write a poem. Now, that would be therapeutic change. She drains me. I feel like a big tit. Over and over the same material. Over and over hitting me over the head about my fee. Week after week I end up doing the same thing—I bore myself. “Today, as usual, I urged her to examine her role in her predicament, how she contributes to her own isolation. It’s not such a difficult concept, but I might as well be speaking Aramaic.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  The imprecision of psychiatric labelsOur study also confirmed that there was a traumatized population quite distinct from the combat soldiers and accident victims for whom the PTSD diagnosis had been created. People like Marilyn and Kathy, as well as the patients Judy and I had studied, and the kids in the outpatient clinic at MMHC that I described in chapter 7, do not necessarily remember their traumas (one of the criteria for the PTSD diagnosis) or at least are not preoccupied with specific memories of their abuse, but they continue to behave as if they were still in danger. They go from one extreme to the other; they have trouble staying on task, and they continually lash out against themselves and others. To some degree their problems do overlap with those of combat soldiers, but they are also very different in that their childhood trauma has prevented them from developing some of the mental capacities that adult soldiers possessed before their traumas occurred. After we realized this, a group of us[10] went to see Robert Spitzer, who, after having guided the development of the DSM-III, was in the process of revising the manual. He listened carefully to what we told him. He told us it was likely that clinicians who spend their days treating a particular patient population are likely to develop considerable expertise in understanding what ails them. He suggested that we do a study, a so-called field trial, to compare the problems of different groups of traumatized individuals.[11] Spitzer put me in charge of the project. First we developed a rating scale that incorporated all the different trauma symptoms that had been reported in the scientific literature, then we interviewed 525 adult patients at five sites around the country to see if particular populations suffered from different constellations of problems. Our populations fell into three groups: those with histories of childhood physical or sexual abuse by caregivers; recent victims of domestic violence; and people who had recently been through a natural disaster. There were clear differences among these groups, particularly those on the extreme ends of the spectrum: victims of child abuse and adults who had survived natural disasters. The adults who had been abused as children often had trouble concentrating, complained of always being on edge, and were filled with self-loathing. They had enormous trouble negotiating intimate relationships, often veering from indiscriminate, high-risk, and unsatisfying sexual involvements to total sexual shutdown. They also had large gaps in their memories, often engaged in self-destructive behaviors, and had a host of medical problems. These symptoms were relatively rare in the survivors of natural disasters.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Nevertheless, shy though I was, I was forced to admit that my sexual and general isolation were becoming unbearable and that my secret demanded to be shared with another. The narrow alleys of the red-light district bordered immediately on the open ghetto and nothing particular distinguished them from other streets. Impatient men waited at the little doors of the cells only ten yards away from the ragged children playing marbles in the cracks in the uneven pavement. The first shops on these streets were still occupied by second-hand dealers. The topography of the place suited me perfectly, for I could wander around as though I were passing there by accident or looking for something. But I could not prevent myself from walking too fast and too stiffly, with a false air of preoccupation. My quick searching glances into the main street, vaulted like a covered bazaar, never went beyond the dealers, and I avoided their eyes and those of passers-by as though I would find in them some sort of ironical accusation; so I hurried past. But even if I were to cross into the zone of public shame, how could I ever accost the women I saw there, sitting on their doorsteps? That seemed an insurmountable trial. And there was another frightening obstacle. I knew, from having often heard our school supervisors say so, that one should never go there without a condom. I had already seen comrades of mine, pale and proud, with rings around their eyes and an awkward gait, announce with affected nonchalance that they had caught gonorrhea, as though that were a proof of their virility. The others, who knew most of the prostitutes by name, would nod knowingly. “Never go to Lola without a condom. Fontana caught this from her.” I listened with intense curiosity, also with some anxiety and an affectation of indifference. As virginity was considered a joke, I had to avoid being suspected of it, so I discouraged their jokes by pretending to be as calm as an old roué. But how could I possibly walk into a drugstore and, in a loud voice, in front of everybody, perhaps even women, ask for a rubber? I might just as well announce solemnly to all and sundry: “I’m on my way to a brothel.” So I would walk up and down in front of a store until the druggist’s worried attention was attracted, and then I would flee down the street while he stared suspiciously after me. When I had enough courage for another attempt, I would choose a different part of town, and eventually I eliminated half the drugstores in the city this way.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Faithfully, my mother obeys the rhythm, or is it the rhythm that rules her from within? She must have lost, long ago, all awareness of her surroundings. The musicians then begin to accelerate their pace, driven by some mysterious force. Their eyes bulge out of their faces, veins swell in their foreheads, their hideously incised faces grimace like magical masks that suddenly come to life. As for the dancer, she seems to explode, torn apart as her limbs begin to cast themselves wildly all around her. But how is one to stop this collective seizure of epilepsy? I felt like shouting insults at them, like beating them, beating with all my strength these women and musicians. But I was paralyzed, as if watching all of this through a glass pane. How could I communicate with these people? Perhaps I too should dance until I became giddy, until I lost consciousness after accepting these rhythms and beating my own head again and again with disjointed gestures, repeated until it continued to shake all by itself, as empty as a doll’s head that moves as it follows its leaded pendulum, until my whole body became dislocated in all its joints, so that no longer a single bone, not a muscle, remained in its proper place, with all my consciousness vanished and my body disintegrated while I allowed the bagpipes to seize my nerves, the tom-tom to rule the beating of my heart and blood, and the cymbals to tear my limbs apart and scatter them north, south, east, and west, throughout the sky and the earth? Would I then manage in turn to get through to the other side of this pane of glass? I felt almost delirious. Suddenly, the music stopped on a single beat, leaving behind it a silence that was heavy and painful. Like a puppet when the thread that guides it breaks, my mother now collapsed, abandoned by the music, limp as a rag, motionless. Why, at this point, such a nauseous pity within me? My heart followed her to the floor and suffered from the sound of her heavy fall on the woven straw mat. Meanwhile, the other women continued their movements. Fat old Khmeissa, our neighbor from across the hallway, seemed to be suffering as she bent forward, with her head and her heavy breasts over my inanimate mother and, forcing her spine so that her buttocks protruded like something monumental, managed at last to place her mouth close to my mother’s ear. The women whispered among themselves in a moment of relative peace. Khmeissa then placed her ear close to my mother and seemed to be listening attentively for a long while. Suddenly, she shouted: “They have spoken! They have said: a red scarf and a white cock!” So the Djnoun spirits had answered! They had expressed their desires to the dancer in her seizure!

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Instead, ourselves the beneficiaries of this kind of benign neglect, we now measure success as the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us. Judith Shapiro, when she was president of Barnard, was prompted to write an op-ed piece in The New York Times advising parents to show a little more trust in their children, stop trying to manage every aspect of their college life. She mentioned the father who had taken a year off from his job to supervise the preparation of his daughter’s college applications. She mentioned the mother who had accompanied her daughter to a meeting with her dean to discuss a research project. She mentioned the mother who had demanded, on the grounds that it was she who paid the tuition bills, that her daughter’s academic transcript be sent to her directly. “You pay $35,000 a year, you want services,” Tamar Lewin of The New York Times was told by the director of “the parents’ office” at Northeastern in Boston, an office devoted to the tending of parents having become a virtually ubiquitous feature of campus administration. For a Times piece a few years ago on the narrowing of the generation gap on campus, Ms. Lewin spoke not only to the tenders of the parents but also to the students themselves, one of whom, at George Washington University, allowed that she used well over three thousand cellphone minutes a month talking to her family. She seemed to view this family as an employable academic resource. “I might call my dad and say, ‘What’s going on with the Kurds?’ It’s a lot easier than looking it up. He knows a lot. I would trust almost anything my dad says.” Asked if she ever thought she might be too close to her parents, another George Washington student had seemed only puzzled: “They’re our parents,” she had said. “They’re supposed to help us. That’s almost their job.” We increasingly justify such heightened involvement with our children as essential to their survival. We keep them on speed dial. We watch them on Skype. We track their movements. We expect every call to be answered, every changed plan reported. We fantasize unprecedented new dangers in their every unsupervised encounter. We mention terrorism, we share anxious admonitions: “It’s different now.” “It’s not the way it was.” “You can’t let them do what we did.” Yet there were always dangers to children. Ask anyone who was a child during the supposedly idyllic decade advertised to us at the time as the reward for World War Two. New cars. New appliances. Women in high-heeled pumps and ruffled aprons removing cookie sheets from ovens enameled in postwar “harvest” colors: avocado, gold, mustard, brown, burnt orange. This was as safe as it got, except it wasn’t: ask any child who was exposed during this postwar harvest fantasy to the photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ask any child who saw the photographs from the death camps.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  Eventually, you’re likely to become more comfortable talking to your sexual partners about sex in daily life. One comfy place to start is with meta-communication—communicating about communication. An example: “I would like to talk to you about something, but I’m feeling kind of nervous about it.” If you’re scared your partner will feel criticized, share that. Vulnerability is not the enemy. Try to initiate uneasy conversations in spaces where you both feel comfortable, like in front of the Puppy Bowl. If you don’t tend to have regular partners where there would be regular opportunities to talk about sex outside of sex, be brave and create those opportunities. Make the most of those awkward fifteen minutes when you bring your date back to your place and just sort of stare at the ground in silence before making out. Recruit inanimate conversation pieces to help you—sometimes I’ll leave a vibrator out on the coffee table before going on a date, so if we return, I can be like, “Oops, how did this get here!!” This is a good segue into, “I love my vibrator,” which is a good segue into using it during partnered sex—something I love, but am not always comfortable asking for during the act. Sharing sexual fantasies outside of sex is a great way to lower the stakes and plant the seeds for future experiences. If you’re still terrified of “kitchen-table sex talks,” i.e., sex talks in casual settings—a term first coined in Dr. Laurie Mintz’s excellent A Tired Woman’s Guide to Passionate Sex—check out mojoupgrade.com. It’s a quiz designed to help couples communicate their fantasies. “We spare you the fear of embarrassment by ensuring that we only show you the questions where you both have indicated a willingness, not those where one or both of you said ‘no.’” Another communication lifeline you can throw yourself in advance of an expected sexual encounter, Magee (the codependency coach) suggests, is setting boundaries ahead of time, even over text—say, “Let’s keep things friendly tonight, and if there’s chemistry, we can do more another time.”10 Or perhaps you’re stressed about something else, like how long it takes you to orgasm. You could say beforehand, or during the make-out stage, “Just so you know, I don’t usually orgasm during sex,” and that might help take some of the pressure off. Working with a sex therapist or coach is another way to practice sexual scripts that you struggle with in the moment.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  But why am I seized by this obscure emotion that is so closely allied to panic? My God, my God, I’m afraid even of my own mother, even my mother has ceased to seem familiar and understandable to me! This must be what a man feels when he awakes at dawn and sees beside him the face of an unknown woman, sealed within her dreams that he can never penetrate, the face of an unknown woman by whose side he has chanced to sleep. She was a stranger to me now, my mother, a part of myself become alien to me and thrust into the heart of a primitive continent. Still, it was she who had given birth to me. What somber ties still bound me to this ghost, and how shall I ever manage to return from the abyss into which she is now dragging me? But here the musicians are slowing down again, the tom-tom is silent, yielding to the shrill bagpipes, insidious in their tone, that seem to trace brief arabesques of sound which my mother follows obediently, her body swaying as if boneless in the slow dance of the charmed serpent. Her disheveled hair falls over her face that is distorted by pain and feebly lit by the embers dying in this fog of smoke; like black serpents beneath a spell, her locks seem to follow her movements. Faithfully, my mother obeys the rhythm, or is it the rhythm that rules her from within? She must have lost, long ago, all awareness of her surroundings. The musicians then begin to accelerate their pace, driven by some mysterious force. Their eyes bulge out of their faces, veins swell in their foreheads, their hideously incised faces grimace like magical masks that suddenly come to life. As for the dancer, she seems to explode, torn apart as her limbs begin to cast themselves wildly all around her.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The morning after an attack, my father often rose in a bad temper. His illness was a part of his life and he didn’t seem to try to avoid it absolutely. He would sit cross-legged on the bed and, despite the doctor’s continually repeated warnings, begin to chain-smoke those horrible cigarettes that are full of straw and bits of wood and that filled the flat with an acrid, stinking fog. He smoked, then coughed, then spat into the yellow pot that was always at the foot of his bed. Afterwards, he would moan and beg God to help him out of this miserable life. Finally, he would dress in the suffocating fumes of the bedroom and go off for a day of ten uninterrupted hours of work. The younger children had known my father’s illness from birth and were not greatly surprised by his sufferings. If he had an unspectacular attack, once the surprise passed, they would return to their games; and my father took bitter note of this. I could never get used to his illness and each attack further convinced me of my selfishness. At night, I would bury my head in the pillow, trying to stifle the whistling of his anguished chest, his hoarse groans, his appeals to God. I had learned to gauge the gravity of each attack. When he came home on those murderously damp winter evenings and flung himself gasping and with bulging eyes on the bed, I knew the evening would be unpleasant. He would be unable to speak and would wave his hand desperately to my mother who was hurrying to his help. She filled the little fire-yellowed saucer with medicated powder and threw a lighted match into it. My father bent over the smoke, opened his mouth and gasped. At once, he began to cough with all his body and lungs, and the sweat dripped from his face. Sometimes, the cough dragged on and on and never seemed to stop. Caught in the horrible rhythm of his coughs, he became panicky, tried to break out of it, rose suddenly, dropped back onto the bed, and then continued to gasp and cough until, overcome by his anguish, he would thrust his fingers down his own throat. Then, I would pack my notebooks in a briefcase and run from the house, followed a long way down the street by the odor of Legras powder and the sound of my father’s cough. ~ 4. UNCLE JOSEPH’S DEATH ~ Hoping to catch a breath of air, I had opened the door and all the windows of the study hall.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Sometimes, I would pluck up enough courage to face the druggist, or at least I thought I had, but then the presence of customers would prevent me from going in and, however long I waited outside, the shop would never empty. My torture lasted until the day I finally admitted to myself that I would never get to the streets of love alone, nor even to the drugstore. I needed a mediator between my sexual isolation and women. It did not take me long to choose one; of all the more experienced boys, Bissor was the only one who would not cruelly humiliate me. This certainty calmed me for a while and even made me less impatient. One Friday afternoon, I set to work at my uncomfortably high chest of drawers, with its cold slab of marble broken in three places. I could not concentrate and, at first, blamed the objects around me. As usual, I had carefully placed four newspapers under the marble to even it and a cushion on the chair to raise my own level. But no position was comfortable. First, I sat on my left leg, then on the other; then I was uncomfortably warm and removed the cushion. Finally, I recognized the old turmoil within me that I knew so well. Without thinking twice, since the idea was now well rooted within me, I quickly got up and, with trembling hands, stuffed my books and papers into my briefcase. I never left any of my things lying around because of the children who tore up everything. I had often run, in imagination, this errand to Bissor’s house, so my legs now carried me there without any hesitation, while my brain stood still. Bissor was just home from his tiring evening paper round. I knew his schedule. As I had hoped, he made no joke, but simply took on an older brother’s manner for which I was almost grateful. Outside the drugstore he asked me for the price of the rubber. As I seemed to intend to wait for him, he took me gently by the arm and said: “No, you must get used to doing this yourself.” In a clear voice, perhaps slightly histrionic, or at any rate so it seemed to me, he asked for a prophylactic — surely it was not necessary to speak so loud.