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

  Learning how to breathe calmly and remaining in a state of relative physical relaxation, even while accessing painful and horrifying memories, is an essential tool for recovery.[9] When you deliberately take a few slow, deep breaths, you will notice the effects of the parasympathetic brake on your arousal (as explained in chapter 5). The more you stay focused on your breathing, the more you will benefit, particularly if you pay attention until the very end of the out breath and then wait a moment before you inhale again. As you continue to breathe and notice the air moving in and out of your lungs you may think about the role that oxygen plays in nourishing your body and bathing your tissues with the energy you need to feel alive and engaged. Chapter 16 documents the full-body effects of this simple practice. Since emotional regulation is the critical issue in managing the effects of trauma and neglect, it would make an enormous difference if teachers, army sergeants, foster parents, and mental health professionals were thoroughly schooled in emotional-regulation techniques. Right now this still is mainly the domain of preschool and kindergarten teachers, who deal with immature brains and impulsive behavior on a daily basis and who are often very adept at managing them.[10] Mainstream Western psychiatric and psychological healing traditions have paid scant attention to self-management. In contrast to the Western reliance on drugs and verbal therapies, other traditions from around the world rely on mindfulness, movement, rhythms, and action. Yoga in India, tai chi and qigong in China, and rhythmical drumming throughout Africa are just a few examples. The cultures of Japan and the Korean peninsula have spawned martial arts, which focus on the cultivation of purposeful movement and being centered in the present, abilities that are damaged in traumatized individuals. Aikido, judo, tae kwon do, kendo, and jujitsu, as well as capoeira from Brazil, are examples. These techniques all involve physical movement, breathing, and meditation. Aside from yoga, few of these popular non-Western healing traditions have been systematically studied for the treatment of PTSD. 2. No Mind Without MindfulnessAt the core of recovery is self-awareness. The most important phrases in trauma therapy are “Notice that” and “What happens next?” Traumatized people live with seemingly unbearable sensations: They feel heartbroken and suffer from intolerable sensations in the pit of their stomach or tightness in their chest. Yet avoiding feeling these sensations in our bodies increases our vulnerability to being overwhelmed by them. Body awareness puts us in touch with our inner world, the landscape of our organism. Simply noticing our annoyance, nervousness, or anxiety immediately helps us shift our perspective and opens up new options other than our automatic, habitual reactions. Mindfulness puts us in touch with the transitory nature of our feelings and perceptions. When we pay focused attention to our bodily sensations, we can recognize the ebb and flow of our emotions and, with that, increase our control over them.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Back then, she said she was willing to be my thesis adviser because I struck her as serious, but she made it very clear that she felt no kinship—indeed, she felt a measure of repulsion—at my interest in the personal made public. I was ashamed, but undaunted (my epithet?). The thesis I produced under her tutelage was titled The Performance of Intimacy. I didn’t mean the word performance in opposition to “the real”; I’ve never been interested in any sort of con. Of course there exist people who perform intimacy in ways that are fraudulent or narcissistic or dangerous or steamrolling or creepy, but that’s not the kind of performance that I meant, or the kind I mean. I mean writing that dramatizes the ways in which we are for another or by virtue of another, not in a single instance, but from the start and always. When it comes to my own writing, if I insist that there is a persona or a performativity at work, I don’t mean to say that I’m not myself in my writing, or that my writing somehow isn’t me. I’m with Eileen Myles—“My dirty secret has always been that it’s of course about me.” Lately, however, I have felt myself awash in a fresh irony. After a lifetime of experimenting with the personal made public, each day that passes I watch myself grow more alienated from social media, the most rampant arena for such activity. Instantaneous, noncalibrated, digital self-revelation is one of my greatest nightmares. I feel quite certain that my character is too weak to withstand the temptations and pressures that would come with hoisting it onto the stage of Facebook, and truly amazed by the fact that so many others—or all others, so it sometimes seems—bear it so easily. More than bear it—celebrate it, intrepidly push at its limits, just as they should. In The Buddhist—which was created from blog posts—Dodie Bellamy hails the blog of poet Jackie Wang, who once posted her thoughts as they decomposed under the influence of Ambien: “6am. hello. fading fast because i took an ambien and am becoming incoherent. but the nice thing about ambien is that you can write and write and write because you don’t give a fuck, it;s good for the loosening that needs to happen in order to speak…. i was going to wrier sometrgiubf important but i snasccan6y cant read nmyg own handwriting and i hallucinate when i look at things.” Intellectually, I’m right there with Dodie, cheering Jackie on. But in my heart I’m saying a prayer of gratitude: it was an act of grace that I got sober before I got wireless.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  Richard knew that Damian had been in contact with Stan via the Internet and moved out to L.A. the day he turned eighteen. He’d had such a horrible relationship with his father and older brothers that he’d run away from home three times. Once he was eighteen, there was no way to drag him back. Damian had said he wouldn’t have minded staying in the country and working on the family dairy farm, but not with the intolerance that surrounded him. “Stan keeps wanting me to let guys bareback my ass for the website, but I won’t.” Richard frowned. “If Stan promised college and isn’t delivering, and if he is encouraging you to be unsafe, then yes, you should leave.” “Could I stay with you?” Richard hesitated. There had been so many untrustworthy hustlers and unstable addicts coming through his clinic that he kept a Taser on hand. Damian seemed angelic compared to most of them, but he wasn’t sure. “I…suppose, but maybe—” “It’s okay. I can tell you’re uncomfortable with the idea. I’ll figure something out.” That night Richard purchased a membership to DaddiesinDamian. com. The number of videos of Damian getting fucked numbered in the hundreds (the boy was only twenty!), and his dick stirred seeing how much Damian loved getting plowed by older men. On the other hand, it bothered him that many of the newest comments said things like, “If you want to keep me as a member, Damian needs to start getting barebacked.” Others said, “Not just barebacked, but gangbanged.” With a little research, he was able to discover that the full name of the owner of DaddiesInDamian was Stan Latham. Digging deeper revealed that Latham had once been arrested for dealing crystal meth but got off on a technicality. Richard had figured Damian’s “master” was up to no good, but this was worse than he expected. Maybe he would have to put past experience behind him and help Damian. Maybe he had to stop worrying about protecting his heart, at least for now. Damian’s depression briefly lifted when he saw the elation in Richard’s eyes. Damian had brought a bouquet of daisies to Richard’s house, and he wore his yard-work clothes, hoping to please Richard as much as possible. “To what do I owe this pleasant surprise? Come in, young man.” Damian looked down. “I have to leave Los Angeles, Dr. Preston. I made the mistake of getting on Stan’s computer. I wanted to see how much money he was making from guys fucking my ass, and it’s…a lot. I also saw some other stuff, and Stan and Bob caught me. Now they won’t let me out of the house. I had to sneak out just to see you.” Damian saw the sadness in Richard’s eyes. “Damian, don’t go back. Call the police from here.”

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  When Nico introduced Fiona, he always said, “This is the lady that raised me.” Nothing Yale could find words for was worth saying. Fiona told him to check out the upstairs when he got a chance. “It’s Versailles up there.” Yale couldn’t find Charlie in the crowd. Despite exuding tremendous height, Charlie was only a bit taller than average—and Yale was always surprised in situations like this not to spot his crew-cut head, his neat beard, his droopy eyes, above everyone else. But Julian Ames was beside him now, down from upstairs. He said, “We’ve been going since lunch! I’m sloshed!” It was five o’clock, the sky already inking itself out. He leaned against Yale and giggled. “We ransacked the bathrooms. He has nothing , or else he’s hiding it. Well, someone found some old poppers in the back of the fridge. But is there any point to poppers if you aren’t getting laid?” “No. Jesus. Poppers ?” “I’m asking seriously!” Julian pulled himself straight. He had a lock of dark hair in front that Charlie maintained made him look like Superman. (“Or a unicorn,” Yale would add.) He brushed it out of his eyes and pouted. Julian was too perfect, if anything. He’d had a nose job when he left Atlanta—better for his acting career—and Yale wished he hadn’t. He’d have preferred an imperfect Julian. “I’m answering seriously. There’s absolutely no point to doing poppers at a memorial.” “But this isn’t a funeral, it’s a party . And it’s like—” Julian was close again, conspiratorial in his ear. “It’s like that Poe story, the Red Death one. There’s death out there, but we’re gonna have a fabulous time in here.” “Julian.” Yale drained the Cuba libre and spat an ice chip back into the glass. “That is not the point. That’s not how the story ends.” “I was never one to finish my homework.” Julian put his chin on Yale’s shoulder—a thing he was prone to do, one that always made Yale worry Charlie would glance over right then. Yale had spent the past four years reassuring Charlie he wouldn’t run off with someone like Julian, or like Teddy Naples, who was now leaning out precariously over the railing, his feet off the ground, calling to a friend below. (Teddy was so small that someone could probably catch him if he fell, but still, Yale cringed, looked away.) There was no reason for Charlie’s insecurity, beyond both men’s looks and flirtatiousness. Beyond the fact that Charlie would never feel secure. Yale had been the one to propose monogamy to begin with, but Charlie was the one who dwelt on its possible unraveling. And he’d picked the two most beautiful men in Chicago to affix his anxieties to. Yale shrugged Julian off his shoulder, and Julian smiled dopily and wandered away. The room had loudened, the sound bouncing off the stories above, more people flooding in.

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

  Then there is bad sex among single people, wherein lack of comfort and familiarity is one of the biggest issues. In fact, bad sex with one-off partners is among the most laughably bad, I am devastated to report, and my upstairs neighbor can regrettably corroborate. “I’d say most of the casual, consensual sex I’ve had was in the meh to bad range,” a twenty-eight-year-old cis straight woman told me. “A few common features include jabby fingering, lackluster oral where it feels like they want to do it for points but don’t actually have a technique, and flipping me over every two seconds because they watch a lot of mainstream porn where shots are fifteen seconds long so staying in one position feels too boring.” The party line among sex therapists is that good sex comes with practice and a level of comfort that’s difficult to cultivate with strangers, though many people do—plenty of people in the non-monogamy community told me that casual sex is the most pleasurable for them. If you’re in a relationship, and you do have the perceived advantage of emotional connection, you can easily fall into sexual ruts that feel way too exhausting to climb out of. We’re tired! Did you know that human greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for thousands of deaths each year? There are so many things to worry about. I’m not suggesting we worry about sex—anti-choice political leaders, select youth pastors, and our parents do enough of that for us—but rather, that we consider investing some of our (limited) energy into understanding the root causes of our sexual dissatisfaction so we can feel less of it. CULPRIT 1: ANHEDONIANumerous studies suggest that young people are experiencing growing rates of anhedonia, or the reduced motivation and capacity to feel pleasure, and the pandemic made things considerably worse across all populations.5 The term encapsulates a wide range of deficits in hedonic function, including major disruptions to the neural pathways that enable us to want and like things. Some researchers cite this anhedonic wave as one of the core phenomena fueling the sex recession, as it becomes harder to justify the work of coordinating sex when the experience doesn’t even feel pleasurable. Anhedonia is a principal symptom of many mental health conditions that are spiking in recent years, including substance abuse, major depression, and personality disorders.6 Recent studies show an alarming rise in psychological pain across all age groups, genders, races, and socioeconomic statuses, including a steep rise in clinical anxiety and depression, which share anhedonia as a common clinical feature.7 In one study, the American Psychological Association found the rise in mental health disorders over the past decade to be particularly severe among young adults, with increased use of digital media hypothesized as a driving factor.8

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  My father would drop by a few times a week while I was at school and leave me a plate of roast chicken, maybe a sushi roll on the counter, but after I got food poisoning from the food sitting out too long, I threw it away. I had a debit card for essentials, but he checked my purchases every day and called to yell at me whenever I spent more than $40 on anything. I didn't want to deal with any of that, so I rarely used the card except to buy gas to get to school. I subsisted on a large supply of shoplifted Healthy Choice microwavable dinners. One time I heard noises downstairs and thought someone had broken in. I ran outside in a large T-shirt and no pants and begged the neighbors to call the cops. When they arrived, they searched my filthy home. They found clothing everywhere, frozen chicken burger wrappers on the floor, mugs and old plastic food containers piled on the coffee table. But they didn't find an intruder. I still stayed awake all night.

• From Controversies of the Early Christian History (2013)

  46 Lecture 7: Was Jesus Married? o Paul continues: “From now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none.” In other words, it is better not to engage in sexual relations in the present age given the fact that this age will end soon. o Then Paul concludes: “The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord, but the married is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided.” Marriage and the Resurrection  A key passage regarding Jesus’s views on marriage is in Mark 12, in which Jesus engages with the Sadducees on a question about the future life. o As mentioned in an earlier lecture, the Sadducees were a group of aristocratic priests who were in control of the Temple in Jerusalem. They did not follow the oral laws or doctrines of the Pharisees, and they certainly did not accept the views of the Essenes. o The Sadducees were very much in favor of the status quo. They accepted as their authoritative scriptures only the books of the Torah, the fi rst fi ve books of the Hebrew Bible, which contain the Law of Moses. In 1 Corinthians, Paul tells his followers that his preference is for men and women not to have sex at all; if they can’t restrain themselves, they should at least be lawfully married. © iStockphoto/Thinkstock.

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  21 Jews in Palestine • Because of a different set of circumstances, Jews in Palestine experienced greater tensions with Gentiles, as well as greater and sharper divisions among themselves. • The dominant cultural and political forces of Greece and Rome were experienced as an “irresistible force” from the outside against the “immovable object” that had been post-Exilic Judaism in Palestine. o The reform of Judaism after the Exile had connected religious devotion to the Lord with specific social and political institutions: king, land, Torah as law of the land, and temple. Religious observance, then, was intimately connected to specific social institutions. o Thus, the pressure of Greek language, culture, and religion could be regarded as a fundamental threat, and Roman rule (abetted by taxation and military presence) could be regarded as oppressive. • The same tensions of assimilation and separation were, therefore, more fraught because they involved material realities rather than simply ideas. o Some Jews, especially those among the aristocrats, were comfortable with Hellenization and advocated a policy of accommodation. o Others, such as the Maccabees and their descendants, identified loyalty to Torah (and God) with Jewish possession of social and political institutions. To be a Jew meant having a Jewish king. To be a Jew meant having a safe and holy temple. To be a Jew meant having Torah as the law of the land, not simply something that is read in the synagogue. These Jews resisted “outsider” influence. o As philosophical schools, the “sects” described by the Jewish historian Josephus, represented distinct political and religious positions. For example, the Essenes and Zealots were militantly

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Shoveling the walk will be a perfect way to begin tomorrow. It’ll loosen me up without making me real tired. I hope Dad hasn’t already shoveled. We watched a couple films of Shute and had a brief workout, in which I was absolutely unstoppable. Probably because everybody but me was still filled with Japanese food from Konigi’s. I tried wrestling without anything in my nose and it didn’t bleed a bit. Coach and I figured that maybe the nose stoppers have been irritating the inside of my nose and making it bleed rather than protecting it. I won’t use any tomorrow. Coach showed a film of Shute’s match last week against Palouse and then another of him at last year’s state tournament. Then he showed the first one again. Kuch and Otto and I thought Shute looked better in the film from last year. But Coach said not to count on it, because Shute was probably a lot more psyched for the state tournament than for a duel meet with Palouse. That’s probably true. The Palouse film didn’t show much, anyway. Shute pinned his man in the first round. “That guy is faster than a fart on an oilskin,” Balldozer said. I think the French have an inordinate concern with flatulence. Bowden and Smith couldn’t come today because their families were out of town for New Year’s dinner. I made sure to thank Coach and the guys again for last night and for coming on New Year’s to watch films and help me work out. Shute looks real, real good. He may be faster than I am but I don’t think he’s stronger or has any better balance or knows his moves any better. He’s aggressive all the time, but he doesn’t seem to like to spend much time on his feet. I’ve noticed it before and I saw it again today in the films. I noticed in the state tournament film that he went for the takedown just as soon as he could and always tried to reverse rather than escape. Maybe I’ll try to spend a lot of time on my feet with him. I hope he wins the coin toss. If he does, it means their first wrestler gets the choice of positions in the second round. Then in the next match our guy gets to choose. It’ll work out so I’ll have my choice, and that’s important. You always want to choose the top position in the second round so you can be on the bottom in the third and score yourself some points. All you can do from the top position is try to pin the guy, and against guys like Shute that’s just not done. I wish he weren’t shorter than I am and so goddamn good-looking. Why can’t he be cretinous, monosyllabic, or maybe look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame instead of an anatomy sketch by Michelangelo? It makes me feel like the bad guy. Down the street Cindy’s Mazda pulls up in front of the house. Willa leaps out into the fresh snow and disappears. Cindy hauls her out and shakes her off. Dad hasn’t shoveled yet. The little kid laughs like crazy and hollers for more. I fling her into the softest-looking mounds and hoist her back out until she begins to turn blue. It doesn’t take long. Then the three of us head in for New Year’s dinner. * * *

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Borman radioed Houston. He was supposed to be sleeping but, in the excitement of the flight, couldn’t make it happen. “We have one request. CDR would like to get clearance to take a Seconal.” Borman had asked whether he (CDR was shorthand for Commander) could take a sleeping pill. He detested the idea of relying on medication, but it was almost impossible to shut down one’s brain in the middle of mankind’s first trip to the Moon. Borman figured that a single Seconal, a barbiturate often prescribed for sleep, wouldn’t be harmful under the circumstances. CapCom Mattingly checked with NASA’s doctors, who okayed it, and Borman made his way back down to the sleeping area in the navigation bay. His crewmates were working and talking above him, but it was the best refuge possible in a craft just thirteen feet by eleven feet and filled with equipment. After much discussion, Lunney and Kraft came to a decision on the matter of the SPS engine. Each of them thought through the theory offered by the man from North American and ultimately judged it to be correct, and they were willing to bet the rest of the flight on it. After consulting with other controllers, who concurred, the men decided to continue with Apollo 8’s flight plan just as it had been written. The next time the SPS engine fired would be when the spacecraft slipped behind the Moon. At that moment, the crew’s lives would depend on its functioning properly. As midnight approached in Houston, all three of the astronauts’ wives, too, struggled to sleep. It had been a long and exhausting first day, but Susan and Valerie remained attached to their squawk boxes as they lay in bed, each trying to pick out a hint of how her husband was feeling by the tone of his voice. Staying overnight in Florida, Marilyn Lovell had no squawk box; instead, she listened to the sound of the waves by her beachside cottage, wondering whether Jim could see that same stretch of ocean from space. A few hours after test-firing the SPS engine, Houston got good news. The test burn hadn’t fouled Apollo 8’s trajectory, as some had feared. In fact, tracking analysis showed that if the spacecraft made no further changes and was simply allowed to coast, it would slingshot around the Moon at an altitude of just 80 miles above the lunar surface, then return to Earth, just as the trajectory specialists had designed. For the first time in a long while, Mission Control grew quiet. It was past midnight and the spacecraft was coasting. And Borman was supposed to be sleeping.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  He felt nauseated almost immediately. That hadn’t been a problem during his Gemini flights, but the Apollo spacecraft was much larger and gave him more opportunity to turn his head and move around—a likely cause of his queasy feeling. He warned his crewmates—don’t turn your heads when you first leave your seats—then steadied himself and allowed it to pass.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Lovell had caught his on something, and it had inflated with carbon dioxide. The vest had earned its nickname—Mae West—after the buxom Hollywood starlet. Even as Borman and Anders smiled, everyone knew they had a problem. Inflated, the Mae West took up space in a cabin where every square inch counted. Deflating it, however, would release levels of carbon dioxide that might be too much for the environmental control system to remove, and that might prove harmful to the crew. Borman wasn’t angry at Lovell, just irritated, and he’d have been irritated at himself if he’d done it. The challenge now was to figure out a solution. Anders hit on one a few seconds later—an answer of old-school simplicity. When the crew got a chance, they would deflate the vest through the urine dump, the same valve through which they got rid of liquid bodily waste. For now, they simply tied it down and got on with their work.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Like electricity moving through a circuit board, Anders made turns and changed directions with precision. Sometimes he looked like a giant strand of spaghetti being slurped through the cabin, yet he managed never to bang into anything or catch any of his coveralls’ pocket pouches on equipment. When he stopped moving, he put objects into twirling, spinning, tumbling motion—a penlight, his camera, even the chewing gum in his mouth all came to life in a floating symphony that Anders conducted. Soon he got into the act himself, doing a somersault, then another. As he got ready for a third, he thought, Whoa. What’s that hairy feeling coming up in my throat? And he knew—if he flipped again, he would vomit. Slowly he floated back to his seat, strapped himself in, and stared at the instrument panel, trying to orient himself in a world that had suddenly lost its up and down.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  As the van made its way to the pad around 4:30 A .M ., a NASA official drove Marilyn Lovell and her four children to a sand dune about three miles from the launch site, the closest NASA allowed observers to be for lift-off. The family were alone when they arrived, except for the coffee and doughnuts NASA had waiting for them. It was still dark. Marilyn pulled a pack of Pall Malls from her purse. Often, she and Susan Borman met in the mornings for a cup of coffee and a smoke, but Marilyn was solo today, so she shook a cigarette loose and lit up by herself. In Houston, the Borman and Anders families began to wake and get ready for a day glued to their televisions.

• From The Wrestler: A Life of Passion and the Pursuit of Greatness (2016)

  I hated wrestling them. It was always a mental struggle trying to prepare for each match. My mind would get carried away and the nerves wouldn’t cease from turning my stomach until the whistle blew and it was time to wrestle. A few times I defeated them decisively, enough for me to think that their confidence would dwindle. But it didn’t. Our next match they would come at me as hard as ever. They were dangerous, and they knew it. Quite frankly, I wanted to get rid of them.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  When you talk about expectations, none were higher than those surrounding Thomas Keller's much-anticipated Vegas version of Bouchon. The knives were out for the chef whom many consider the best and most respected in the world. That a chef of his unquestioned caliber and integrity—whose French Laundry seemed the very antithesis of everything Vegas stands for—would open a restaurant in the bizarro faux-Renaissance Venetian hotel/casino/resort seemed to many an abdication of greatness, even a betrayal of principles. Plenty of food nerds wanted to see him fail—preferred, from the safety of their desktop computers, to see him fail—as a punishment for daring to bring good food to what they see as The Worst Place on Earth. Keller, by this school of thought, should be punished for thinking that gamblers and vacationers from middle America and the South, in their ugly shorts and their socks with sandals, might recognize and appreciate sophisticated, properly cooked French food. To them, it was pearls before swine, a "sellout," an insult to the proprietary instincts of the metropolitan dining "elite." Ruhlman had made a good case, on a foodie Web site, that this was pure snobbery. Why shouldn't the masses have access to fine food? he argued. Why shouldn't they be invited to the same table we—New Yorkers and San Franciscans and world travelers—see as almost a birthright? Isn't that a great chef's ultimate responsibility, to change things for the better? To seduce, coerce, and induce people to eat better, try new things, experience joy, even enlightenment? I thought Ruhlman had made an unusually cogent case. In fact, it was this plaintive argument that had won me over, convinced me to put aside my own fear and loathing and come to Vegas myself. Was he right?

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Smith and I look at each other. “Come on, you Dougie!” Randy yells. “Put it on ’im! Gobble, gobble, gobble one time!” Doug looks sheepishly to the bench where Coach Ratta and the assistant coach, Tom Morgan, sit with the JVs. Morgan laughs and speaks into the tape recorder. L.C. has visions of a quick pin. He begins to ride Doug high, looking to sneak a half nelson on him and drive him to his back. Doug feels the guy’s weight shifting and lets him have the half nelson. Almost. The light of five pinning points shines in his eyes as L.C. starts to drive Doug over. Doug clamps down hard on the guy’s feeble half nelson, rolls to his back, then right over again. Our bleachers erupt in a chant of “Pin, pin, pin!” and the light in L.C.’s eyes turns to panic. He flops and strains and tries to bridge, but Doug has his shoulders controlled now with a half nelson of his own. Slap! The ref slaps the mat, and it’s all over. Our side cheers, the L.C. side sighs, and Doug bounces up and waits for the ref to raise his hand. There it is: balance again. The most important quality a wrestler has. More important than strength, speed, smarts—even more important than endurance. You feel the guy’s weight. You feel where he’s going, what his body’s going to do. Then you take advantage. You use his strength, his speed, his smarts, even his endurance, against him. I’m not terribly excited about the other JV matches, so I go sit with Kuch and Sausage. Kuch is trying to bolster Sausage’s confidence. Mash did a little psych job on him at the weigh-in. Mash knew he couldn’t make weight with his warm-up suit on, but he tried anyway. The ref read off 104.5. You could just see Sausage thinking, “He’s not gonna make weight! I won’t be killed!” Mash took off his warm-ups. In his tights and top he weighed 103.25. Sausage closed his eyes, undoubtedly calculating the weight of an L.C. wrestling uniform. Mash stripped to his jock. Sausage peeked around the ref and read the results for himself: 102.75. He turned a white shade of pale. Mash stood off by himself and put his stuff back on. With no larger person next to him to put his small stature in perspective, Mash looks like he could go about nine-feet-three and 690 pounds. Sausage shouldn’t have looked, but he did. “You gotta go after him, Sausage,” Kuch says. “You’ve got nothing to lose. Go out there fierce and proud and there’s no way you’ll come back ashamed. No matter how bad ya get beat.” Sausage is hunched up in a corner. He hangs his head between his legs and breathes heavily through his mouth. Balldozer comes over, pats him on the knee, and says, “Shit to the thirteenth power, Sausage,” which is a French way of saying good luck. Coach comes through the door smiling.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  My family engaged in a flurry of activity to transform my life from that of a doctor to that of a patient. We set up an account with a mail-order pharmacy, ordered a bed rail, and bought an ergonomic mattress to help alleviate the searing back pain. Our financial plan, which a few days before had banked on my income increasing sixfold in the next year, now looked precarious, and a variety of new financial instruments seemed necessary to protect Lucy. My father declared that these modifications were capitulations to the disease: I was going to beat this thing, I would somehow be cured. How often had I heard a patient’s family member make similar declarations? I never knew what to say to them then, and I didn’t know what to say to my father now. What was the alternate story? — Two days later, Lucy and I met Emma in the clinic. My parents hovered in the waiting room. The medical assistant took my vitals. Emma and her nurse practitioner were remarkably punctual, and Emma pulled up a chair in front of me, to talk face-to-face, eye-to-eye. “Hello again,” she said. “This is Alexis, my right hand.” She gestured to the NP, who sat at the computer taking notes. “I know there’s a lot to discuss, but first: How are you doing?” “Okay, all things considered,” I said. “Enjoying my ‘vacation,’ I guess. How are you?” “Oh, I’m okay.” She paused—patients don’t typically ask how their doctors are doing, but Emma was also a colleague. “I’m running the inpatient service this week, so you know how that is.” She smiled. Lucy and I did know. Outpatient specialists rotated on the inpatient service periodically, adding several hours of work in an already jam-packed day. After more pleasantries, we settled into a comfortable discussion on the state of lung cancer research. There were two paths forward, she said. The traditional method was chemotherapy, which generically targeted rapidly dividing cells—primarily cancer cells but also cells in your bone marrow, hair follicles, intestines, and so forth. Emma reviewed the data and options, lecturing as if to another doctor—but again with the exception of any mention of Kaplan-Meier survival curves. Newer therapies had been developed, however, targeting specific molecular defects in the cancer itself. I had heard rumors of such efforts—it had long been a holy grail in cancer work—and was surprised to learn how much progress had been made. These treatments, it seemed, had led to long-term survival in “some” patients.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Marcus couldn’t say no. “So can you give me a loan?” The crowd laughed at this, and Dr. Marcus barely needed to explain that Nico gave the money straight to his sister, that it was another year before the permanent tooth grew in. Yale looked now for Terrence. It took a minute, but there he was, sitting halfway up the stairs, too surrounded for Yale to chat with him yet. Instead, Yale took one of the mini quiches off a passing tray and slipped it to him through the balusters. “You look stuck!” Yale said, and Terrence put the quiche in his mouth, held his hand out again, said, “Keep ’em coming!” Fiona had wanted to trick her parents, to exchange Nico’s ashes with fireplace ones and give the real ones to Terrence. It was hard to tell if she was serious. But Terrence wasn’t getting any ashes, and he wasn’t getting anything else either, besides Nico’s cat, which he’d taken when Nico first went into the hospital. The family had made it clear that when they began dismantling Nico’s apartment tomorrow, Terrence would be excluded. Nico had left no will. His illness had been sudden, immediately debilitating—first a few days of what had seemed like just shingles, but then, a month later, moon-high fevers and dementia. Terrence had been an eighth-grade math teacher until this summer, when Nico needed him around the clock and Terrence learned he was infected himself. And how would Terrence get through the fall, the winter, with no Nico, no job? It wasn’t just a financial question. He loved teaching, loved those kids. Terrence had some of the vague early symptoms, some weight loss, but nothing serious yet, not enough to go on disability. He’d taken the test after Nico got sick—whether out of solidarity or just to know , Yale wasn’t sure. It wasn’t as if there were some magic pill. Yale and Charlie had, just on principle, been among the first to get tested that spring. Charlie’s paper had been advocating for testing, education, safe sex, and Charlie felt he had to put his money where his mouth was. But on top of that, Yale had just wanted to get it over with. Not knowing, he figured, was bad for his health in and of itself. The clinics weren’t giving the test yet, but Dr. Vincent was. Yale and Charlie opened a bottle of champagne when they got the good results. It was a somber toast; they didn’t even finish the bottle. Julian was back at Yale’s ear, saying, “Get yourself a refill before the slide show starts.” “There’s a slide show?” “It’s Richard .” At the bar Yale found Fiona talking to someone he didn’t know, a straight-looking guy with a jaw. Twisting her blonde curls around her finger. She was drinking too fast, because that was an empty glass in her hand. And she’d gotten it since she gave Yale her half-drink, and Fiona weighed maybe a hundred pounds.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  That book, by Upper East Sider and Vassar graduate Sue Kaufman, follows New York City mother of two Bettina Balser in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Balser, thirty-six, is a Smith College–educated former artist who can quote Baudelaire and Proust, but whose life now revolves around shopping, decorating, cooking, and throwing parties. It’s all at the behest of her husband, Jonathan, a former activist turned nouveau riche social climber who demands that his wife head up their home life to his exacting standards. With no outlet to express her anger, Balser—who shakes uncontrollably when Jonathan issues his unreasonable orders—takes to drinking, smoking too much, and writing in a secret journal. She also starts having an affair with a piggish playwright named George Prager. He isn’t very nice, but the pair share an explosive sexual connection. Prager is dominant in bed, and Balser finds that she likes it. For a while, that uncomfortable truth scares her. But then she begins to understand that what she’s acting out with her lover is just another angle on her relationship with Jonathan. “Why should I be disturbed by the sado-masochistic aspects of that relationship, when I have another one going?” Balser writes in her diary. “Why not face the truth: it’s an enormous relief to have that sort of thing out in the open and act it out, instead of having to deal with it in a disguised form, all veiled and gussied up with domestic overlay as it is with Jonathan and me.” Although Balser can’t stand who her husband has become, she understands she’s trapped—after all, he controls the money. At one point, her period is late and she believes Prager has gotten her pregnant. Her options, or lack thereof, flash before her. “Without a cent of my own, without a checking account, the only other way [ beyond asking Prager for cash] I could have paid for an abortion would have been to try and get the money secretly from my father, and even I shied away from all the filthy implications of that,” she realizes. Luckily, her period shows up and she doesn’t have to debase herself. But even that relief doesn’t solve the problem of the larger social constructs that frame her marriage, in which she has to be the “submissive woman,” the “obedient wife” to the “forceful dominant male” breadwinner. Blume nods to Diary of a Mad Housewife in Wifey , when Sandy’s sophisticated best friend, Lisbeth—who lives on the Upper West Side and who is experimenting with an open marriage—slips her a copy. Sandy wonders if she should be offended: “Did Lisbeth think she was a mad housewife too? Was that why she’d given her the book?” The novel doesn’t come up again until Sandy’s husband, Norman, mentions it during a fight, when Sandy is trying to express why their relationship leaves her unsatisfied. “Have you been reading that book again?” Norman snipes.