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 Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  My body knows this and clearly tells me so, while my brain remains wrapped in knots, trying to figure things out. Of course, when I was learning to accept double binds as the rule of law in Limori’s group, I knew none of this, but my body did. It never stopped telling me that what I was learning didn’t make sense. However, the sinister, dangerous beauty of authoritarian rule is that at the same time that Limori was manipulating me, she was teaching me to ignore any signals from my body or mind that would contradict her position of power. The analogy I use is that gurus teach us to build a dependence on compass points that are outside ourselves. We become completely dependent on these external references because we are simultaneously being taught that our internal compass is faulty. Not knowing any of this at the time, I became fully integrated into the spiritual community I’d found. The feeling of being specially chosen by God was reinforced by spending weeknights, some weekends and later a week at a time in a spiritual setting with others who were on the same path. My social circle had grown, but was almost entirely comprised of those in the group, and I spent most of my spare time with them as well, especially Debbie and Amber, who were both single like I was, and close to my age. I’ll reference Robert J. Lifton again, and his first criteria for thought reform, milieu control: the control of human communication within an environment. One of the elements of milieu control that Lifton cites is a mind-control guru setting up “a sense of antagonism with the outside world; it’s us against them.”9 This was certainly the case with Limori’s group; we were continually immersed in messages about the sacredness of what we were doing, the importance of our work for God. The difference between of all of us who were there, willing to listen to and follow Limori, and those who were not in the group, and therefore had less value in God’s eyes, was often brought to our attention. One of the reasons I found myself wanting to develop friendships with others who followed Limori’s teaching was that I had early on absorbed the group message that life consisted of two types of people: “us” and “them,” “them” being literally everyone on the planet who did not believe in or follow Limori. She planted the seeds of us against them in many ways, some subtle, some not so much. For example, we were a community of searchers. It was our desire for a deeper understanding of life that brought us to Limori in the first place. Therefore, most naturally, many of us spent a great portion of our time in the exploration of the world and the spiritual ideas put forth by those both ancient and recent.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  This was another reminder that we had to constantly be on guard and wary; doing God’s work incited the wrath of the “dark forces,” and coming to Wolf’s Den en masse like this meant that the Devil would be really pissed at us. Cabin assignments were to be strictly followed – as with everything else, the cabin assignments were decided upon with Spirit’s guidance and the “energies” were balanced by pairing certain people together. Meals would be taken communally in the main lodge with breakfast at 8:00 a.m. Alice was in charge of the kitchen and would be preparing the meals for us, but we would help with cleanup. Whatever happened or was shared by anyone at the workshop was strictly secret and was not to be shared with anyone once we’d returned to our regular lives. After these rules had been outlined, we were free to spend the first evening as we wished, catching up with our compatriots and winding down from the long drive. Limori floated among us and held court. She continually provided bossy instruction to those who lived at Wolf’s Den about tasks to be done immediately or in the coming days or weeks. “Open a window; we need some fresh air. Close the door or the cats will get out. Brent, is there firewood stacked at each cabin? Alice, what is that smell? Turn off the stove—you’re burning the soup. Rosemary, get me a platter to put this on. No! Not that one. The blue one. Ugh, I’ll do it myself. John, is there enough toilet paper in each outhouse? Go check. No, I said, go check. ‘I think so’ isn’t a good enough answer,” etc. This bossiness was one of the things that always bothered me the most about Limori, and being here in close quarters with her for several days in a row made my discomfort with the relentlessness of it, and her control over those around her, begin to grow. Everyone around her was always treated as if they were four years old and couldn’t make the smallest decisions for themselves. But, as with every other warning sign and feeling of discomfort, I dismissed how I was feeling. “She’s not bossy,” I thought. “She’s just particular.” The first night, the cabin I was assigned to was warm with both heat from the wood stove and the intimacy and community of the four women who were my bunk-mates. We took turns stoking the fire and brushed our teeth using water from a jerry can balanced on an old wooden chair in the corner. Some of the women in my cabin were the ones I’d driven up with; others were not, but we all knew each other and shared the common bond of a deepening desire to do good spiritual work. Ironically, I was assigned to share a double bed with Michael’s girlfriend Jessica; Amber and Debbie were each on a tier of a bunk bed on the other side of the room.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  This is a natural, instinctive desire; if we are bonded to the adults in our family they will provide for us and protect us. Approval equals survival in the early life of a human animal. When we as adults are enticed and seduced into a cult, it is the guru to whom we look for approval. The twin tactics that Limori used, of building me up (“you are each so vitally important in God’s plan”) and tearing me down (“you have failed again by letting your ego get in the way of your service to God”) kept me unbalanced and entrenched in self-doubt, yet simultaneously and perpetually hopeful that I would receive the total acceptance and affirmation of my worth that I so desperately wanted. The more deeply I became involved in the group and the more firmly the ideas and beliefs that Limori taught became ingrained, the greater became my need for her approval and praise. It seemed a bit like how I imagine a drug addict to be: I was always chasing my next fix of praise or approval, yet with each fix I became more and more dependent on the drug until it became impossible to live without. Just as an addict will eventually cheat or lie or steal to obtain their fix, I would gradually begin to go to further and further lengths to obtain mine, lengths that eventually included doing things that were morally and ethically reprehensible to me. But for now, I was not clearly seeing any of this and simply skated from one spiritual event to another with the group to which I had become bonded. At Wolf’s Den I was trying to enjoy the experience of my first weeklong workshop, although I always felt the strain of the emotional upset when people were worked over by Limori. And I was in a constant battle with my body, which was sending me clear signals that this was not a safe environment and something was wrong. But I ignored the nervous stomach and uneasiness I perpetually felt or, more commonly, tried to find a spiritual reason that would explain why I felt this way. Was I in my ego? Or was I unwilling to fully surrender to God’s will? These were usually the conclusions I came to when my stomach was in knots from dawn to dusk, and I would resolve, once again, to work harder and be a better servant. After workshopping Victor about his need for solitude, Limori channelled to us that this day was to be a day of silence. We were not allowed to speak to anyone until she instructed us to do so. We were allowed to go anywhere on the lodge property, however, and reflect in silence. It was suggested that we spend as much time as possible outdoors. So instructed, we trooped silently out of the lodge, wearing warm jackets and sometimes hats against the autumn chill in the air.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  “Valerie Nightingale!” Ben said, practically dancing a jig. “County commissioner. Veteran. Helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. Tough, smart, everything you dream of.” “You’re making me hard,” said L.D. “Only one problem.” “What’s that?” “She’s not of your tribe. And she’s gonna announce next week.” L.D. nodded as if he knew all about Valerie Nightingale. He didn’t like to lag behind the rumor mill, especially when it was bad news. He didn’t like it at all. “Nobody’s unbeatable,” he said irritably. “Just need the right candidate. Someone young, popular, and smart.” “Smart enough to let you do his thinking for him.” “Merely helping the democratic process along,” said L.D., studying his nails, which were perfect. “Raping virgins, more like it,” said Ben. “And at a funeral to boot.” Just then the norther hit with a wallop of wind, blowing hats off half the men, who chased through the gravestones after their tumbling Stetsons. —The same wind coursed through the parking lot of the sale house in Fort Stockton as Sonny Lamb unloaded fifteen heifers into the livestock pens. They were polled Herefords, a breed valued for its toughness, fertility, and ability to survive on native grasses. But they were also, in Sonny’s opinion, supremely handsome animals, with immense, soulful eyes and sweet dispositions, slow moving and unrufflable, as if the minute hand and the hour hand had changed places on their inner timepieces—a calming influence, in other words. The truth is Sonny didn’t have the emotional distance to be a cowman. He named all his animals and could easily distinguish them. Sometimes when he walked the pasture he felt like a teacher entering the classroom and saying hello to the children. He might have fared better in a less intimate profession. At least the teacher didn’t have to sell off his students to make a buck. He looked the part of a cowboy, though—tall and broad shouldered, with a tan line on his forehead where his hat came to a stop. When he smiled, a network of sunbaked wrinkles went to work, crinkling his eyes and dimpling his cheeks. His nose inclined a bit toward his left shoulder, the result of a foul ball on the high school baseball field. His stance was a little swaybacked, and his Adam’s apple raced up and down, especially when he sang. He was a darn good singer. If you were next to him in church, you’d notice him harmonizing. But his speaking voice was subdued, like a lot of folks out here, contrary to what you might think of a country so unbounded that you’d want to shout for attention. No. Their voices echoed the hush of the place, distant bird calls, whispers, hums, mumbled confessions, rustling leaves, the creaking of the windmill, all so subdued that a forceful sneeze would startle the dead.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  The nature of her eroticism and the difficulties of a free sexual life push the woman toward monogamy. Nonetheless, a liaison or marriage is far less easily reconciled with a career for her than for the man. The lover or husband may ask her to give up her career: she hesitates, like Colette’s Vagabond who ardently wishes to have a man’s warmth at her side but who dreads the conjugal shackles; if she gives in, she is once again a vassal; if she refuses, she condemns herself to a withering solitude. Today, the man generally accepts the idea that his partner should continue working; novels by Colette Yver that show young women cornered into sacrificing their professions to maintain peace at home are somewhat outdated; living together is an enrichment for two free beings, who find a guarantee of their own independence in the partner’s occupations; the self-sufficient wife frees her husband from the conjugal slavery that was the price of her own. If the man is scrupulously well-intentioned, lovers and spouses can attain perfect equality in undemanding generosity.6 Sometimes the man himself plays the role of devoted servant; thus did Lewes create for George Eliot the favorable atmosphere the wife usually creates around the lord-husband. But most of the time, it is still the woman who pays the price for harmony at home. It seems natural to the man that she run the house and oversee the care and raising of the children alone. The woman herself believes that her personal life does not dispense her from the duties she assumed in marrying; she does not want her husband to be deprived of the advantages he would have had in marrying a “real woman”: she wants to be elegant, a good housekeeper, and a devoted mother as wives traditionally are. It is a task that easily becomes overwhelming. She assumes it out of both consideration for her partner and fidelity to herself: for she insists, as we have seen, on fulfilling every aspect of her destiny as woman. She will be a double for her husband at the same time as being herself; she will take charge of his worries, she will participate in his successes just as much as taking care of her own lot, and sometimes even more so. Taught to respect male superiority, she may still believe that man takes first place; and sometimes she fears that claiming it would ruin her family; split between the desire to affirm herself and self-effacement, she is divided and torn.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  There is one female function that is still almost impossible to undertake in complete freedom, and that is motherhood; in England and in America, the woman can at least refuse it at will, thanks to the practice of birth control; we have seen that in France she is often compelled to have painful and costly abortions; she often finds herself burdened with a child she did not want, ruining her professional life. If this burden is a heavy one, it is because, inversely, social norms do not allow the woman to procreate as she pleases: the unwed mother causes scandal, and for the child an illegitimate birth is a stain; it is rare for a woman to become a mother without accepting the chains of marriage or lowering herself. If the idea of artificial insemination interests women so much, it is not because they wish to avoid male lovemaking: it is because they hope that voluntary motherhood will finally be accepted by society. It must be added that given the lack of well-organized day nurseries and kindergartens, even one child is enough to entirely paralyze a woman’s activity; she can continue to work only by abandoning the child to her parents, friends, or servants. She has to choose between sterility, often experienced as a painful frustration, and burdens hardly compatible with a career.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Thus the independent woman today is divided between her professional interests and the concerns of her sexual vocation; she has trouble finding her balance; if she does, it is at the price of concessions, sacrifices, and juggling that keep her in constant tension. More than in physiological facts, it is here that one must seek the reason for the nervousness and frailty often observed in her. It is difficult to decide how much woman’s physical makeup in itself represents a handicap. The obstacle created by menstruation, for example, has often been examined. Women known for their work or activities seem to attach little importance to it: Is this because they owe their success to the fact that their monthly problems are so mild? One may ask if it is not on the contrary the choice of an active and ambitious life that confers this privilege on them: the attention women pay to their ailments exacerbates them; athletic women and women of action suffer less than the others because they pass over their sufferings. It is clear that menstrual pain does have organic causes, and I have seen the most energetic women spend twenty-four hours in bed every month in the throes of pitiless tortures; but their enterprises were never hindered by them. I am convinced that most ailments and illnesses that weigh women down have psychic causes: this is in fact what gynecologists have told me. Women are constantly overwhelmed by the psychological tension I have spoken about, because of all the tasks they take on and the contradictions they struggle against; this does not mean that their ills are imaginary: they are as real and devouring as the situation they convey. But a situation does not depend on the body; it is rather the body that depends on it. So woman’s health will not detract from her work when the working woman has the place she deserves in society; on the contrary, work will strongly reinforce her physical balance by keeping her from being endlessly preoccupied with it. When we judge the professional accomplishments of women and try to speculate on their future on that basis, we must not lose sight of all these facts. The woman embarks on a career in the context of a highly problematic situation, subjugated still by the burdens traditionally implied by her femininity. Objective circumstances are no more favorable to her either. It is always hard to be a newcomer trying to make one’s way in a hostile society, or at least a mistrustful one. Richard Wright showed in Black Boy how blocked from the start the ambitions of a young American black man are and what struggle he has to endure merely to raise himself to the level where whites begin to have problems; the blacks who came to France from Africa also have—within themselves as well as from outside—difficulties similar to those encountered by women.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  The woman first finds herself in a state of inferiority during her period of apprenticeship: I have already pointed this out in relation to the period of girlhood, but it must be dealt with in more detail. During her studies and in the early, decisive years of her career, it is rare for the woman to be able to make full use of her possibilities: many will later be handicapped by a bad start. In fact, the conflicts I have discussed will reach their greatest intensity between the ages of eighteen and thirty: and this is when their professional future is determined. Whether the woman lives with her family or is married, her friends and family will rarely respect her efforts as they respect a man’s; they will impose duties and chores on her, and curtail her freedom; she herself is still profoundly marked by her upbringing, respectful of the values the older women around her represent, haunted by childhood and adolescent dreams; she has difficulty reconciling the inheritance of her past with the interest of her future. Sometimes she rejects her femininity, she hesitates between chastity, homosexuality, or a provocative virago attitude, she dresses badly or like a man: she wastes a lot of time and energy in defiance, scenes, and anger. More often she wants, on the contrary, to assert her femininity: she dresses up, goes out, and flirts, she is in love, wavering between masochism and aggressiveness. In all cases, she questions herself, is agitated and scattered. By the very fact that she is in thrall to outside preoccupations, she does not commit herself entirely to her enterprise; thus she profits from it less, and is more tempted to give it up. What is extremely demoralizing for the woman trying to be self-sufficient is the existence of other women of her class, having from the start the same situation and chances, and who live as parasites; the man might resent privileged people: but he feels solidarity with his class; on the whole, those who begin on an equal footing with equal chances arrive at approximately the same standard of living, while women in similar situations have greatly differing fortunes because of man’s mediation; the woman friend who is married or comfortably kept is a temptation for the woman who has to ensure her success alone; she feels she is arbitrarily condemning herself to the most difficult paths: at each obstacle she wonders if it would not be better to choose a different way. “When I think I have to get everything from my brain!” a young, poor student told me indignantly. The man obeys an imperious necessity: the woman must constantly renew her decision; she goes forward, not with her eye fixed on a goal directly in front of her, but letting her attention wander all around her; thus her progress is timid and uncertain. And moreover—as I have already said—it seems to her that the further she advances, the more she renounces her other chances; in becoming a bluestocking, a cerebral woman, she will either displease men in general or humiliate her husband or lover by being too dazzling a success. Not only will she apply herself all the more to appearing elegant and frivolous, but she will also hold herself back. The hope of one day being free from looking after herself and the fear of having to give up this hope by coping with this anxiety come together to prevent her from devoting herself single-mindedly to her studies and career.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  It is natural for women to try to escape this world where they often feel unrecognized and misunderstood; what is regrettable is that they do not dare the bold flights of a Gérard de Nerval or a Poe. Many reasons excuse woman’s timidity. Her great concern is to please; and as a woman she is often already afraid of displeasing just because she writes: the term “bluestocking,” albeit a bit overused, still has a disagreeable connotation; she lacks the courage to displease even more as a writer. The writer who is original, as long as he is not dead, is always scandalous; what is new disturbs and antagonizes; women are still astonished and flattered to be accepted into the world of thinking and art, a masculine world: the woman watches her manners; she does not dare to irritate, explore, explode; she thinks she has to excuse her literary pretensions by her modesty and good taste; she relies on the proven values of conformism; she introduces just the personal note that is expected of her into her literature: she points out that she is a woman with some well-chosen affectations, simpering, and preciosities; so she will excel at producing “best sellers,” but she cannot be counted on to blaze new trails. Women do not lack originality in their behavior and feelings: there are some so singular that they have to be locked up; on the whole, many of them are more baroque and eccentric than the men whose strictures they reject. But they put their bizarre genius into their lives, conversation, and correspondence; if they try to write, they feel crushed by the universe of culture because it is a universe of men: they just babble. Inversely, the woman who chooses to reason, to express herself using masculine techniques, will do her best to stifle an originality she distrusts; like a female student, she will be assiduous and pedantic; she will imitate rigor and virile vigor. She may become an excellent theoretician and acquire a solid talent; but she will make herself repudiate everything in her that is “different.” There are women who are mad, and there are women of talent: none of them have this madness in talent called genius.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  I didn’t have the money to enter some elite facility with groomed grounds and full-time therapists. But after ten years of constant work, buying the least expensive entrées, and thrift-store shopping, I had finally saved enough money to not work for several months. At last, a burnout of my very own. I knew this was an enormous privilege that most people don’t have. I also knew that one of my PTSD books said in its beginning pages that you should absolutely not quit your job after diagnosis—survivors need structure and purpose in order to heal. Still, the books also said that healing from PTSD isn’t truly possible while you are still in danger. You can’t convince yourself that you’re safe if you’re actually unsafe, and my work environment felt threatening on a daily basis, so I had to leave. Besides, I was focused, I told myself. I would be structured and purposeful. Maybe if I made healing my full-time job, I would be as productive as ever. With any luck, I’d be fully healed and ready to become the CEO of a new trauma-friendly podcast corporation by the end of 2018. And so the first thing I did was what any good journalist would do. I began my research. — Learning about C-PTSD is not easy because it doesn’t officially exist. The name “complex PTSD” is somewhat new, coined in the ’90s by psychiatrist Judith Herman. And it doesn’t exist because it isn’t officially in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is essentially the bible of mental health: If it’s not in there, it ain’t real. There was an effort by a group of mental health experts to include it in the DSM-5, which was published in 2013, but the faceless arbiters of mental health behind the DSM—a group of psychiatrists I envision as a society of hooded figures chanting around a sacrificial child star—decided that it was too similar to PTSD. There was no reason to add a “C,” no need for a distinction between the two. It’s worth mentioning, however, that the U.S. Department for Veterans Affairs and the United Kingdom National Health Service both recognize C-PTSD as a legitimate diagnosis. Because of this, there isn’t much literature on C-PTSD. What does exist is often dry, dull, and written with all the kindness and emotional intelligence of a tech bro. But still, I was desperate to learn, so I bought a small stack of books, each with a vague impressionist painting on the cover coupled with uninviting font. And I made my way through them, one painful page at a time. The books taught me that when we live through traumatic experiences, our brains take in the things around us that are causing the greatest threat, and they encode these things deep into our subconscious as sources of danger.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  My eyes scanned my living room. Gelly Roll pens? I used those a lot when I was a preteen. Halogen lamps? We had those. We had a big poster of emperor penguins in our living room, where I was beaten frequently. Are fucking penguins a subconscious trigger now? I google “emperor penguins” and look at pictures of them, waddling around the Antarctic stoically. They’re fat and cute. But I guess I feel anxious? So are they a trigger, or am I already triggered and anxious from reading the stressful trauma books? What is real? This line of questioning illuminates the nuanced difference between healing from traditional PTSD and complex PTSD. If I had traditional PTSD…if, let’s say, getting hit by a car was the one foundational traumatic moment of my life, I could learn to isolate and resolve the triggers from it, potentially through exposure therapy: walking past the Krispy Kreme every day, crossing that intersection with a safe protector. But unfortunately, I do not have one foundational trauma. I have thousands. So my anxious freak-outs are not, as the books say, “temporal.” They don’t only occur when I see an angry face or someone pulls a driver out of their golf bag. My freak-outs are more or less constant, a fixed state of being. Ah. The dread. That infinite plethora of triggers makes complex PTSD more difficult to heal from than traditional PTSD. And the way the books seem to think about it, our fixed state of being also makes us more problematic. — The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is a kind of bible for C-PTSD sufferers. Though I have real reservations about van der Kolk’s work because he is an alleged abuser himself,[2] the book was a crucial first text in helping me understand the basics of C-PTSD. In it, van der Kolk writes about a study in which he analyzed three groups of people: adult victims of childhood abuse, adult victims of recent domestic violence, and adult victims of a recent natural disaster.[3] All the groups displayed some symptoms of PTSD. But survivors of natural disasters (generally sufferers of a singular traumatic event) had distinctly different symptoms from survivors of childhood abuse (generally sufferers of complex trauma). “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,” van der Kolk writes. “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 What My Bones Know (2022)

  Quitting my job was a critical first step. Removing myself from the stressful stimuli of my boss snapping at me meant that I no longer had the accompanying problematic responses. I didn’t need to pull co-workers outside to smoke all the time. I didn’t need to complain about my boss over dinner with Joey every night. I didn’t constantly think I was the worst radio producer to ever live. So, that achieved something. Next, I called neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made. She told me that our bodies have a limited number of metabolic resources. We need a certain amount of sleep and water and nourishment in order to think, to learn new things, to produce the correct hormones. If we don’t get all of those things, our bodies are “running at a deficit.” But we don’t often understand what deficits we’re running at. We are not like The Sims, where we can see our hunger and rest and boredom levels represented as little progress bars at the bottom of the screen. Barrett said that when we’re dehydrated, we don’t necessarily feel thirsty—we feel exhausted. When we have something odd happening in our stomach, our body doesn’t quite know if we have a menstrual cramp or a stomachache or if we need to poop. We might not even be aware for a long period of time that our stomach hurts. And this isn’t unique to people with PTSD. It’s normal, everyday bodily dissociation that we all suffer from. If we find ourselves in a shitty mood, we might not necessarily be mad about a certain trigger. We could just be running at a metabolic deficit. Our body might be screaming “I NEED FUNYUNS” while we project our hangriness onto, say, this poor sweaty schmuck who’s breathing too loud in the elevator. But Barrett said that PTSD does make these inclinations worse. It affects a variety of systems in the body, throwing them all out of whack. Our hearts might beat faster. Our lungs might pump harder. Our body budget can get tipped off-balance more easily. And when it does, our reactions to these deficits can feel outsized. “Make sure that you get enough sleep, make sure you exercise, make sure that you eat in a healthful way,” she told me when I asked her what I could do to be a better person. When I countered that that didn’t seem like enough, she kindly offered, “You know, all you can do is take as much responsibility as you can. And sometimes it’s the attempt that matters, you know, more than the success.” Then she chuckled at herself. “That’s a very Jewish mother response!”

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  So, first step of hacking my brain: sustaining it with enough oxygen and nutrients. I adopted an aggressive diet that involved lots of chickpea pasta and cauliflower. I got an app that let me take fitness classes all around the city—Pilates, boxing, high-intensity interval training—and I took three classes a week. I filled my tote bags with nuts and dried fruit and chugged constantly from a giant water bottle. I quit drinking and smoking, cold turkey. I got eight hours of sleep every night and wore a Fitbit to keep me honest. These efforts helped in some ways. I had more physical energy. My legs felt strong and capable. Exercise boosted my mood temporarily. But my psychic energy was supremely lacking. I could leap up subway stairs with a load of groceries, but I often still couldn’t get myself up off the couch to send an email. One spring day, I was walking through a corridor of cotton-candy-pink cherry blossom trees on the way to the subway when I was abruptly beset with anxiety. I was sure I was forgetting something: Did I leave the stove on? Was I supposed to call someone? Did I have a doctor’s appointment I was missing? The recrimination was so strong, I wondered if I should turn tail and go home. But even though I didn’t know what triggered me or why this was happening, at least I knew one thing: This terror wasn’t coming from my body. My actions allowed me to assure myself that I was well rested, well fed, and healthy. This anxiety must have come instead from the dank alleys of my mind. Well, I thought, I guess I better muster up the courage to walk inside and look for the source. CHAPTER 15 [image file=image_rsrc3E3.jpg] In Gretchen Schmelzer’s excellent, gentle book, Journey Through Trauma, she insists on the fifth page: “Some of you may choose a therapist: a psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, counselor, or member of the clergy. Some of you may choose some form of group therapy. But I am telling you up front, at the beginning: in order to heal, you will need to get help. I know you will try to look for the loophole in this argument—try to find a way that you can do this on your own—but you need to trust me on this. If there were a way to do it on your own I would have found it. No one looked harder for that loophole than I did.”[1] After my diagnosis, I looked for that loophole, too, for a while. — After I started realizing the magnitude of what having C-PTSD meant, I was livid at Samantha for not telling me about it sooner. This should not have been a secret, I thought. My diagnosis should have been a critical part of the conversation about my mental health this entire time.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  In an age all too happy to collapse the sodomitical mother into the MILF, how can rampant, “deviant” sexual activity remain the marker of radicality? What sense does it make to align “queer” with “sexual deviance,” when the ostensibly straight world is having no trouble keeping pace? Who, in the straight world, besides some diehard religious conservatives, truly experiences sexual pleasure as inextricably linked to reproductive function? Has anyone looked at the endless list of fetishes on a “straight” porn website recently? Have you read, as I did this morning, about the trial of Officer Gilberto Valle? If queerness is about disturbing normative sexual assumptions and practices, isn’t one of these that sex is the be-all and end-all? What if Beatriz Preciado is right—what if we’ve entered a new, post-Fordist era of capitalism that Preciado calls the “pharma-copornographic era,” whose principal economic resource is nothing other than “the insatiable bodies of the multitudes—their cocks, clitorises, anuses, hormones, and neurosexual synapses … [our] desire, excitement, sexuality, seduction, and … pleasure”? Faced with the warp speed of this “new kind of hot, psychotropic, punk capitalism,” especially from my station of fatigue, exchanging horniness for exhaustion grows in allure. Unable to fight my station, at least for the time being, I try to learn from it; another self, stripped. I first met Sedgwick in a graduate seminar titled Non-Oedipal Models of Psychology. By way of introduction, she announced that she had started going to therapy because she wanted to be happier. To hear a scary theoretical heavyweight admit such a thing changed my life. Then, without missing a beat, she said she wanted to play a quick get-to-know-you game involving totem animals. Totem animals? How could it be that I had fled the spacey Haight-Ashbury of my youth for hard-core, intellectual New York, explicitly to escape games involving totem animals, only to find myself in the middle of one in a doctoral classroom? The game placed an icy finger on my identity phobia: it was but a short leap from here, I felt, to the index card, Sharpie, and lapel pin. Perhaps anticipating this horror, Sedgwick explained to us that the game had a kind of out. She said that we were free to offer up a fake animal, a kind of decoy identification, if we so desired—if, for example, we had a “real” totem animal that we would prefer to keep to ourselves.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Lola loved the land but also felt chained to it. She subscribed to certain magazines—The New Yorker, National Geographic, Architectural Digest —that kept her up to date while at the same time feeding her shyness about stepping out of her zone. Her accent confined her like an invisible fence to this vast, unpeopled region. She harbored fantasies of jettisoning the ranch for someplace she’d only heard of—Cape Cod, for instance, or Vancouver. Even Houston would be a dazzling alternative. Who would she be if she wasn’t who she was? She felt her life speeding by, rendering such existential questions purely hypothetical. It was too late to make a change; it was too late the moment she was born. Lola had known Sonny almost her entire life. She had been friends with his sister, Marlene, from first grade on, and long before they ever dated she was set on marrying him. He was the most attractive boy in his age group, never gawky even in his teens when he was the quarterback of the chronically losing team and sang in a country cover band. With only seven thousand people in the entire county, there weren’t a whole lot of boys to compare. Back then, Sonny was the object of a lot of female projection, with those deep-set scuppernong eyes and Elvisy hair. The eyes hadn’t changed but the hair was thinning and the bald spot on the dome was claiming more territory. Tell the truth, he was forty years old with little to show for himself. Lola’s family always thought she sold short, and sometimes she wondered if she would have made the same choice had her world had been a little wider. They went to bed listening to the grumbling of the approaching storm and gnawing on the uncertainty of three months from now when they wouldn’t be able to afford hay for the cows they still had. Lola forced herself to stop talking about the money, although the issue was on both their minds. They should start making contingency plans, but all alternatives led to uncertain places, and it wasn’t entirely clear they would continue on the same road together. This is something they didn’t talk about. In the middle of the night the storm was on top of them, like war. Sonny was still awake, fondling his regrets, when a lightning bolt exploded nearby. Their dog, Bandit, a bull terrier with a patch surrounding one eye, leapt into bed and burrowed under the sheet. “He’s a little scaredy cat, aren’t you, Bandit?” Lola said. Another lightning strike sounded like it was in the next room. This time everybody jumped. Bandit moaned and trembled. “Wow, that was close,” Lola said.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  • Seeing a therapist overly eager to prescribe drugs. I wanted to have my feelings after ten years of repressing them. • Seeing therapists who wanted to try hypnosis or other weird techniques. It was okay if they could hear me react and respected that immediately, but not if they tried to convince me. • Having people tell me to "get over it." It takes a long time to get over long-term abuse. The Third Stage: Longer-Term IssuesEight years after leavingthe cult, some significant issues remain to be dealt with. Primarily, these have to do with triggers, career, geography, and relationships. Triggers and flashbacks trouble me from time to time. I think that this will be a lifelong issue, but one that can be handled as long as I can identify that I am being triggered, and then deal with it on that level. I am still trying to make a career transition. I continue to work at a career chosen for me by the cult leader and I continue to resent that. However, I am more at peace with it as the years go by and as I develop as a writer and open up new doors for myself in the field of social psychology. I still live in Minnesota, which is not a place I'd have chosen; yet I feel I have to stay here until my children are grown. I have a sense of rootlessness that predates the cult. However, I have gotten better at deciding to "be here now," and I am active and involved in my community. As a single woman with a complicated history, I find that trying to enter the dating world has been daunting. This is normal for many women my age, but the addition of the cult experience makes it even more difficult. When do you break the news? I'm still trying to learn different ways to answer the seemingly innocent question, "And what brought you to Minnesota?" On the positive side, I can say the following: I know myself well now, and I use that knowledge to direct my activities. I am assertive about not doingthings I don't wish to do. I'm adept at recognizing abuses of power and I'm not afraid to call them what they are. I recognize when I am triggered and I can name it and move on. I have a strong, supportive, and diverse community of friends. I'm no longer in therapy, although it is important to me that I can call my therapist for a tune-up if I need it (I have done that a few times over the past several years). My children (now ten and twelve) are doing well. Their father and I have a cooperative parenting relationship. I feel I've been honest with them, and they understand a good deal about cults and power abuse. I feel I've been successful in taking that abusive experience and making it something useful to me, but most importantly, to others.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  In my mind I see Coach waving at me from the top of David Thompson’s green-and-gold water tower in the park. He’s yelling toward school, where I’m being kept prisoner. I think he wants to spring me, but I can hardly hear. Gene answers for me. “Forty-six after a workout about fifteen minutes ago.” Gene’s voice is faraway. “Christ!” Coach rants. “He’s going down too fast. He’s probably dehydrated. I’ll go get some salt. Make him drink some water, Gene.” And Coach is gone. I hear his heels click. He’s walking right down the side of the water tower! What balance! Boy, I’d have hated to wrestle Coach Ratta in his prime. I lose control. I rave. I’m out the window, up the hill in the park. It’s summer and I’m swinging on the big kids’ swing. I throw my head back and pump for the sky. Upside down a green-and-gold kingdom oscillates feudally. There are 2,563 of us in David Thompson High School. That’s more than some small towns. The high school is green and gold, the junior high, the grade school, the water tower, the public toilet, the grass, the sun. I swing level with the bar. I stretch my head way back, the ground swooshing, swooshing in my ears. I can’t get sick now. I always get sick on the big swing. I look down. How many David Thompson sneakers rubbed to sand this former grass? My teeth fall out. They slide across the sandy patch below, near, then very far as I swing. They nip the iron pole, bite down on a clump of grass. I can’t get sick now. I’m lean. I carry the colors of the Columbia. I can make the river flow again. My short hair brushes the sand, the grass, the sand, the grass. My nose begins to bleed, arcing dots of blood elliptically. I rave. I jump. Gene catches me. He’s making me drink water. It’s easy, because I’m thirsty as hell. “You’re all right, man,” Gene says. “You’re just dehydrated.” “Victim of a fucked-up nitrogen balance,” I reply. “At least I hope that’s all, Gene. There’s no end to the terrible diseases people can get.” I’ve been reading Rare Diseases lately. It’s ghastly. Poe could have written it. I feel a bit better. Things have changed a little since Gene wrestled in high school back in the middle sixties. I explain to him how I’ve got to have a doctor’s permission to drop down to 147. I have my appointment next Tuesday, the day after Christmas. The appointment’s in the morning; then we wrestle Lewis and Clark in the afternoon. If I’m much over fifty, I doubt the old doctor will let me go down. We have to wrestle eight matches at the weight we’ll wrestle in the state tournament. Outside of those eight, we can wrestle in any class above the one we start the season in.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  Mary Kay is feeding Danny, who is throwing scraps from his high chair to the delight of Sam, “the damn cat,” as we all called him. While Grandpa carves the turkey, Grandma peers out from her magnifying glass and mutters something about how lucky we all were. There are children in India with nothing to eat, I recall her saying. You children don’t know how good you have it. Grandpa shakes his head. Shut up, Alice, he says, jabbing the carving knife into the turkey’s thigh. With that, dinner is served. This next part is a lot clearer in my mind. We gathered in the dining room, and I wiggled into the chair next to my mother, feeling very proud to have scored a spot next to her. As it turned out, the mystery of my mother’s whereabouts would not be solved that night or for many years to come. It would be the first of many secrets I remember keeping over the years—or trying to keep, making me nervous, flustered. I didn’t even get a first bite of turkey before I was banished from the table. Nancy, who sat across from me and had been sticking her tongue out at me all day, kicked me under the table, and I let out a bloodcurdling scream. That got Danny squawking in his high chair. Holmer jumped up from his seat at the head of the table and grabbed me by the collar. He dragged me up the stairs to my room, growling and grunting with every step. It all happened so fast, a flurry of arms and legs. My mother was finally home, and he wasn’t about to let any of us screw this up. Holmer threw me into the room like I was a rag doll and slammed the door. I lay there, sobbing as loudly as I could, hoping my mother would come to save me. I imagined her opening the door slowly, poking her head in first to see if I was okay. I’d run to her, and she would hug me. Then she’d smooth my hair and tell me it was all right for me to go back downstairs and sit next to her and finish dinner. We’ve got pumpkin pie with whipped cream, she’d say. But she never came. No one did. My thoughts began to race. What if I died? They’d be sorry then. I could see them all gathered around the casket. I’d be lying in the box in my blue St. Francis jumper with the school crest on the left side. We shouldn’t have been so mean to her, Holmer would sob. But it would be too late. I would already be dead. I can’t remember now how long I howled before I finally fell asleep that night. An hour, maybe more. Almost certainly I woke up and got into my pajamas, but I have no memory of that now.

• From Action (2014)

  Neither of us came, I don’t think, and after getting home, I discovered that one of my labia was swollen. I did what I always do in times of medical crisis: avoided googling my symptoms at all costs—the pictures are life-threateningly gross and misleading; I have found 100 percent of the time I don’t follow this rule. Instead, I dialed up my sage older sister, Laura, who is a lot smarter than I am, and less of a sensitive little nightmare who thinks she’s dying or else STI’ed up because of benign swelling. “I used a condom!” I wailed, sans salutation of any kind when Laura picked up, because I have excellent phone etiquette. She didn’t balk, but calmly asked what happened, because she is the best and instantaneously gets it most, if not all, of the time. “I finally got it in with Alan and one side of my vagina looks like someone took a bike pump to it.” “Oh, dude, calm down. That’s totally normal! Did you use enough lube?” I recalled that our only kind was salivary, and she told me to go sit on some ice for an hour. Post-deflation, I called her back to say thank you, having sufficiently calmed down enough to even say “hello” first. Since then, I make sure that if I’m carrying a condom, I’ve also got one of those single-use packets of lube close at hand, lest I run into another issue with my and a partner’s construction. Passing Gas During Oral One of my best friends recently told me that her most bloodcurdling fear is “letting out a fart with someone’s face in my minge.” Thank her home country of Britain for that delightful locution, and thank me for telling you that however homicidal this potential humiliation might feel, you are going to be fine—and your stomach, at least, will feel better? Let’s not minge words: This can happen, and while you should do your best to prevent it at all costs via the motivation of “basic human decency and respect,” bodies are villainous machines that process their exports at uncontrollable clips sometimes. While I have never been either the deliverer or recipient of this wildly unpleasant-seeming olfactory tour de farts, I have been the unlucky, unwitting recipient of other gruesome anatomical products. And I am alive, and pretty much fine, if tinged crimson about committing this particular prose to the corridors of the Library of Congress.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  “Well, actually, what I want is to publish the sections of the diaries you’re in. I’ve decided to start with the Paris years in the 1930s, instead of with the childhood diaries. No one’s interested in those. They are interested in you, Henry, as a literary figure. The only gratitude I need from you is your permission to publish my portrayal of you.” She whipped out a typed release from her purse. “Of course, of course.” He waved his hand as if that was all there was to it but then added, “I’ll need to have final say on what goes in and stays out, of course. Hugo, you know. We both owe a great deal to Hugo.” He hummed as he looked from Anaïs to Rupert, who sat straight up, alert and amiable. Anaïs pointed to the margin of the prepared release. “Why don’t I just write that in, ‘Henry Miller has the right to review the final edit.’” She scribbled on the three copies, then handed them to Henry along with her Montblanc. Henry took the releases. “I shouldn’t do this without having my lawyer look at it.” He eyed Anaïs. She looked stricken. “But because it’s you, damn the lawyers. They always say no. And I owe you, Anaïs. I really do. And Hugo, of course.” He hummed as he signed the three copies. “How is your husband, Anaïs? I haven’t talked with Hugo in a while.” Anaïs delicately touched Rupert’s hand. “Rupert, dear, could you put up the convertible top before we go? Tristine and I got so blown on the way here.” Rupert clearly did not want to leave, but he scurried off to do her bidding. Before he was out of earshot Henry said, “What about the sex? You gonna to leave in all the sex? Hugo will know we were both lying to him. I don’t care what your arrangement with Hugo is, or with this doltish Rupert fellow, but Hugo is my friend, and I don’t want him to know I fucked his wife.” “I’ll leave out the sex. That way it will seem we were just friends.” “Ha! You won’t have anything left!” “That’s not true. We talked about books and art, our writing.” I exclaimed, “Oh, don’t leave out the sex. That’s the best part!” Henry set his mischievous eyes on me; he hadn’t noticed me before. Anaïs explained, “I let Tristine read the diary pages about us.” Henry said, “Very good. The young ones take us as models.” Rupert came back. “Top’s up.” Henry muttered loudly to himself, “So Anaïs is gonna take out the fucking so Hugo won’t know.” Anaïs shot me an urgent look. I said, “Henry, can students like me look at your papers at UCLA?” “If you want to ruin your eyes. Buy my books instead. It took thirty goddamned years to lift the ban on them in this country, doncha know? You should exercise your hard-won right to buy them.”