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 I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  If I could only figure out why cancer was in my body, maybe I could stop it—a reasonable desire but one that wasn’t serving my mental health long-term. Head-tripping 24-7 over an unanswerable question was definitely not productive. In the decades since my diagnosis, I’ve learned that “What?” is a better question to ask than “Why?” For example: What is going on in my body when I have these anxious thoughts? What part of my body feels the most scared or anxious? What can I do to support myself now? What helps me de-escalate my worry in healthy ways? Truth is, we may never know why we or someone we love gets sick. Why our partner decides to leave us for a younger lover. Why we get laid off from a dream job or booted from a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Why a BFF suddenly becomes distant. Why a seemingly good financial investment goes south. And on and on. And while assigning blame may make us feel like we have some degree of control, ultimately it’s the last thing that deserves to be taking up valuable space in our minds. Survival demands that we don’t get stuck looking back or spinning our wheels with worry about the future or beating ourselves to a pulp with a bunch of “should-haves.” When it comes to navigating uncertain moments, a far more productive focus is on how we care for our mental and physical health, right here and right now. When we let go of the “why” and zero in on the “what”—as in, What do I most need right now to feel supported?—we not only calm our systems, but we become more present, more adaptable, more creative, and, most importantly, more at ease with life’s natural currents. HOLD FASTOnly 1 in 10 pancreatic cancer patients survives five years past their diagnosis. If the cancer is found early and the tumor can be removed, the chances for survival are slightly higher. But one of the problems with pancreatic cancer is that it’s hard to detect because the symptoms often go overlooked. Dad’s disease was already aggressive when the doctors found it. If he didn’t do chemo and radiation right away, his prognosis of survival was less than two months. To make matters worse, his tumor was wrapped around a major artery. The only way he’d even be eligible for surgery was if the mass shrank enough to clear the artery. Dad muscled through six months of a powerful cocktail of chemotherapy and radiation, along with all their debilitating side effects. To help him find the inner strength to dig deep, my mother made a beautiful altar with photos of our ancestors, cherished mementos that reminded him that life was so worth fighting for. She also framed a photo of his personal mantra: Hold fast—a nautical term that to him meant “rough seas ahead, tie the lines, batten down the hatches.”

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  It would also be easy to find in the Christian doctrine of the flesh closely related themes of anxiety: the involuntary violence of the act, its kinship with evil, and its place in the play of life and death. But in the irrepressible force of desire and the sexual act, Saint Augustine was to see one of the main stigmata of the Fall (that involuntary movement reproduced in the human body man’s rebellion against God); the Christian pastoral ministry was to set the rules of economy, on a precise calendar and according to a detailed morphology of acts; and the doctrine of marriage was to give the procreative finality the dual role of ensuring the survival or even the proliferation of God’s people, and of making it possible for individuals to avoid pledging their souls to eternal death through indulgence in that activity. In short, this was a juridico-moral codification of acts, moments, and intentions that legitimated an activity that was of itself a bearer of negative values; and it inscribed it in the dual order of the ecclesiastical institution and the matrimonial institution. The time of rites and the time of legitimate procreation could absolve it of blame.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  As to global terrorism, the situation has become only more dangerous than it was before the Iraq War.99 Following the assassination of Bin Laden in 2011, al-Qaeda still thrives. Its strength was always more conceptual than organizational—global revolutionary fervor combining an intense political militancy with dubious claims to divine sanction. Its branch affiliates, including the one founded in Iraq (as of this writing increasingly active there and also in the Syrian civil war) as well as those in Somalia and Yemen, continue to promote a restoration of the caliphate as the ultimate objective of their interventions in local politics. Elsewhere, in the absence of any tightly organized cadre, there are thousands of freelance aspirants to terrorism worldwide—radicalized in Internet chat rooms, self-trained, poorly educated, and lacking any clear practical objective. Such was the case with Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebolawe, two British-born converts to Islam, who murdered the British soldier Lee Rigby in 2013 in southeastern London, claiming to avenge the deaths of Muslim innocents by British troops. Like Muhammad Bouyeri, who assassinated the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in 2004, and the Madrid train bombers, who killed 191 people in the same year, they were not directly linked to al-Qaeda.100 Some self-starters do seek out the al-Qaeda leadership for credentialing and in hope of being sent to some important operational theater, but it seems that trainers in Pakistan prefer to send them home to destabilize Western countries instead—as happened with the 7/7 London bombings (July 2005), the Australian bombing plan (November 2005), the Toronto plot (June 2006), and the foiled British project of blowing up several planes over the Atlantic (August 2006). These freelance terrorists have very little knowledge of the Quran, and so it is pointless to attempt a debate about their interpretation of scripture or to blame “Islam” for their crimes.101 Indeed, Marc Sageman, who has talked with several of them, believes that a regular religious education might have deterred them from lawless violence. They are, he has found, chiefly motivated by the desire to escape a stifling sense of insignificance and pointlessness in secular nation-states that struggle to absorb foreign minorities. They seek to fulfill the age-old dream of military glory and believe that by dying a heroic death, they will give their lives meaning as local heroes.102 In these cases, suffice it to say, what we call “Islamic terrorism” has been transformed from a political cause—inflamed with pious exhortations contrary to Islamic teachings—into a violent expression out of youthful rage. They may claim to be acting in the name of Islam, but when an untalented beginner claims to be playing a Beethoven sonata, we hear only cacophony.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  How to fix this? As Dr. Taylor puts it, “We want people to be scientists. First you need to have a good understanding of what safety behaviors you are using. Then you can do some experimental testing and see what happens if you remove the safety behavior.” Here’s the good news: letting go of the life preserver that’s actually keeping you underwater not only is doable; it also gets results. How do we know? Over the past decade, Alden and Taylor have run a series of groundbreaking studies where they asked people to do just that. And in those studies, they told me, 92 percent of people could identify right away what safety behaviors they were using. I certainly know what I used to do: I avoided eye contact and avoided introducing myself, preferring, oddly, to pretend that I already knew the person, which led to confusion on their part and awkwardness all around. But once I realized that’s what I was doing, I stopped. And in their studies, Alden and Taylor found their participants could stop, too. In several studies, Alden and Taylor asked socially anxious participants to have a five-minute conversation with a lab confederate—a getting-to-know-you chat that is the prerequisite for any potential new friendship. Beforehand, the participants were asked what they were afraid might happen during the conversation. In other words, what Reveal was their Inner Critic predicting? Answers ranged from, “I will say something stupid,” to, “My partner will think badly of me,” to, “They’ll think I’m weird,” and everything in between. Next, participants were asked about their safety behaviors: What did they do to try to make themselves feel safer or to prevent The Reveal from occurring? Again, answers ran the gamut: “Think really hard about getting my words out right.” “Put my hand in front of my mouth when I talk.” “Rehearse what I’m going to say next while the other person is talking.” “Smile, smile, smile.” “Focus on my enunciation.” “Continuously monitor what I’m saying.” “Think about taking deep breaths to calm myself down.” Then half the participants got the following instructions, with their personal fears and safety behaviors filled in the blanks, like so: In order to help overcome your anxiety, it is important to discover whether what you fear can actually happen. To accomplish this, you should try not to do the things you normally do to prevent the person from thinking you’re stupid. For example, during the conversation, do nothing to save yourself, do not avoid eye contact. Just think that you want to discover what will happen when you don’t avoid eye contact. By doing this, you will be better able to see if your expectations are confirmed. The other half were told nothing about safety behaviors. They were told to wait it out—that getting over anxiety was like getting into a bath of hot water: at first unpleasant, but after a while they’d get used to it and feel better.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  3Besides dreams of velocity, or in connection with them, there is in every child the essentially human urge to reshape the earth, to act upon a friable environment (unless he is a born Marxist or a corpse and meekly waits for the environment to fashion him). This explains a child’s delight in digging, in making roads and tunnels for his favorite toys. Our son had a tiny model of Sir Malcolm Campbell’s Bluebird, of painted steel and with detachable tires, and this he would play with endlessly on the ground, and the sun would make a kind of nimbus of his longish fair hair and turn to a toffee tint his bare back crisscrossed by the shoulder straps of his knitted navy-blue shorts (under which, when undressed, he was seen to be bottomed and haltered with natural white). Never in my life have I sat on so many benches and park chairs, stone slabs and stone steps, terrace parapets and brims of fountain basins as I did in those days. The popular pine barrens around the lake in Berlin’s Grunewald we visited but seldom. You questioned the right of a place to call itself a forest when it was so full of refuse, so much more littered with rubbish than the glossy, self-conscious streets of the adjoining town. Curious things turned up in this Grunewald. The sight of an iron bedstead exhibiting the anatomy of its springs in the middle of a glade or the presence of a dressmaker’s black dummy lying under a hawthorn bush in bloom made one wonder who, exactly, had troubled to carry these and other widely scattered articles to such remote points of a pathless forest. Once I came across a badly disfigured but still alert mirror, full of sylvan reflections—drunk, as it were, on a mixture of beer and chartreuse—leaning, with surrealistic jauntiness, against a tree trunk. Perhaps such intrusions on these burgherish pleasure grounds were a fragmentary vision of the mess to come, a prophetic bad dream of destructive explosions, something like the heap of dead heads the seer Cagliostro glimpsed in the ha-ha of a royal garden. And nearer to the lake, in summer, especially on Sundays, the place was infested with human bodies in various stages of nudity and solarization. Only the squirrels and certain caterpillars kept their coats on. Gray-footed goodwives sat on greasy gray sand in their slips; repulsive, seal-voiced males, in muddy swimming trunks, gamboled around; remarkably comely but poorly groomed girls, destined to bear a few years later—early in 1946, to be exact—a sudden crop of infants with Turkic or Mongol blood in their innocent veins, were chased and slapped on the rear (whereupon they would cry out, “Ow-wow!”); and the exhalations coming from these unfortunate frolickers, and their shed clothes (neatly spread out here and there on the ground) mingled with the stench of stagnant water to form an inferno of odors that, somehow, I have never found duplicated anywhere else. People in Berlin’s public gardens and city parks were not permitted to undress; but shirts might be unbuttoned, and rows of young men, of a pronounced Nordic type, sat with closed eyes on benches and exposed their frontal and pectoral pimples to the nationally approved action of the sun. The squeamish and possibly exaggerated shudder that obtains in these notes may be attributed, I suppose, to the constant fear we lived in of some contamination affecting our child. You always considered abominably trite, and not devoid of a peculiar Philistine flavor, the notion that small boys, in order to be delightful, should hate to wash and love to kill.

• From Open (2009)

  EVERYWHERE I GO, Parisians rush up and wish me luck. The tournament is the talk of the city. In restaurants and cafés, on the street, they yell my name, kiss my cheek, urge me onward. The story of my reception at the Springsteen concert has made the newspapers. The people, the press, are fascinated by my improbable run. Everyone can identify with it. They see something of themselves in my comeback, in my return from the dead. It’s the night before the final and I’m sitting in my hotel room, watching TV. I shut it off. I go to the window. I feel sick. I think about this last year, these last eighteen months, these last eighteen years. Millions of balls, millions of decisions. I know this is my final chance to win the French Open, my final chance to win all four slams and complete the set, which means my final shot at redemption. The idea of losing scares me, and the thought of winning scares me nearly as much. Would I be grateful? Would I be worthy? Would I build on it—or squander it? Also, Medvedev is never far from my thoughts. He has my game. I gave it to him. He even has my first name. Andrei. It’s going to be Andre versus Andrei. Me versus my doppelgänger. Brad and Gil knock at the door. Ready for dinner? I hold the door open and tell them to come in for one second. They stand just inside the door and watch me open the minibar. I pour myself a huge vodka. Brad’s mouth falls open as I down the drink in one gulp. What the hell do you think—? I’m sick nervous, Brad. I haven’t been able to eat a bite all day. I need to eat, and the only way I can eat is if I take the edge off. Don’t worry, Gil says to Brad. He’s fine. At least drink a big glass of water too, Brad says. After dinner, when I get back to my room, I take a sleeping pill and slide into bed. I phone J.P. He says it’s early afternoon where he is. What time is it there? It’s late. It’s so very late. How are you feeling? Please, please, talk to me for a few minutes about anything but tennis. Are you OK? Anything but tennis. OK. Well. Let’s see. How about I read you a poem? I’ve been reading a lot of poetry lately. Yeah. Good. Whatever. He goes to his bookshelf, takes down a book. He reads softly. Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. I fall asleep without hanging up the phone.

• From Chasing Beauty

  By mid-century, upper-class American families were sending their children to Paris for their education, intending them to become fluent in the lingua franca of art and music, science and literature. This finish of prestige and sophistication would be needed for navigating high society, where, in the American context, what you knew and what you wore and what you owned—more than birth—signaled and secured social status. (This may have been true more for New Yorkers than Bostonians, who “cultivated their genealogies,” as the historian Henry Adams remarked.) But there were risks. Mrs. Stewart had a copy of the popular 1840 English novel The School-girl in France, or the Snares of Popery; A Warning to Protestants against Education in Catholic Seminaries, which alerted readers to the dangers of Catholic boarding schools. Young Protestant women, unaccustomed to the liturgical drama of the Catholic Mass, were vulnerable, the author gravely warned, because these sacred rituals had a seductive lure, an “almost irresistible power to the senses.” Belle boarded at her school from Monday through Friday. On weekends, she joined her parents at their hotel nearby. She returned early on Monday mornings, rang the school’s large bell, and walked through its gate to a building surrounded by high walls. Stained-glass windows topped the interior walls and let in light that tinted the floors. She and the other girls wore the school uniform: a dark dress covered by a high-necked apron in black silk. School days were regimented, as was typical of a French education, which tended to be highly formal, with an emphasis on rote learning. A morning bell rang at 5:15 A.M. in a barracklike upper room, where the students slept on cots with sheets so “new that they rustled like paper.” A first breakfast followed, usually a warm soup, not very appetizing, then singing and dancing lessons; next, a second breakfast of vegetables or applesauce with a selection of cheeses. Schoolwork continued until 5 P.M., followed by social time, a walk, one more meal, then to bed promptly at 8:30 P.M. Subjects included geography and French history as well as intensive language study, in which students copied out long passages from literature and poetry. Belle’s teachers, Mademoiselles Hanson and Betzy, required that everyone speak in French only, even after classes were finished for the day. This was terrifying at first for the students, all international, in part because they were not familiar with conversational French. Belle copied out long French poems on the pages of her friendship album, which she’d taken along to Paris. Her French composition book, which she put in an old floral lacquer box for safekeeping, is filled with practice phrases: “à bout de souffle—out of breath”; “Je n’y comprends rien—I understand nothing about it”; “Elle aime se faire remarquer—She likes to be conspicuous.”

• From Chasing Beauty

  The girls had religious instruction at the Oratoire du Louvre, a Reformed Church located just off the newly completed rue de Rivoli, directly across from the Louvre Museum. Once a week, they walked from their school to the church to listen to lectures given by Rev. Athanase Coquerel, the senior preacher and a prominent liberal theologian whose writings combined strict Calvinist doctrine with the rationalism of the French Enlightenment. Students had to write summaries of his sermons and lectures, which they submitted for his review. Speaking first in English, then in French, Rev. Coquerel lectured on Abraham, the prophecies, and on the last words of Christ—“Why hast thou abandoned me?” He was noted for his eloquence and as a “sincere lover of tolerance and freedom of thought.” Later, when Belle was asked if she worked hard at school, it was said she replied that she did so only “if it was against the rules.” The rigor of her Paris schooling and her personal papers show something else: an intense diligence she disavowed. Perhaps she didn’t want to be seen as too smart, a boring bluestocking, the epithet thrown at women intellectuals, with its implications for the marriage market. Later in life, though, she chased knowledge with fervor. The sixteen students at the pension came from Italy, Germany, Holland, Russia, India, England, and Ireland. Only three students were American, and two of them came from Boston. Julia Gardner, sixteen years old, was the second-youngest child of John Lowell Gardner, a prominent Boston merchant, and Catharine Elizabeth Peabody Gardner, originally from Salem. Helen Waterston, a year younger, was the only child of Robert Cassie Waterston, a Unitarian minister, and Anna Cabot Lowell Quincy Waterston. Helen’s grandfather was Josiah Quincy, who had been a congressman, a Boston mayor, then the longtime president of Harvard College. Like Mr. and Mrs. Stewart, both girls’ parents stayed at hotels nearby while their daughters attended school during the week. Helen started on December 8, 1856, two months after opening day, on the advice of Julia’s mother, Mrs. Catharine Gardner. It was the day Helen first met Belle, noting in her daily journal that the other American besides Julia was “Isabella Stewart, a New York girl.” [image file=image_rsrc78F.jpg] Helen Ruthven Waterston, Alonzo Hartwell, 1856, crayon with white detail on paper, Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

• From Chasing Beauty

  As spring overtook the gardens at Green Hill, a pulse of excitement seemed to quicken her. In mid-May, she told Berenson that she felt “torn in a thousand directions trying to have the necessary, the useful, and the ornamental all done at once. So, I get your letters and read them with joy, between bird and bush, horse and dog, but find time to answer—no—absolutely never!” She was always at her most playful at Green Hill, and this spring season was no exception. She had added a water garden, where “a turtle has heard of it and climbed the hill and plunged in, and now lives there a monastic life.” Several days later she wrote of her fox terriers and being “on the hunt for a new variety of lilacs.” The mood of her missives to Berenson, however, changed abruptly at the end of May with a very stern note, which began with this dictum: “Tell me exactly what you paid for the Holbeins.” Several months before Berenson had offered her a pair of portraits by the sixteenth-century German-Swiss master Hans Holbein the Younger, court painter to Henry VIII. Berenson wrote a glowing description of the portraits, which depicted Sir William Butts, physician to the king, and his wife Lady Margaret Butts, saying the quality of each painting was “almost as jewel-like as Van Eyck’s . . . The modelling is superb, the colouring gorgeous.” He told the truth about the quality of the paintings but not their sale price, which he gave as £20,000. She subsequently received a letter from the former owners, stating a different price: £16,000. Now she was convinced there was “something wrong in the transaction.” She repeated that she had never liked the London dealer, Colnaghi, returning to the matter of the delay in sending her the Crivelli painting. She reminded Berenson that she had told him she “absolutely did not want to have anything to do with them again . . .” Then she gave a warning: “Before going to the bottom of the Holbein matter myself, I want you to tell me exactly all you know. It looks as if it might be a question of the Law Courts. This I want to avert.” She never brought a lawsuit. In June she wired Berenson his original asking price for the Holbein portraits, but it is not clear from their correspondence that summer exactly how they resolved the discrepancy. A likely scenario: she once again set aside her misgivings about Berenson because she couldn’t bear to lose him, especially so soon after losing Jack. She conveniently blamed a target far more distant—Colnaghi. Berenson was too central to her ambitions. In addition, the paintings she’d gotten through him had already shot up in value, an ascent that was sure to continue. Besides, she had countless things to attend to with the design and construction of her enormous building project.

• From Chasing Beauty

  When Jack returned to Bayreuth from Munich, he was talked into attending the nearly four-hour-long Tristan again. It was Belle’s third time. Before the performance, they stopped at Wagner’s burial place, where she picked ivy leaves from vines covering the grave’s enormous funeral stone. She pasted several of these into her travel album, next to pictures of the town and theater. She also collected photographs of the singers decked out in their operatic costumes, early celebrity shots for fans. In letters, Jack declared his wife “happy.” *** VENICE WAS NEXT. THE GARDNERS DIDN’T KNOW WHEN THEY MIGHT ARRIVE because an outbreak of cholera was spreading there. So they meandered by train through the Alps, from Munich to Salzburg to Innsbruck and finally to Vienna, where they visited the graves of Schubert and Beethoven. They saw as many paintings as possible in the galleries of Munich and Vienna. Belle bought photographic reproductions of Dürer and Holbein, of Mantegna and Rubens. Even Jack thought Vienna “delightful,” if too hot in early September. Ten days later they finally arrived in Venice. They couldn’t stay again at the Hotel de l’Europe because of several cases of cholera, so they engaged rooms at the Hotel Britannia. They met often with Daniel and Ariana Curtis and their son, Ralph, for walks and for dinners at the Palazzo Barbaro. The year before, the Curtises had purchased the top floors of the palace for a comparatively paltry sum. The Gardners, as they had during their previous stay in Venice, felt grateful for the generous hospitality of the Curtis family. Maybe this time especially, because during these same weeks, Jack was managing a crisis brewing back home. The Gardner nephews Joe Jr. and Amory had traveled back to Boston several weeks before. Soon after their arrival, Jack wrote to their cousin, George’s son Georgy, about a telegram that had arrived, telling of Joe’s unhappy return and how he’d become “much depressed.” This was alarming, and Jack offered to return immediately. Joe Jr. had had privileges—a Harvard education, a seemingly close relationship with his brothers and cousins and with Belle and Jack, a love of outdoor life and work. He bought for himself a relatively remote estate, Sagamore Farm, bordering the Miles River in Hamilton, twenty-five miles north of Boston. But he couldn’t seem to find his footing. Rumors swirled that he’d fallen in love with a young man from England who’d been in his college class. There is no mention of this in Jack’s letters; he uses phrases like “very bad times” and “great suffering.” Back in Boston, his cousin Georgy arranged for a doctor to be with Joe full time. Jack advised Georgy to consult with Aunt Julia, who “would also give you excellent advice,” and he hoped that “Joe would outgrow his troubles as I believe that is often the course in such cases.” They would hope for the best, adding that he and Aunty Belle were next on their way to Florence.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  42 Lecture 8: Homer—The Odyssey Telemachus at home on Ithaca. Books III and IV show Telemachus traveling to visit Nestor and Menelaus to seek news of Odysseus. Books V through VIII take up Odysseus’s own story. At the beginning of Book V , the nymph Calypso holds Odysseus captive and wants to make him her husband. At Zeus’s command, Calypso lets Odysseus go. From her island, he journeys to the Phaeacians, a people who will help him home. Books IX through XII are a fl ashback to Odysseus’s adventures from the time he left Troy until he arrived at Calypso’s island; with his arrival on Ithaca in Book XIII, the structure returns to a straightforward chronology. Odysseus himself narrates Books IX through XII, in the fi rst person. Odysseus’s most famous adventures occur here. The story shifts to third-person narration again in Book XIII. A strict chronological arrangement of the Odyssey would put Books IX through XII fi rst, followed by V through VIII, followed by XIII through XXIV . Books I through IV happen at the same time as Books V through VIII. Delaying Odysseus’s entrance for four full books lets us see how badly he is needed on Ithaca. His absence causes great problems for his family and his community. Odysseus’s family cannot know whether he is alive or dead; this means they do not know how to order their own lives. Many young suitors are courting Odysseus’s wife, Penelope. If Odysseus is dead, she should remarry, but if he is alive, she should remain faithful to him. Telemachus does not know if he should guard the kingdom for his father or assert his own rights. Odysseus’s absence causes problems for his society because Ithaca has been kingless for 20 years. Penelope’s suitors are the focal point for these troubles in both family and society. They are destroying Odysseus’s household and threatening his marriage. Apparently, whichever one of them marries Penelope will become ruler of Ithaca. Thus, they are threatening Telemachus’s rights as well. Homer starts the Odyssey at the precise moment when the situation on Ithaca is reaching crisis point. We fi rst see Odysseus himself in Book V , when Calypso tells him he may leave her island. Odysseus’s and Calypso’s interaction here foregrounds the human condition and Odysseus’s understanding of it. Calypso offers Odysseus

• From Opening Up by Writing It Down (2016)

  This chapter is written for therapists who might want to use expressive writing for their clients, and regular people who might want to use it for themselves. As you read the following pages, you will pick up a recurring theme: Be your own scientist. What works for a group of people in an experiment may or may not work for you. Try different techniques. Keep notes about what makes you feel better or worse. Monitor your behavior while you are experimenting with writing by tracking your sleep, drinking, weight, exercise, and the quality of your relationships and daily mood. Adapt your writing to your context, your needs, and to what works for you. WHEN SHOULD YOU ENGAGE IN EXPRESSIVE WRITING? Expressive writing is beneficial in helping to sort out complicated issues. Many of the most complex problems surround powerful emotions related to major life transitions. Almost all of the early writing studies focused on major personal upheavals or traumas. The research evidence now suggests that writing about a wide range of topics can be helpful: • Traumatic experiences from the past. If you find yourself thinking or worrying about an old issue too much, then writing might be beneficial. • Current or recent bothersome upheavals. Writing helps in working through relatively minor problems—a fight with a family member or coworker, failing an exam, anxiety about tackling a new problem, working through a complicated problem at work. • Making a life course correction. Every now and then, it is helpful to stop, stand back, and evaluate how your life is going. Taking a life inventory can help people reevaluate their goals, values, emotions, relationships, and who they are. In the same category would be normal life transitions—either positive or negative. Graduating, falling in love, getting married, and starting a new job are all generally positive experiences but typically require rethinking who we are and where we are going. • Stilling the mind. If you find yourself obsessing about a particular topic or talking about it too much, or if it is impeding your sleep, writing about it can be helpful. As outlined earlier in the book, writing can help people sleep and expand working memory. WHEN SHOULD YOU NOT ENGAGE IN EXPRESSIVE WRITING? This is a more difficult question to answer because it probably depends on the person and circumstance. The studies that have hinted that expressive writing could be harmful have involved pushing people to engage in emotional processing of events that are overwhelming, are ongoing, or have happened in the previous days or weeks. This is where you must be your own judge. If, immediately after a terrible experience, you feel you need to write, then write. But if you feel you aren’t ready, don’t. If you start writing and feel you aren’t making progress or you are getting more distressed, stop. Write about less emotional topics. Write about superficial issues. Don’t drag yourself through the mud. You are already in the mud.

• From Chasing Beauty

  Six months later, Isabella opened one last gallery on the first floor. The Macknight Room had been a small apartment. Matthew Prichard had stayed there early in 1902 before the museum first opened. Sargent took those rooms during his artist in residency in 1903, as did Okakura and A. Piatt Andrew in later years. She named the gallery after Dodge Macknight, many of whose landscapes populate the walls. She tore out an interior wall to make a bigger space and put her desk against a side wall. Here she put a large portrait of Prichard by John Briggs Potter, a moody moonscape by Dennis Bunker, and an eighteenth-century creamware inkstand decorated with the head of a bearded man. She paired a tiny round photograph of herself, taken when younger, next to the figure of the man, as if they were a couple. Jack Gardner is not often referenced in the museum; maybe he is here. Isabella also placed a large lacquer box, measuring eight by ten inches, on a chair next to her desk, where she would carefully collect for safekeeping newspaper clippings and all her incoming correspondence about the Great War. Thirty-OneBlood and Thunder1915–18During the spring and summer months of 1914, the newspapers were full of alarming news from Europe. Americans living there at the time, according to Gertrude Stein, then in Paris, “never really believed that there was going to be war.” The shock was great when war was declared on August 4. Ralph Curtis reported to Isabella that for two months, since the war’s start, John Singer Sargent had been “stranded in the Austrian Tyrol, isolated from the world!” Clayton Johns was stuck in Germany for several weeks, until the grandson of Felix Mendelssohn paid his passage home in gold bullion. The Berensons stopped their traveling for a time and lived quietly at I Tatti, the estate they had bought and renovated years before in the Settignano hills near Florence. Mary Berenson apologized to Isabella during these same weeks for not writing sooner, saying, “The War has cast such sadness upon us that I have had no heart to write.” Thomas Whittemore wrote to her about London in wartime. People were “terrified of the Zeppelin raids in these cold foggy nights! It was raining, not one street-light in ten lit, and those shaded flat down on the ground, like great red eyes peering fearfully out from under shaggy brows.” The Great War turned out to be the cataclysm that undid the Victorian world as Isabella and her generation had known it. “Think of the civilized twentieth-century!” she exclaimed in a letter to Berenson in the fall of 1914. Henry James was so distraught, he gave up his American citizenship in 1915 to join in solidarity with his adopted England. Henry Adams put his feeling simply and definitively, declaring that “Our old world is dead.”

• From Chasing Beauty

  Matthew Stewart Prichard, a British citizen, also brought news of the war. In its opening months, Isabella agonized over his fate. She had gotten two brief postcards from him in 1914, from The Hague and then from Ruhleben, an internment camp for British civilians. Prichard had made the unlucky decision to schedule a months-long tour of Germany to improve his language skills in the summer of 1914. He was reading an edition of Mozart’s letters on a bridge near the University of Freiburg, in southern Germany, when he was captured. He was subsequently imprisoned in the English-speaking camp, located in Spandau, outside Berlin. [image file=image_rsrc7AV.jpg] American Field Services Ambulance in France, A. Piatt Andrew, 1916, gelatin silver print. Isabella sent messages to Prichard via the American embassy in Berlin but heard nothing. She wrote about his situation to everyone she could think of in Washington, D.C., except President Wilson, a Democrat. She worried he might not like the name Gardner, perhaps on account of the family’s Republican affiliation. T. S. Eliot, then in London, reported to Isabella that he too had not heard from Prichard. Then, in June 1915, she got a letter from Elisina Tyler, a sometime Italian countess and wife of the diplomat and collector Royall Tyler. Mrs. Tyler had heard from Prichard and sent along a copy of his letter. “Thank you for thinking to tell him that phrase ‘Vien dietro a me’ &c,” Isabella hurriedly replied, referring to a line from Dante, which reads: “Come after me and let the people talk. Stand like a firm tower that never shakes its top for blast of wind.” Isabella knew Prichard loved Dante, though she noted to Mrs. Tyler that “perhaps a year ago he didn’t need him.” By October 1915, she still had not heard directly from Prichard, so she wrote to Mrs. Tyler again, saying it had been such a long time without word from him or about him. She found herself weeping at the thought of the ‘poor weary bones of his on that Ruhleben bed.’” A month later, Prichard’s first letter from prison arrived at Fenway Court. He described conditions at the camp in a somewhat anodyne tone, no doubt because of censors. His next letter was a little more specific, saying that he was studying Spanish, keeping up with his reading of Bergson’s philosophy, and teaching Italian to his fellow prisoners, and in no time, Dante’s Inferno. ***

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  This prosaic address to Epicrates is certainly not one of the highest forms of Greek reflection on love. But in its very banality it does bring out some important aspects of “the Greek problem of boys.” The young man—between the end of childhood and the age when he attained manly status—constituted a delicate and difficult factor for Greek ethics and Greek thought. His youth with its particular beauty (to which every man was believed to be naturally sensitive) and the status that would be his (and for which, with the help and protection of his entourage, he must prepare himself) formed a “strategic” point around which a complex game was required; his honor—which depended in part on the use he made of his body and which would also partly determine his future role and reputation—was an important stake in the game. For him, there was a test in all this, one that demanded diligence and training; there was also, for others, an occasion for care and concern. At the very end of his eulogy of Epicrates, the author declares that the life of the boy, his bios, must be a “common” work; and, as if it were a matter of a work of art to be finished, he urges all who know Epicrates to give this future figure “the greatest possible brilliance.” Later, in European culture, girls or married women, with their behavior, their beauty, and their feelings, were to become themes of special concern; a new art of courting them, a literature that was basically romantic in form, an exacting morality that was attentive to the integrity of their bodies and the solidity of their matrimonial commitment—all this would draw curiosity and desires around them. No matter what inferior position may have been reserved for them in the family or in society, there would be an accentuation, a valorization, of the “problem” of women. Their nature, their conduct, the feelings they inspired or experienced, the permitted or forbidden relationship that one might have with them were to become themes of reflection, knowledge, analysis, and prescription. It seems clear, on the other hand, that in classical Greece the problematization was more active in regard to boys, maintaining an intense moral concern around their fragile beauty, their corporal honor, their ethical judgment and the training it required. What is historically singular is not that the Greeks found pleasure in boys, nor even that they accepted this pleasure as legitimate; it is that this acceptance of pleasure was not simple, and that it gave rise to a whole cultural elaboration. In broad terms, what is important to grasp here is not why the Greeks had a fondness for boys but why they had a “pederasty”; that is, why they elaborated a courtship practice, a moral reflection, and—as we shall see—a philosophical asceticism, around that fondness. *Aristotle’s Rhetoric shows the importance of the categories of kalon and aischron in speeches of praise.5

• From Open (2009)

  IN THE QUARTERS I face Marcelo Filippini, from Uruguay. The first set is easy. The second set is easy. I run him, he crumbles. Tramps like us, baby, we were born to run. I enjoy this as much as winning—cutting the legs out from under my opponents, seeing the many years with Gil pay dividends in one concentrated two-week span. I win the third set without any resistance from Filippini, 6–0. You’re maiming guys! Brad shouts. Oh my God, Andre, you’re freaking maiming them. I’m in the semis. My opponent is Hrbaty, who just whooped me in Key Biscayne, when I was in a stupor over Steffi. I win the first set, 6–4. I win the next set, 7–6. Clouds roll in. A light drizzle starts to fall. The ball is getting heavier, which keeps me from playing offense. Hrbaty takes advantage and wins the third set, 6–3. In the fourth he goes up 2–1, and a match that I had won is slipping, slipping away. He’s down a set, but clearly he’s seized the momentum. I feel as if I’m just hanging on. I look to Brad. He points to the skies. Stop the match. I signal the supervisor and umpire. I point to the clay, which is mud. I tell them I’m not playing under these conditions. It’s dangerous. They examine the mud like miners panning for gold. They confer. They halt play. At dinner with Gil and Brad, I’m in a foul mood because I know the match was turning against me. Only the rain saved me. Otherwise we’d be at the airport right now. And now I can’t believe I have all night to stew over the match, to worry about tomorrow. I stare at my food, silent. Brad and Gil discuss me as if I’m not at the table. He’s OK physically, Gil says. He’s in fine condition. So give him a good speech, Brad. Coach him up. What do you want me to say? Think of something. Brad takes a swig of beer and turns to me. OK, Andre. Look. Here’s the deal. I need twenty-eight minutes from you tomorrow. What? Twenty-eight minutes. It’s a sprint through the tape. You can do it. You’ve got five games to win, that’s all, and that shouldn’t take any more than twenty-eight minutes. The weather. The ball. The weather is going to be fine. They’re saying rain. No, it’s going to be fine. Just give us twenty-eight great minutes. Brad knows my mind, the way it works. He knows that order, specificity, a clear and precise goal, are like candy to me. But does he also know the weather? For the first time it crosses my mind that Brad isn’t a coach but a prophet. Back at the hotel, Gil and I squeeze into the elevator. It’s going to be OK, Gil says. Yeah. Before bed, he forces me to drink my Gil Water. I don’t want to. Drink it.

• From Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy (1989)

  Since patients tend to resist assuming responsibility, therapists must develop techniques to make patients aware of how they themselves create their own problems. A powerful technique, which I use in many of these cases, is the here-and-now focus. Since patients tend to re-create in the therapy setting the same interpersonal problems that bedevil them in their lives outside, I focus on what is going on at the moment between a patient and me rather than on the events of his or her past or current life. By examining the details of the therapy relationship (or, in a therapy group, the relationships among the group members), I can point out on the spot how a patient influences the responses of other people. Thus, though Dave could resist assuming responsibility for his marital problems, he could not resist the immediate data he himself was generating in group therapy: that is, his secretive, teasing, and elusive behavior was activating the other group members to respond to him much as his wife did at home. In similar fashion, Betty’s (“Fat Lady”) therapy was ineffective as long as she could attribute her loneliness to the flaky, rootless California culture. It was only when I demonstrated how, in our hours together, her impersonal, shy, distancing manner re-created the same impersonal environment in therapy, that she could begin to explore her responsibility for creating her own isolation. While the assumption of responsibility brings the patient into the vestibule of change, it is not synonymous with change. And it is change that is always the true quarry, however much a therapist may court insight, responsibility assumption, and self-actualization. Freedom not only requires us to bear responsibility for our life choices but also posits that change requires an act of will. Though will is a concept therapists seldom use explicitly, we nonetheless devote much effort to influencing a patient’s will. We endlessly clarify and interpret, assuming (and it is a secular leap of faith, lacking convincing empirical support) that understanding will invariably beget change. When years of interpretation have failed to generate change, we may begin to make direct appeals to the will: “Effort, too, is needed. You have to try, you know. There’s a time for thinking and analyzing but there’s also a time for action.” And when direct exhortation fails, the therapist is reduced, as these stories bear witness, to employing any known means by which one person can influence another. Thus, I may advise, argue, badger, cajole, goad, implore, or simply endure, hoping that the patient’s neurotic worldview will crumble away from sheer fatigue. It is through willing, the mainspring of action, that our freedom is enacted. I see willing as having two stages: a person initiates through wishing and then enacts through deciding.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  The False LifeTable of ContentsTo obtain true life, man must on earth resign the false life of the flesh and live by the spirit. AS IN HEAVEN SO ON EARTHONCE his mother and brothers came to Jesus, and could not get to him because there were so many around him. A man seeing them went to Jesus and said: Your family, your mother and brothers, are standing outside wanting to see you. But Jesus said: My mother and my brothers are those who have understood the will of the Father, and do it. And a woman exclaimed: Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that you have sucked! And Jesus replied: Only they are blessed who have understood the spirit of the Father and keep it. And a man said to Jesus: I will follow you wherever you may go. Jesus answered him: There is nowhere for you to follow me to: I have neither house nor any place to live in. The beasts have their dens and their lairs, but man is at home everywhere if he lives by the spirit. It happened once that Jesus was sailing with his pupils in a boat. He said: Let us cross to the other side. A storm arose on the lake and the boat began to fill so that it nearly sank. But Jesus lay in the stern and slept. They woke him and said: Master, is it nothing to you if we are drowned? And when the storm subsided he said: Why are you so timid? You have no faith in the life of the spirit. To one man Jesus said: Follow me. But the man replied: I have a father who is old; let me first bury him and then I will follow you. And Jesus said to him: Let the dead bury the dead, but if you wish really to live fulfill the Father's will and publish it. Another man said: I wish to be your pupil and will fulfill the Father's will as you command, but let me first arrange my family affairs. And Jesus said to him: If a ploughman looks back he cannot plough. As long as you look back you cannot plough. You must forget everything except the furrow you are driving and only then can you plough. If you consider what may befall your bodily life you cannot live, because you have not understood the real life. After this it happened that Jesus went with his pupils into a village, and a woman named Martha asked him into her house. She had a sister, Mary, who sat at Jesus' feet and listened to his teaching, while Martha was busy preparing a good meal for them. And Martha went up to Jesus and said: Do you not see that my sister leaves me to do all the work? Tell her to help me with it. In reply Jesus said to her: Martha, Martha!

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

  June looked at him reflectively. “Actually, that’s not bad . . .” She was just about to leave publishing and set up her own literary agency. “Remember,” she said at the end of the evening, “if ever you decide to write that book, let me know.” Things were moving a little too fast for me. The only major piece of writing I had attempted was my ill-fated thesis, and the kind of book that June had in mind was something very different. It would mean that I would have to reveal myself at my most vulnerable. It would be like stripping naked before hundreds of strangers. And writing books was something that other people did—people like Charlotte. The whole process seemed daunting. How would I know what incidents to select? How could I shape the material so that it made a point without imposing an artificial pattern that would distort it? How would I know what kind of style to use? I could see from Charlotte’s typescripts that she would sometimes put a line right through a paragraph: how did she know that it hadn’t worked? And besides, I didn’t really enjoy writing. I had always rather dreaded the moment when I had to write a chapter of my thesis or an essay. It had never been easy. Writing was a grim, exacting, frustrating process because you never said exactly what you wanted to. How on earth could I embark on a whole book? Especially since, with my track record, it was bound to be yet another failure. I might have dithered indefinitely, but Sally intervened. It was a summer evening in 1979, and I was staying overnight in her flat in Dulwich. I quite often did this, since it saved me having to do the grueling journey to Highbury every night. “Now, look here.” Sally led me into her sitting room, where we usually had a glass of sherry to celebrate the end of another school day. But on this particular evening, Sally had other plans. She had cleared her little white desk in the corner of the room. Her father had made it himself; indeed, he had sat at that desk struggling with the calculations that had led to the discovery of radar. “This is a historic desk,” Sally said. “It will bring you luck.” She had already laid out an exercise book and a new felt-tipped pen. “I’m going to go out now for an hour,” she continued. “I’m going to go for a walk, do some shopping—maybe I’ll call on Brigid. But I’m going to be away for a whole hour. So get started. Just sit down now and write the first two pages of your book. Just two pages, that’s all! And then, when I get back, we’ll have a drink to celebrate.” She pulled back the chair, turned on the desk lamp, looked at me firmly, and left the flat. And so there was nothing for it. I sat down and started to write.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  In our interview with branding author Dorie Clark, who has written extensively on LGBTQ+ issues for the Harvard Business Review , she explained, “The stress around hiding can become extraordinarily distracting, leaving people less energy for their work. As anybody who’s ever been in junior high knows, when you have to focus too much on what people are thinking about you, it’s a surefire recipe for anxiety.” She added that managers can help dispel such worries. Putting antidiscrimination policies in place is fundamental, but beyond that team leaders can speak up for marginalized groups, initiate inclusion conversations with their teams, and treat all complaints as serious (even about seemingly minor issues) and investigate them immediately. “Humans are highly calibrated to pick up on signals from other humans. If you are concealing something, other people generally know it,” Clark added. “They might not know what it is, but they know you seem guarded. Saying you are gay—or whatever one’s identity is—is usually the most innocuous explanation because people might concoct a million bad things: This person’s a snob, or they think they are superior, or, worse, they are doing something wrong and don’t want us to know about it.” Hiding our true identities isn’t just an issue for those in the LGBTQ+ community. The Deloitte University Leadership Center reveals that 61 percent of all employees say they hide part of their identity in some way. For instance, a working mom might not talk about her kids to appear more “serious” about her career; a Muslim employee might have to find a hidden corner of the office to pray so no one will see him; or a gay man might not display pictures of his partner at work or even on social media. When managers create cultures where people feel comfortable being themselves, dramatic performance gains can be unlocked as everyone is able to focus all their attention on work. Whether or not they are part of a traditional minority group, team leaders should be able to share at least one story of identity-covering in their own behavior to display vulnerability. Please note that in all this, no one wants to be defined by a single dimension of their identity, e.g., “the Black guy” or “the gay teammate.” That also means managers should not ask individuals to give opinions representing their entire group. LGBTQ+, Muslim, or Black people are not a monolith. After all, no one would think to ask something like: “Jerry, you are White; what would White people think about this product?” Managers can help by recognizing that everyone has differences, and those parts of us represent only a fraction of who we are.