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 Blue Nights (2011)

  I try it again: She “tells” her present fear of life in relation to Heidegger. She “tells” her understanding of the abyss. She qualifies her understanding of the abyss: “This is merely how I interpret the abyss; I could be wrong.” Considerable time passes before I realize that my preoccupation with the words she used has screened off any possible apprehension of what she was actually saying when she wrote her journal entry on that March day in 1984. Was that deliberate? Was I screening off what she said about her fear of life the same way I had screened off what she said about her fear of The Broken Man? Hello, Quintana? I’m going to lock you here in the garage? After I became five I never ever dreamed about him? Did I all her life keep a baffle between us? Did I prefer not to hear what she was actually saying? Did it frighten me? I try the passage again, this time reading for meaning. What she said: My present fear of life. What she said: Pass into nothingness. What she was actually saying: The World has nothing but Morning and Night. It has no Day or Lunch. Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep. When I tell you that I am afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street, is this what I am actually saying? Does it frighten me? 25Let me again try to talk to you directly. On my last birthday, December 5, 2009, I became seventy-five years old. Notice the odd construction there—I became seventy-five years old—do you hear the echo? I became seventy-five? I became five? After I became five I never ever dreamed about him?

• From Between Us

  Another example from our interviews illustrates the outside-in emotions well. Chiemi, a twenty-year-old Japanese student who lives with her grandparents, tells us she always tries to be home on time for dinner. Recently though, she has joined an extracurricular activity for which she stays out late a couple of days a week. When she mentions to her grandparents that she will be late that night, they complain that she is “never on time.” Chiemi is annoyed about this exaggeration, but she tries to understand her grandparents: They must be worrying; they surely mean well; they care about her. When the interviewer asks her what she does or tells her grandparents, Chiemi answers she never mentions to them that she is annoyed: How can I say . . . I want to say “I want to have more fun, I want to have fun until late at night.” But at the same time, you know, I know how much they worry about me. So I try not to say anything like that. I just try to laugh it off/smile it away. Chiemi accommodates to her grandparents’ wishes, and starts making even more of an effort to come home early. She plays her role. Sen’s relatives, the Utku Inuit, Hiroto, and Chiemi are all focused outwards, not inwards. When an OURS model of emotions prevails, emotional acting is Situated: individuals accommodate to the social norms, expectations, and roles in their social context. What matters is whether your emotions match up to others’ needs and expectations, whether you fit with the norms, and whether you fulfill your role. In fact, in a large-scale international questionnaire study, psychologist David Matsumoto and his colleagues found emotional suppression to be highest in national cultures that are strong on social order, norms and traditions, and power hierarchy, and lowest in national cultures that prioritize the individual and their feelings. Does this mean that Sen’s relatives, the Utku Inuit, Hiroto, Chiemi, or all the international students in order- and hierarchy-loving countries feel alienated from their feelings? When Sen’s relatives showed no emotion, did they feel unnatural? When the Utku Inuit stayed calm in the face of frustration, did they feel alienated? When Hiroto nodded in the committee, or Chiemi smiled to her grandparents, did they feel phony? Does it make them unhappy to not express their emotions? Does their anger or grief resurface at other, improper times?

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Daisy asked. I am listening , I thought, to the cacophony of my digestive tract . Of course I’d long known that I was playing host to a massive collection of parasitic organisms, but I didn’t much like being reminded of it. By cell count, humans are approximately 50 percent microbial, meaning that about half of the cells that make you up are not yours at all. There are something like a thousand times more microbes living in my particular biome than there are human beings on earth, and it often seems like I can feel them living and breeding and dying in and on me. I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans and tried to control my breathing. Admittedly, I have some anxiety problems, but I would argue it isn’t irrational to be concerned about the fact that you are a skin-encased bacterial colony. Mychal said, “His dad was about to be arrested for bribery or something, but the night before the raid he disappeared. There’s a hundred-thousand-dollar reward out for him.” “And you know his kid,” Daisy said. “Knew him,” I answered. I watched Daisy attack her school-provided rectangular pizza and green beans with a fork. She kept glancing up at me, her eyes widening as if to say, Well? I could tell she wanted me to ask her about something, but I couldn’t tell what, because my stomach wouldn’t shut up, which was forcing me deep inside a worry that I’d somehow contracted a parasitic infection. I could half hear Mychal telling Daisy about his new art project, in which he was using Photoshop to average the faces of a hundred people named Mychal, and the average of their faces would be this new, one-hundred-and-first Mychal, which was an interesting idea, and I wanted to listen, but the cafeteria was so loud, and I couldn’t stop wondering whether there was something wrong with the microbial balance of power inside me. Excessive abdominal noise is an uncommon, but not unprecedented, presenting symptom of infection with the bacteria Clostridium difficile , which can be fatal. I pulled out my phone and searched “human microbiome” to reread Wikipedia’s introduction to the trillions of microorganisms currently inside me. I clicked over to the article about C. diff , scrolling to the part about how most C. diff infections occur in hospitals.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  has to do is fear God and keep his commandments. This is the only time that the commandments are mentioned in Qoheleth. The epilogue practically tells the reader not to pay too much attention to the book. One does not need wisdom; it is sufficient to keep the commandments. We find a somewhat similar attitude later in the book of Baruch (see chapter 28 below). Qoheleth, in contrast, never suggested that “the whole duty of everyone” could be identified so simply. It is not surprising, however, that some scribes found Qoheleth troubling and tried to limit its influence. The greater surprise is surely that it was included in the canon of Scripture at all. Its inclusion may have been due to its supposed Solomonic authorship, but it also testifies to the critical spirit that pervades so much of the Hebrew Scriptures. FOR FURTHER READING Job Commentaries S. E. Balentine, Job (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2006). Well-illustrated theological commentary. N. C. Habel, The Book of Job (OTL; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985). Detailed commentary. Distinctive for defending the authenticity of the Elihu speeches. J. G. Janzen, Job (Interpretation; Atlanta: John Knox, 1985). Theological consideration of existential questions raised by Job. C. A. Newsom, “The Book of Job,” NIB 4:319–637. Elegant, literate commentary with theological reflections. M. H. Pope, Job (AB 15; New York: Doubleday, 1979). Classic philological commentary, rich in parallels with ancient Near Eastern literature. C.-L. Seow, Job 1–21. Interpretation and Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013). Literary-theological commentary with attention to reception history. Studies J. L. Crenshaw, “Job, Book of,” ABD 3:858–68. Excellent overview of the critical issues. ————, Reading Job (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2011). Literary and theological commentary. K. J. Dell, The Book of Job as Sceptical Literature (BZAW 197; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991). Categorizes Job as different from Proverbs/Wisdom. G. Gutiérrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987). Interpretation of Job in light of liberation theology. Avi Hurvitz, “The Date of the Prose Tale of Job Linguistically Reconsidered,” HTR 67 (1974): 17–34. Argument for the date of the prologue on the basis of language. C. A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Sophisticated literary and moral analysis. L. G. Perdue, Wisdom in Revolt: Metaphorical Theology in the Book of Job (JSOTSup 112; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991). Good discussion of the critical issues. S. Terrien, The Iconography of Job through the Centuries (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). Superb illustrated volume. J. W. Whedbee, The Bible and the Comic Vision (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 221–62. Job as comedy.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Yet in the East Christianity was making great strides, and by 235 it had become one of the most important religions of the Roman empire. Christians now spoke of a Great Church with a single rule of faith that shunned extremity and eccentricity. These orthodox theologians had outlawed the pessimistic visions of the Gnostics, Marcionites and Montanists and had settled for the middle road. Christianity was becoming an urbane creed that eschewed the complexities of the mystery cults and an inflexible asceticism. It was beginning to appeal to highly intelligent men who were able to develop the faith along lines that the Greco-Roman world could understand. The new religion also appealed to women: its scriptures taught that in Christ there was neither male nor female and insisted that men cherished their wives as Christ cherished his church. Christianity had all the advantages that had once made Judaism such an attractive faith without the disadvantages of circumcision and an alien Law. Pagans were particularly impressed by the welfare system that the churches had established and by the compassionate behavior of Christians toward one another. During its long struggle to survive persecution from without and dissension from within, the Church had also evolved an efficient organization that made it almost a microcosm of the empire itself: it was multiracial, catholic, international, ecumenical and administered by efficient bureaucrats. As such it had become a force for stability and appealed to the emperor Constantine, who became a Christian himself after the battle of Milvian Bridge in 312, and legalized Christianity the following year. Christians were now able to own property, worship freely and make a distinctive contribution to public life. Even though paganism flourished for another two centuries, Christianity became the state religion of the empire and began to attract new converts who made their way into the Church for the sake of material advancement. Soon the Church, which had begun life as a persecuted sect pleading for toleration, would demand conformity to its own laws and creeds. The reasons for the triumph of Christianity are obscure; it certainly would not have succeeded without the support of the Roman empire, though this inevitably brought its own problems. Supremely a religion of adversity, it has never been at its best in prosperity. One of the first problems that had to be solved was the doctrine of God: no sooner had Constantine brought peace to the Church than a new danger arose from within which split Christians into bitterly warring camps.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  31 'Justification and Salvation History', Perspectii•es, p. 74. Cf. earlier, 'Ministry', Essays, pp. 75f. On justification interpreted as a universal and social act of God, see also M. Barth, 'The Kerygma of Galatians', Interpretation 21, 1967, pp. 141-3. 32 'The Faith of Abraham in Romans 4', Perspectives, pp. 79-101. 34 Stendahl's observation on this point was preceded by Cerfaux's (The Christian in the Theology of St Paul, n. 1 on pp. 375f.): Christ's appearance to Paul 'was destined not to resolve a crisis of the soul, but to call him to a great mission .... Introspection was not much practised in this era. Augustine had not passed into history.' 33 Ibid., p. 83. Introduction 437 theology is not righteousness by faith but the history of salvation described especially in Romans 9-11. 35 Kasemann responded, pointing out that similar views had been held by Wrede, Schweitzer and others, and arguing that righteousness by faith is the central theme of Paul's theology. 36 The theme should not be understood as an individualistic one, however, but rather righteousness by faith and the history of salvation belong together. Yet Stendahl and his friends are right in protesting against the individualist curtailment of the Christian message .... The Pauline doctrine of justification never took its bearings from the individual, although hardly anyone now realizes this. 37 Since 'hardly anyone' realizes the history-of-salvation and cosmic dimen sions of the doctrine of righteousness by faith, and since Kasemann had protested long and vigorously against Bultmann's individualism; since, further, both Bornkamm and Conzelmann protest against Kiisemann that righteousness by faith concerns the individual, and even Kiisemann acknowledges (as we saw above) that faith is primarily an individual decision, it is somewhat surprising to read that it is 'in the English-speaking world' that 'the key-words of law and justification are associated almost inevitably with a legalistic construction. The existentialist interpretation of faith rouses uneasiness because it seems to end in individualism.'38 Kasemann is clearly in a difficult position in his two-front war. He wants to maintain the centrality of righteousness by faith, deny too much individualism to it, and insist that faith is an individual decision. In denying an over-emphasis on individualism, he must himself attack his teacher, Bultmann, and yet also pass off the fear that Bultmann's existentialist position is too indi vidualistic as a misunderstanding characteristic of the English-speaking world, where the influence of the Reformation has faded. It is important to note that Kasemann's defence of the centrality of righteousness by faith and his fear of its being subordinated to salvation history do not entirely spring from disinterested exegesis, and he makes this abundantly clear. Among German theologians of his generation, the rediscovery of the Reformation doctrine of righteousness by faith, says Kasemann,

• From Bigorexia

  [chest press machine softly rattles] [gym equipment rattles] [Craig] What is my typical day like? I wake up, I eat breakfast, I relax, eat again, relax a little bit more, let my food settle, go to the gym, eat again. Come home, eat again, relax, take a protein shake, go to sleep. [weight plates rattle] For me, I'm into the mass monster look and, you know, I'm trying to keep it somewhat alive to show the world that the monsters do exist. [upbeat rock music] [man 1] Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. You got this. -[man 2] Bring down. -[man 3] One and a half inches. Go! -[Janae grunts] -[man 3] Hold it. [man 1] Good! [weigh plates rattle] [Janae coughs and laughs] -[muffled chat] -[music continues] -[man 3] I give you that one. -Yeah. Check that up. [laughs] -[coughs and chuckles] -[wristband unfastens] -[sighs] -[man 4] It was pooling up in your eye a little bit. Oh, dude, it was, I couldn't even see out of that eye. [gentle music] [plastic bottle cracks] [upbeat music] [Janae] I was always drawn into sports and, specifically, lifting an-- and wanting to be big and strong. Big muscles and strength was something I was always drawn to. Those two things were these two strong desires that were with me my whole life. To some point, still, it's still something that, you know, trying to balance is tricky. [interviewer] What are your feelings on bigorexia? I think it's a real thing. I'm certainly in it. I-- I would say that I can totally relate. I think it's very common. I think a lot of the bigger athletes feel that to some degree. I know I did myself. You'd walk into a room, and there's a bunch of other athletes in there, but I could be the biggest one, and I would know that in my head, but I would look at them and I would always feel like they were bigger than me, and I would always feel insecure, like, back then, the way I picked out all of my clothes was what made me look biggest. Psychologically, it was a big struggle for me too, because I'm still feeling like I'm supposed to be female, but yet, now I'm putting more male hormones into my body. And some of those things I really struggled with. Lifting was more important than my career, more important than anything else. It was just a big part of who I am, but now, like, the need to figure out my gender and figure out all these things was kind of surpassing that. So I was struggling. Those issues became this balancing act. What's most important to me and what things am I willing to give up. If I want to transition and, you know, I pretty much have to walk away my lifting career, which was something that was very fulfilling and something I love doing. So it's just really complicated.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  more terrifying in the Qumran texts. But there is no mandate in Paul for the Calvinist insistence on the eternal predestination of the individual to salvation or damnation. Paul saw damnation as the shadow that was cast by election from grace; it ensures the purity of the gospel message; he did not put forward a theory about God’s system of selection, but an explanation of what happens to a man when he hears the gospel – he chooses, and so he is chosen. This tremendous attack on the whole Judaic concept of man’s relationship with God, and its replacement by a new salvationist system, was summarized in Paul’s great essay in determinist theology, the epistle to the Romans. What an extraordinary document to be received by a young congregation who had never met the apostle! No one has ever fully understood Romans. No one can remain undisturbed by it, either. It is the most thought-provoking of all the Christian documents. It has a habit of forcing men to reconsider their whole understanding of religion even when they have spent many years in theological inquiry. Thus Romans profoundly changed Augustine’s thinking in the last years of his life. It was the detonator to Luther’s explosion. It has been used again and again to demolish and reconstruct systems of theology, most recently by Schweitzer, Bultmann and Barth. Most theological revolutions begin with Romans, as indeed did Paul’s own. Romans is an imperfect document, the work of a man not wholly satisfied with his case: that is its merit as a key. The circular form of the argument, its return again and again to the same starting points and conclusions, betray the anxiety of a man who still saw, and knew he saw, through a glass darkly. The imperfection of his vision was, indeed, implicit in the majesty of his conception of God, the distancing he achieves between God and man, and time and eternity. Paul was the beneficiary of a vision. We must accept his sincerity on this: it was clearly the most important event in his whole life. But, as a man who demanded the whole truth, he recognized that his vision had been incomplete. The difference between the theology of Jesus and Paul is not merely that one is implicit, the other explicit; it is that Jesus saw as a God, Paul thought as a man. But the process of trying to think through the theological problem made Paul into a very formidable figure. On the one hand he presents an insuperable obstacle to any humanist rescue-operation on Jesus – any presentation of him as the greatest and noblest of all human beings, stripped of his divine attributes. Paul insisted he was God: it is the only thing about him which really matters, otherwise the Pauline theology collapses, and with it Christianity. But equally, Paul is an obstacle to those

• From Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939)

  We can now conceive what an emotion is. It is a transformation of the world. When the paths before us become too difficult, or when we cannot see our way, we can no longer put up with such an exacting and difficult world. All ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. So then we try to change the world; that is, to live it as though the relations between things and their potentialities were not governed by deterministic processes but by magic. But, be it well understood, this is no playful matter: we are cornered, and we fling ourselves into this new attitude with all the force at our command. Note also that our effort is not conscious of what it is, for then it would be the object of a reflection. It is above all the seizure of new relationships and new demands. To put it simply, since the seizure of one object is impossible, or sets up an unbearable tension, the consciousness seizes or tries to seize it otherwise; that is, tries to transform itself in order to transform the object. In itself, this change in the direction of the consciousness is nothing remarkable. We can find numerous examples of similar transformations of activity and of perception. For instance, to search for a shape that is dissimulated in a picture-puzzle (where is the gun?) is to deploy one's perceptivity towards the picture in a new way, it is to scan the branches, the telegraph posts, etc., in the picture as if one were looking at a gun, it is to carry out the ocular movements that one would make in seeing a gun. But we do not perceive these movements as such. By means of them, an intuition which transcends them, and of which they constitute the hyle, scrutinizes the trees and posts that are seized upon as 'possible guns' until suddenly the perception crystallizes and the gun appears. Thus, through a change of intention, as in a change of behaviour, we apprehend an object, new or old, in a different fashion. We need not first take up a position on the reflective plane. The instructions under the picture provide the immediate motivation; and we look for the gun without leaving the non-reflective plane: a potential gun has appeared, vaguely localized in the picture.

• From Opening Up by Writing It Down (2016)

  The story doesn’t end there. Barbara was understandably upset by the event and called her therapist the next morning. When she met with him later that day, he recommended that she tell her story to everyone she met. The more she told the story, he claimed, the more quickly her anxiety symptoms would disappear. Why might talking about a trauma help to cure the trauma? This is intuitively sound advice. But why? Talking about a trauma is a natural human response. When this need to disclose is blocked or inhibited, stress and illness result. Beyond the potential dangers of long-term inhibition, there is something positive about confronting upsetting experiences. Barbara needed more than the release of inhibition. She needed to come to terms with her terrifying experience. Talking, according to the therapists, was a good way to do this. Talking about a trauma goes beyond merely moving past inhibition. Usually, when someone talks about a trauma, another person listens. In the case of Barbara, her listeners told her that she was fast thinking, competent, and brave. When she explained that she was still upset, they assured her that her feelings were normal and that they were available to help her in any way. In other cases, talking about a trauma can result in other benefits such as advice, attention, sympathy, financial assistance, and a way of excusing the individuals from carrying out their normal responsibilities. Although these social benefits can be valuable, there is much more to be gained from talking about upsetting experiences. Specifically, the act of talking can change the ways we think and feel about traumatic events and about ourselves. THE ROLE OF TALKING IN ACHIEVING CATHARSIS VERSUS INSIGHT Most therapists agree that talking about an upsetting experience is psychologically beneficial. The agreement ends there. Some think that talking about a trauma is primarily valuable in achieving catharsis by getting the person to express pent-up emotions. Others believe that talking helps the client attain insight into the causes of the difficulties with the trauma and their potential cures. Others argue other perspectives as to when and why talking may be helpful, and this argument has changed over time as theories and clinical practices have evolved. In the late 1800s, the young Austrian physician Sigmund Freud began to piece together an overarching theory of personality that pointed to the reasons that confronting a trauma was beneficial. Many of Freud’s early ideas stemmed from a technique pioneered by another physician named Josef Breuer, typically called “the talking cure.”

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  YOUR BRAIN ON FEAR AND ANXIETYRemember those antidrug commercials from the ’80s? Maybe I’m dating myself here, but those PSAs made me scared (and hungry) at the same time. “This is your brain,” an ominous voice announces as an egg dropped into a buttery, sizzling frying pan. “This is your brain on drugs,” the voice reveals as we watch as the egg bubbles, fries, and shrinks. The crispy brown edges, an emblem of destruction. “Any questions?” the voice demands. Yeah. Can I get a roll and coffee with that? I know that commercial was supposed to keep me from doing ecstasy in English class with the girl who came from an exotic place called Chicago, but it didn’t. All kidding aside, some researchers believe that chronic anxiety can not only harm your brain—it can become addictive, like a drug. Like many women I know, my mind is built to solve problems and seek solutions. But two things can be true at once. A strength can also be a weakness when taken to the extreme. One of my favorite experts on anxiety is Dr. Judson Brewer. Dr. Jud, as he likes to be called, is an Associate Professor in Psychiatry and the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University. His studies suggest that anxiety is more habitual than we realize. To understand his research, we first have to remember how our habits work. All habits (positive and negative) have three distinct parts: trigger, behavior, and reward. The trigger kicks off the behavior, and the behavior creates a reward or result. (FYI, I use the terms “reward” and “result” interchangeably because not all rewards are so rewarding.) For example, let’s say you’re feeling stressed at work (trigger). You want this feeling to go away, so you drink a few glasses of wine each night to relax (behavior). The distraction helps you temporarily feel better (reward). According to Dr. Jud, over time negative behaviors create addictive habits that gloss over the cause of our suffering and create more problems in our lives. Enter the usual suspects: overeating, drinking, drugs, endless social media scrolling, procrastination, stress-shopping, sex with randos, and anything else you can think of to make the discomfort stop. In these patterns, it’s easy to see how anxiety can be similar to an addictive habit. The more we fuel it, the more anxious we get, and the more we turn to unhealthy behaviors to reduce our anxiety. It’s a never-ending cycle that wears us down, shrinks our resilience, and makes our lives way smaller than they need to be. Now for the good news: habits aren’t fixed; they’re fluid—just like our brains. In fact, our beautiful brains have the ability to change and form new patterns and connections throughout our lives—no matter how old we are. (That means you can teach old dogs new tricks. Lucky us!)

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

  After we discussed this, Maddy was equally fired up and frightened. She bought what I was saying about repetition but was scared. She offered that three of her female co-workers often ate lunch together in the breakroom. Usually, Maddy would eat at her desk or in her car. The setup was too good to pass up: same people, pretty much every day. They were cordial already, which, again, is the only bar. How to approach the group was a question. Maddy dreaded what she called the “Hi, Guys” Hover, so we decided to have her get to lunch first and let the group join around her. At first, Maddy felt awkward—she didn’t know the context of anything they were talking about, but she stuck it out anyway, just listening, nodding, and, to her surprise, laughing along a couple of times. She kept reminding herself—they’re friendly, they’re friendly. Before she actually sat at the table with them, Maddy realized, she had ruled them out as potential friends because two were older and one was an intern. She had thought she needed more commonality in a friend—someone her age, with her background. Looking back, she also realized she had been dying for someone else to initiate, but they all thought she just wanted to keep to herself. It was basically a big, silent miscommunication on both sides. Maddy wasn’t sure if joining lunch that first time had gone well or not, but later that night she got a Facebook friend request from one of them. “There’s still a long way to go, and I’m not sure if we’ll end up capital-F friends or not, but this isn’t a bad start,” Maddy reported. Remember, if they’re friendly, they’re in. Think of everyone you’re friendly with or could be friendly with. There. I bet you just broadened your social life substantially. GIVE THEM SOMETHING TO WORK WITH Next comes disclosure. This is the second step for Maddy but the first for people like Nora, who are stuck in limbo between acquaintances and friends. Like Nora, many of us have a collection of half-baked friendships and people we are friendly with, but we can’t seem to get beyond that. Sometimes this is the result of the perfectionist rearing its head again: “Nobody seems interested—everyone is so busy with life and kids and everything,” Nora says. Without really realizing it, Nora is waiting for someone to seem “interested,” meaning someone who unambiguously approaches her. Nora wants certainty. Without realizing it, she wants the potential friend to initiate interesting, easy conversation and invite her to do things. But because she’s waiting for a friendship that materializes into clear, sharp focus, she inadvertently screens out everyone else. Despite having halfway-there friends all around her, she thinks she has to start from scratch.

• From Bigorexia

  [Tony] All right. -[Craig] Hey, how's that? -[Tony] You see that arm? -You want to get that toned a little bit? -[Craig] Just a little bit. Friends of freedom, I am Dr. Tony Huge, and we are here to crush ignorance and pioneer human evolution. I've met many of the most massive bodybuilders around the world and I have met a number of them that do not understand how large they are. They want to get as absolute big as possible, they want to be the biggest. To most people, it would make zero sense because they're already seen as the biggest. Why would they want to get any bigger? It's to the point of almost like a circus freak. [Tony] ...a little break for the first... [cameraman] Looks like it's modern times-- [Craig] I-- I don't want to-- Yeah, hey, what's the matter? Yes, he looks good, Justin. -He looks-- he looks cool-- -I didn't really-- Okay, I'll do it, but I-- I just don't-- I didn't really want to film anything until I was all ready to go, but I'll stop sounding like a bitch and do it. [Tony] Yeah, I don't think this part of the process can be any different. He's going down the stairs. Just like he's small at any time. [Craig] I was a toothpick. I put on 100 pounds naturally, from 150 to 250. It was easy to put on muscle, then once I, you know, went the other route, kept on putting on even more and more and more, and I was just like, "Wow, I'm really blowing up." I mean, I'm 342 right now, my heaviest ever was 350. I feel like I'm addicted to getting big. When you want to be the biggest, you just keep on getting bigger until you are the biggest, and even when you're the biggest, you still want to get bigger. I would definitely say bigorexia. Because, uh, just never satisfied. Simply. Never satisfied. I wouldn't say it's a bad addiction. Um, its life-changing and it could be a problem, you know, if it affects your lifestyle, but I wouldn't say that. I don't think bigorexia is inherently a problem. It is going to cause the person who suffers from it to, uh, cost some of their health, uh, some of their happiness, but if you look at anyone in any industry that's really great at what they do, they're probably great at it because they're a little bit insane. [weight plates rattle] I think Craig has the worst case of bigorexia that I've ever seen. I mean, I think he's the world's largest bodybuilder. He fluctuates between 330 and 350 pounds. So, here we have the world's largest bodybuilder who's still afraid that people are going to think he's small, who's still afraid that he's going to get caught on camera not looking as biggest, and who's working every day to try to even get bigger.

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

  By contrast, playing a role you choose yourself is like erecting scaffolding. With scaffolding, temporary structure is placed around a building in order to construct or repair it. The scaffold grants access and provides safety while you shore up the building, incorporate new elements, or add finishing touches. Then, when the work is done, the scaffolding is no longer necessary—it can be removed, but the new, improved building remains. Giving yourself some structure by playing a role you choose allows you to build up and reinforce the real you. * * * So how might this work in real life? How to assign yourself some structure so you can build up the real you? Meet Aisha, a physician who used to deal with hard-core social anxiety at work. She was the first in her bursting-with-pride family to go to college but always felt one step out of step at the prestigious schools and hospitals from which she built her career. She was convinced she didn’t belong, not among the ivy and the prep school kids. Her education and career went beyond anything she had previously imagined, and she was sure that someday someone would eventually notice, say, “I’m sorry, mistakes were made,” and politely usher her out.2 These days, Aisha’s medical specialty—kids with autism—is hot. And despite her doubts, Aisha’s skills are hot, too. She put together a successful applied research program from scratch and toiled hard to win an avalanche of funding. All this got her noticed by the hospital higher-ups, and without quite knowing how, Aisha found herself rising in the ranks. But instead of being elated, she was terrified, convinced The Reveal of her inadequacy and incompetence was close at hand. When Aisha came to see me, she told me she belonged in the trenches, not at the top. On the one hand, she knew patient care was where she did her best work: she genuinely enjoyed helping families with an autistic child, especially single parents trying to balance everything. But more problematically, Aisha also thought she belonged in the trenches because she wasn’t competent to lead. During her first presentation to hospital leadership, she got so overwhelmed that mid-slide she passed the presentation off to a colleague. Poker face in place, the colleague graciously took over as if it had been planned that way all along, though afterwards she approached Aisha with a mix of incredulity and concern, which is how Aisha ended up in my office. During another meeting with leadership, Aisha faked an emergency phone call in order to go into the hallway, lean against the wall, and breathe. She told me she saw the power suit she wore on meeting days as a costume—a far cry from the familiar, in-the-trenches scrubs she usually wore alongside everyone else in the clinic.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Because I had what I mistook for a staph infection I would need that morning to see a dermatologist. Before noon I had been diagnosed: not an earache, not a staph infection, but herpes zoster, shingles, an inflammation of the nervous system, an adult recurrence, generally thought to have been triggered or heightened by stress, of the virus responsible for childhood chickenpox. “Shingles”: it sounded minor, even mildly comical, something about which a great-aunt might complain, or an elderly neighbor; an amusing story tomorrow. Tomorrow. When I will be fine. Restored. Well. Telling the amusing story. You’ll never guess what it turned out to be. “Shingles,” imagine. Nothing to worry about then, I remember saying to the doctor who made the diagnosis. Zoster can be a pretty nasty virus, the doctor said, guarded. Still in the mode for maintaining momentum, and still oblivious to the extent to which maintaining momentum was precisely what had led me to the doctor’s office, I did not ask in what ways zoster could be a pretty nasty virus. Instead I went home, smoothed some translucent foundation over what had now been established as not a staph infection, took one of the antiviral tablets the doctor had given me, and left for West Forty-fifth Street. I left for West Forty-fifth Street not because I felt any better (in fact I felt worse) but because going to the theater had been my plan for the day, going to the theater was that day’s momentum: get to the Booth in time for the 3:30 understudy rehearsal, walk across West Forty-fifth Street during the break and pick up fried chicken and greens to eat backstage, stay for the performance and have a drink afterwards with Vanessa and whoever else was around. “Direct, engaging, well-tempered,” the stage manager’s performance notes for the evening read. “Ms. Redgrave nervous pre-show. Vortex very clear. Rapt audience. Cell phone at very top of show. In attendance: Joan Didion (piece o’ chicken at the café, show, and ladies’ cocktail hour). Hot humid day; stage temp: comfortable.” I have no memory of Ms. Redgrave nervous preshow. I have no memory of the ladies’ cocktail hour. I am told that it featured daiquiris, blended backstage by Vanessa’s dresser, and that I had one. I remember only that the hot humid day with the comfortable stage temperature was followed, for me, by a week of 103-degree fever, three weeks of acute pain in the nerves on the left side of my head and face (including, inconveniently, those nerves that trigger headaches, earaches, and toothaches), and after that by a condition the neurologist described as “postviral ataxia” but I could describe only as “not knowing where my body starts and stops.” I can only think that this may have been what Ntozake Shange meant by “corporeal ineptness.” I no longer had any balance. I dropped whatever I tried to pick up.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  It would be a month or so later, in Dallas, before the will and the determination and the resolution all failed her. When she called after twenty-four hours in Dallas she had seemed distraught, on the edge of tears. In Dallas she had been introduced for the first time not only to her mother but to many other members of what she was now calling her “biological family,” strangers who welcomed her as their long-missing child. In Dallas these strangers had shown her snapshots, remarked on her resemblance to one or another cousin or aunt or grandparent, seemingly taken for granted that she had chosen by her presence to be one of them. On her return to New York she had begun getting regular calls from her mother, whose initial resistance to the idea of a reunion (in the first place it wasn’t a reunion, her mother had punctiliously pointed out, since they had never met in the first place) seemed to have given way to a need to discuss the events that had led to the adoption. These calls came in the morning, typically at a time when Quintana was just about to leave for work. She did not want to cut her mother short but neither did she want to be late for work, particularly because Elle Décor, the magazine for which she was at that time the photography editor, was undergoing a staff realignment and she felt her job to be in jeopardy. She discussed this conflict with a psychiatrist. After the discussion with the psychiatrist she wrote to her mother and sister saying that “being found” (“I was found” had evolved into her arrestingly equivocal way of referring to what had happened) was proving “too much to handle,” “too much and too soon,” that she needed to “step back,” “catch up for a while” with what she still considered her real life. In reply she received a letter from her mother saying that she did not want to be a burden and so had disconnected her telephone. This was the point at which it seemed clear that not one of us would escape those muddled impulses. Not Quintana’s mother, not Quintana’s sister, certainly not me. Not even Quintana. Quintana who referred to the shattering of her known world as “being found.” Quintana who had called Nicholas and Alexandra “Nicky and Sunny” and seen their story as “a big hit.” Quintana who had imagined The Broken Man in such convincing detail. Quintana who told me that after she became five she never ever dreamed about The Broken Man. A few weeks after her mother disconnected her telephone another message arrived, although not from her mother and not from her sister. She received a letter from her natural father in Florida.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  Finally, Augustine came of age theologically in the late 390s/early 400s, just as the storm of the Origenist controversy burst upon—and blew apart—the pan-Mediterranean community of orthodox theologians. Theories of the soul’s preexistence seemed suddenly uncomfortably close to heresy: Western tradition increasingly leaned toward seeing soul and body as beginning life together at the same time. And as souls became ever more incarnate, so too did history: the meaningful arena of God’s activity shifted to events in this world. The faithful recited creeds asserting their belief in bodily, even fleshly resurrection. Hell’s eternal fires burned too attractively to be renounced. And nobody wanted Satan to be saved.15 Different man, different temperament, different times—and very different views, consequently, on divine justice and mercy, and on the meaning and consequences of sin. These were the premier issues framing Augustine’s life’s work, from his commentaries on Paul’s letter to the Romans against the Manichees in the 390s to his polemics against Pelagius and especially against Julian of Eclanum in the 420s. The historical and therefore the social dimension of sin; the linguistic and therefore the cognitive dimension of sin; God’s justice and mercy toward sinners, and therefore the theological dimension of sin: these three components of his idea of sin all crystallized for Augustine around the figure of the first human being, Adam. By the fourth century, Adam had had a long career in philosophical commentary on Genesis, for which he served as a symbol for the concept “mind.” The roots of this allegory go back to first-century Hellenistic Jewish thought, to Philo of Alexandria’s On the Creation of the World. In that work, Philo had decoded the story of the sin in the garden “spiritually,” as a standing cautionary tale: when the senses (“Eve”) are turned toward earthly things (“the serpent”), they can distract even the mind (“Adam”; On the Creation of the World 2.8; Augustine himself repeated this allegory some three centuries later, in his Genesis against the Manichees, 1.19, 30). Besides relieving the reader of the story’s literal embarrassments (Why is God so angry? Why does he not want Adam to know the difference between good and evil? Where did the snake come from?), such moralizing allegory much more readily accommodated a prime teaching of Platonism: Souls are by nature immortal, and accordingly their existence precedes life in the fleshly body. Contingent upon the divine, souls are nonetheless like the divine in that they have no temporal beginning. Genesis, allegorically understood, was about the way that soul behaves, not the way that soul “begins.”

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  God is still just in holding the sinner culpably responsible, however, even if the sinner cannot help but sin, for two reasons. First, the sinner (since he was “in Adam”) suffers the universal penalty of Adam’s sin—the will’s diminished capacity—justly. And, second, though he cannot help but sin, he nonetheless sins freely in the sense that nothing outside of himself compels him to sin. A person sins because he chooses to sin. Since his sin is his own choice, he is punished justly.18 In his Confessions, Augustine brilliantly explored these ideas on sin and its consequences in part through the device of autobiographical narrative. In books 1 through 8 he provides a story about his own past, of his search for happiness (and, thus, for God, the only true source of happiness) in all the wrong places: in academic success, in social acceptance, in sex, in Manichaeism, in professional advancement. The story of his search peaks in book 8, where he provides an unforgettable portrait of his own indecision and divided will. In the end he converts, but only, he says, with the help of heaven.19 Augustine’s life story ends with his baptism in book 9; but the Confessions goes on. Fully 40 percent of the work’s eighty thousand words still remain, philosophically rich discussions of memory (book 10), time (book 11), language, scriptural interpretation, divine revelation (books 12 and 13). What emerges clearly from the soaring speculations of these difficult final books is the question that had driven Augustine’s tale from its beginning: How can fallen humankind know God? Why is finding God so difficult? After all, Augustine notes, God has provided many ways to know him: physical creation, which is his handiwork; his scriptures and his church; his divine Son, “who is the mediator between You the One and us the many” (11.29.39, with deliberate reference to the Platonic contrast). And the soul itself naturally longs for God (Confessions 1.1,1, quoted on p. 116). Especially via the higher part of the soul, the mind made according to the divine image and likeness, God has provided the royal road back to himself (Gen 1.26–27; Confessions 13.34,49). By turning inward, Augustine urges, a person can find God, who is “deeper in me than I am in me” (3.6,11). But it is precisely here, in the deep self of the seeker, that sin has wrought its worst damage. Sin has ruptured the human self by tearing apart will and affect, thought and feeling. (For Augustine as for Origen, as for the Platonic tradition generally, knowing, willing, and loving are all functions of a unified mind.) As now constituted, a person cannot choose what she loves; and if she loves, she cannot will herself not to love. Love, the motor of the will, escapes the mind’s control. After the Fall, every person’s loves—good intentions notwithstanding—are misdirected carnaliter, and people act accordingly. What moves a person is not what she knows, but what she wants.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  Augustine sums up this condition as the divided will: the mind knows one thing but wants something else; it thinks one thing but feels something else. Augustine sees Paul as describing this condition, the universal punishment for Adam’s sin, in his letter to the Romans: “I do not understand my own actions. . . . I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. . . . I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. I do not do the good that I want, but the evil that I do not want is what I do” (7.15–20). And Augustine memorably captures this paralyzing paradox of wanting and not wanting the same thing at the same time, describing his own struggle to commit to celibacy as his path into the catholic church, when he prayed da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo, “Grant me chastity and continence; but not yet” (Confessions 8.7,17). Even if the seeker’s ruptured self wants to know God, it is confounded by another difficulty. A person’s ability to know anything at all has been complicated and compromised by humanity’s exile in time. After Eden, Augustine explains, the experience of time marks off crucial differences between the human mind—that is, God’s image in humankind—and God himself. God is outside of time. He knows everything perfectly and (an aspect of this quality of knowing) he knows everything all at once, in “the simultaneity of eternity” (13.7,9). No gap whatsoever distinguishes divine knowing from divine willing and divine doing. Fallen humanity, however, has an utterly different experience of self and time. People know incompletely, they will ineffectively, they do imperfectly. Human consciousness is dislocated, distended by living in time. Augustine cannot say what time is, but he gives a dizzying description of how time is (11.14,17). Time, he says, functions psychologically: its effects tell within the soul: “It is in you, my mind, that I measure time,” 11.27,36). Time is measured by its flow, its ceaseless movement from the future (one type of nonbeing, since it does not yet exist) into the past (another type of nonbeing, since it no longer exists). The future is not yet; the past is no longer. Between these two plains of nonbeing that stretch out infinitely in either direction stands the singular reality of the present. Only the present actually is. Yet the present itself is inherently ungraspable: If we can think of some bit of time that cannot be divided into even the smallest instantaneous moment, that alone is what we call “present.” And this time flies by so quickly from the future into the past that it is an interval of no duration. . . . A present moment takes up no time. (11.15,20).

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  All of a person’s consciousness, her ability to know and to understand, is circumscribed by and limited to this infinitely tiny, perpetually transient moment. Experience—by definition, solely in the present—ceaselessly runs between the fingers of the soul like sand. From this constant flow of atomized instances, how can a person possibly know anything, grasp anything? To answer this question, Augustine thinks about language. Language, like thought, like experience, like consciousness, is also intrinsically distended in time. It too depends upon flow, a linear passage from being (present) to nonbeing (past). Consonants and vowels alternate to form phonemes, words follow words, nouns follow verbs. Both in its smallest units (consonants and vowels) and in its larger ones (words, sentences, and more), language works by having a beginning, a middle, and an end. (Augustine the ancient rhetorician thinks in terms of language spoken and heard, 11.6,8–11.11,3.) Only through the integrative functioning of memory can meaning be wrung from language. Once the end of a sound, a word, a sentence is reached, memory recalls the whole, and then interprets what the sounds convey. Interpretation and understanding, the attainment of meaning, are thus the accomplishments of memory, whether for language or more broadly for experience itself. Meaning, in consequence, is never immediately present. It is always and necessarily mediated, retrospective, imperfect. This tenuousness of meaning—thus, of knowing—is symptomatic, claims Augustine, of humankind’s penal situation in time. Truth without shadows, meaning without mediation, love without conflict, will come only at history’s end, when time itself is swallowed up in “the Sabbath of eternal life” (13.36,51). In City of God, painting across a huge canvas—twenty-two books, written in a period of over fifteen years, covering all of human history—Augustine further developed these ideas. Seen from one perspective, City of God is a universal history of the conflict between two sorts of love, amor dei (love of God) and amor sui (love of self), from the fall of Satan to the final redemption. Seen from another, City of God is a review of sin and of its terrible consequences for humanity, past (beginning in Eden), present (in the power relations of people, communities, societies, and empires), and future (when saints are saved and sinners finally and forever damned).