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.

Page 49 of 501 · 20 per page

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

  Hence the tub I had permitted myself tonight. For lunch I consumed two pieces of crispbread covered with cottage cheese (again, one carton had to last the week). So I never actually stopped eating—just cut it back, and the results were gratifying. I had really started to lose weight. This had begun quite deliberately. I knew that I was not anorexic like Rebecca, because that was an illness that was beyond one’s conscious control. I, however, was choosing of my own free will not to eat. I was often ravenously hungry, and would sometimes allow myself a piece of real toast and butter, which, if I had been truly anorexic, I told myself, would have been quite impossible. And I was not driven by any ulterior or unconscious motive. My purpose was, I believed, simple and pragmatic: I wanted to save money. Money had become a major issue. I had never handled money much before. In the convent, we had owned nothing but everything had been provided, and the same had been true while I had lived in St. Anne’s as an undergraduate. At the beginning of each term, when we received our grant checks from the government, we paid a fixed sum to the college for bed and board. Our rooms were cleaned for us and meals were served three times a day. But now I had to buy my own food and manage my own budget, and I found this obscurely frightening. I had started to panic about the future. Academic jobs were notoriously hard to get and my present scholarship would last for only three years. What would happen then? If I couldn’t get a post as a university teacher, whatever would become of me? I was trained for nothing else, and at twenty-six, I was really too old to start again. There was school teaching, of course, but I knew that I did not want to do that. There was one precaution that I could take, however: I could save money. If I built up a reserve fund, I could perhaps hang on for a few years until I finished my doctorate and was eligible for the coveted academic post. Then I would be set up for life and could eat and spend whatever I wanted. I made it sound rational, at least to myself, but this was a crazy scheme and a telling indication of the state I was in. Compared with most students, I was well off.

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

  Yes, I would continue to take him to Blackfriars. I did not believe in any of it anymore; God had finally departed from my life; but it would do me no harm to sit for a while every week with those good people. And giving Jacob this new chance would be a positive thing to do. He had so few pleasures, and when he had found something that he so clearly relished, it would be cruel to take it away from him. It wasn’t as though I had anything else to do on Sunday mornings. In fact, I really didn’t have anything else to do in my life at all. 4. Consequently I Rejoice I have no idea how it happened, but it was the result of a wor-rying new development. At least, it was of concern to me. Dr. Piet had greeted the news with his usual nonchalance, but this latest symptom had been yet another sign to me that my mind was breaking down completely. I had started to lose control over my actions—only for a short period of time, and only infrequently, but I still found it very disturbing. The first time it occurred, I had been working in my room in Manor Place and decided that it was time for coffee. “Another cup, Karen?” Nanny smiled as I came into the kitchen and lit the gas under the kettle. “You must be thirsty this morning!” “Sorry, Nanny? What do you mean?” Nanny looked puzzled, as well she might. “Well, you were here just half an hour ago.” I must have looked blank. “I saw you going upstairs with your mug while I was tidying the drawing room. Surely you remember, Karen?” she added, disturbed about her own powers of memory. “I saw you quite distinctly,” she added, to convince herself as much as anything. “Oh yes, of course. I do apologize, Nanny. I was miles away.” Poor Nanny, I thought, as I returned to my room. She was getting on in years, and old people were notoriously forgetful. But when I opened the door to my room, I saw the mug on the windowsill; when I examined it, I found it full of coffee that was not yet entirely cold. Try as I would, I could not recall making it. I must have gone downstairs, boiled the water, poured it onto the coffee granules, and returned to my desk. And I had no recollection at all of any of this. Then, a few weeks later, I found myself unexpectedly sitting in the English Faculty Library. There I was, at a table in the upstairs reading room, with a copy of the journal Notes and Queries (known to us irreverently as Quotes and Drearies) open in front of me. And again, I had no recollection of leaving the house, taking the short walk down Manor Place, crossing the road, and entering the library. No recollection at all.

• From Another Country (1962)

  They stared at each other and his face made her frightened all over again. “Where did he go?” she asked. “I don’t know. I figured he’d gone to Harlem. He just disappeared.” “Vivaldo, she’s coming here this afternoon.” “Who is?” “His sister, Ida. I told her that I left him with you and that you would be here this afternoon.” “But I don’t know where he is . I was in the back, talking to Jane—and he said he was going to the head or something—and he never came back.” He stared at her, then at the window. “I wonder where he went.” “Maybe,” she said, “he met a friend.” He did not trouble to respond to this. “He should have known I wasn’t just going to dump him. He could have stayed at my place, I ended up at Jane’s place, anyway.” Cass watched him as he banged his cigarette out in the ashtray. “I have never,” she said, mildly, “understood what Jane wanted from you. Or, for that matter, what you wanted from her.” He examined his fingernails, they were jagged and in mourning. “I don’t know. I just wanted a girl, I guess, someone to share those long winter evenings.” “But she’s so much older than you are.” She picked up his empty glass. “She’s older than I am.” “That hasn’t got anything to do with it,” he said, sullenly. “Anyway, I wanted a girl who—sort of knows the score.” She considered him. “Yes,” she said, with a sigh, “that girl certainly knows how to keep score.” “I needed a woman,” Vivaldo said, “she needed a man. What’s wrong with that?” “Nothing,” she said. “If that’s really what both of you needed.” “What do you think I was doing?” “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know. Only, I’ve told you, you always seem to get involved with impossible women—whores, nymphomaniacs, drunks—and I think you do it in order to protect yourself—from anything serious. Permanent.” He sighed, smiled. “Hell, I just want to be friends.” She laughed. “Oh, Vivaldo.” “You and I are friends,” he said. “Well—yes. But I’ve always been the wife of a friend of yours. So you never thought of me—” “Sexually,” he said. Then he grinned. “Don’t be so sure.” She flushed, at once annoyed and pleased. “I’m not talking about your fantasies.” “I’ve always admired you,” he said soberly, “and envied Richard. ” “Well,” she said, “you’d better get over that.” He said nothing. She rattled the ice around in his empty glass. “Well,” he said, “what am I going to do with it? I’m not a monk, I’m tired of running uptown and paying for it——” “For it’s uptown that you run,” she said, with a smile. “What a good American you are.” This angered him. “I haven’t said they were any better than white chicks.” Then he laughed. “Maybe I better cut the damn thing off.” “Don’t be such a baby.

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

  But you know, it happened quite naturally—by accident, really. When he was little, he used to sit next to me at breakfast while I read the paper, so to keep him quiet and give him something to do, I taught him to pick out all the Os and then the As and so on, and then, all of a sudden, he started reading all by himself.” My job would be to look after Jacob while Nanny was off duty. That meant that I would take care of him after supper on Wednesday evenings, when Nanny went off to visit a friend, and Jenifer and I would share him on Saturday, which was Nanny’s half day. Jenifer would take him during the afternoon and give him his supper, and then I would take him to my room until it was time for bed. Because of his epilepsy, I would have to sit with him while he went off to sleep, until Jenifer came to bed, at about 10:30 p.m. I was startled to hear that for years she had shared a large attic room at the top of the house with Jacob, who was absolutely terrified of the dark and could not sleep alone because of his night terrors and seizures. Herbert, Jenifer’s husband, slept in his study next to the drawing room, a small, chronically disordered lair that was almost entirely filled with a massive homemade stereo system, constructed out of large wooden crates by Alan Ryan, the Harts’ former son-in-law, who was about to take up a fellowship at New College. Even though he was now divorced from Joanna, I was told that Alan was still very much a part of the family—an idea that I found intriguing. In my Catholic family, divorce was a cataclysm that led to permanent estrangement. “And,” Jenifer continued, “I wonder if you would mind relieving Nanny, who usually sits with him, when I am especially late—out at a dinner or something. Only if you’re free, of course,” she added hastily. “You can read up there. Jacob will go to sleep with the bedside light on, and you can sit on my bed until I come up.” It had sounded quite manageable when Jenifer had run through the job description in her peaceful college rooms. But now that I was about to meet Jacob, I was not so sure. “I hope you’re not worried about all this,” Jenifer said, clearly anxious herself, as she settled opposite me on the white sofa with her own goblet of sherry. “There’s no need to be. In fact, it’s very important that you don’t show any nervousness, because he’ll pick it up in a second, and then it really will be impossible.” I smiled with what I hoped looked like confidence, but I was afraid that I might be instinctively repelled by Jacob.

• From Another Country (1962)

  And, with the merest of glances at Eric and Vivaldo, “I think you might have had enough practice by now.” Ida looked into his eyes with an unreadable smile, which yet held some hint of the vindictive. She crushed out her cigarette, adjusted her shawl, and rose, demurely. “I’m glad you think I’m ready,” she said. “Keep your fingers crossed for me, sugar,” she said to Vivaldo, and stepped up on the stand. She was not announced; there was merely a brief huddle with the piano-player; and then she stepped up to the mike. The piano-player began the first few bars, but the crowd did not take the hint. “Let’s try it again,” said Ida, in a loud, clear voice. At this, heads turned to look at her; she looked calmly down on them. The only sign of her agitation was in her hands, which were tightly, restlessly clasped before her—she was wringing her hands, but she was not crying. Somebody said, in a loud whisper, “Dig, man, that’s the Kid’s kid sister.” There were beads of sweat on her forehead and on her nose, and one leg moved out, trembling, moved back. The piano-player began again, she grabbed the mike like a drowning woman, and abruptly closed her eyes: You Made me leave my happy home. You took my love and now you’ve gone, Since I fell for you. She was not a singer yet. And if she were to be judged solely on the basis of her voice, low, rough-textured, of no very great range, she never would be. Yet, she had something which made Eric look up and caused the room to fall silent; and Vivaldo stared at Ida as though he had never seen her before. What she lacked in vocal power and, at the moment, in skill, she compensated for by a quality so mysteriously and implacably egocentric that no one has ever been able to name it. This quality involves a sense of the self so profound and so powerful that it does not so much leap barriers as reduce them to atoms—while still leaving them standing, mightily, where they were; and this awful sense is private, unknowable, not to be articulated, having, literally, to do with something else; it transforms and lays waste and gives life, and kills. She finished her first number and the applause was stunned and sporadic. She looked over at Vivaldo with a small, childish shrug. And this gesture somehow revealed to Eric how desperately one could love her, how desperately Vivaldo was in love with her. The drummer went into a down-on-the-levee-type song, which turned out to be a song Eric had never heard before: Betty told Dupree She wanted a diamond ring.

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

  And so it began. I embarked on years of psychiatric sessions during which we raked over the memories of my unexceptional childhood. No doubt this conformed to the orthodoxy of the day, and in many cases I am sure that this is an effective way to treat the problems of adult life. But in my case, it simply did not work. The anxiety attacks, the terror, and the occasional loss of consciousness continued, and each hallucinatory episode pushed me further away from the rest of the world, making it even more impossible for me to get onto that merry-go-round. When I wrote Beginning the World, I used the conversations with Dr. Piet as a narrative device to explain what I thought was happening to me psychologically. But the truth is that I remember very little about them. I desperately wanted the treatment to work and cooperated as fully as I could, but Freud, I believe, once said that if you are suffering from toothache, you cannot engage in any productive analysis. You cannot even fall in love. Against the background of these strange periodic attacks, which Dr. Piet dismissed as mere symptoms of a deeper malaise, these psychiatric sessions felt as though we were conducting an esoteric discussion of medieval history while the house was on fire. I wish that Dr. Piet had allowed me to discuss my experiences in the convent. If I could have talked to him about the novitiate, the loneliness, the strain of the last few years of religious life, or my ambivalent feelings about it all, then maybe I could have begun to process the experience. But Dr. Piet usually deflected any such discussion. He saw it as a distraction, a smoke screen that enabled me to hide from my real problems. “You see, in the convent, you were safe,” he would tell me earnestly. “You were not challenged in any way. It was a secure, quiet existence—far from the madding crowd, if you like. You didn’t have to face up to emotional or sexual issues. You were in abeyance. You had, as it were, crawled back to the womb.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  The more graphic and specific my sexual imagery grew, the more the relatively simple idea of strapping the vibrating Butterfly onto her became, by contrast, tame and gentle and uninvasive—the very least I could do for her. Her neck-holes, her back, had the definite look of a vibrator-lover, anyway. I let her check out her book (she and the library man had a moment of feeling eye contact, as I had expected) and walk out onto the street, and then I brought the universe down and got out the Butterfly. My plan was to put it on her as she walked home, because I thought that she would feel it less, perhaps, if she was in a state of movement than if she was sitting down. But I had to be sure that it wouldn’t startle her—I wasn’t interested in disturbing her or making her feel she was losing her sanity. Consequently I had to test the product out on myself: I kicked off my pants and underpants, and, placing a Handi Wipe between the pleasure-nubbins of the machine and my scrotum so that I wouldn’t be exposing Ms. Henna to any of my germs when I did finally strap it on her, I stepped into its straps and pulled it snugly in place. I walked around the lobby of the library with it on, looking at the high corners of the room and concentrating on what it felt like. I was surprised to find that, though fairly tight, the black straps around my ass and thighs weren’t perceptible at all as I walked. What was perceptible, unfortunately, was the width of the Butterfly itself between my thighs. Perhaps if the bulk of my genitalia weren’t in the way the device would have nestled more comfortably, but even then it might be instantly apparent to the woman that something was there. I recalled reading a news item about a large woman who shoplifted portable TVs by walking out with them between her legs; but it wouldn’t do here to have a shape that the woman could feel as she walked. But all was not lost—I found that when I was sitting down, even with my legs crossed, it was as if the rubbery shape of the Butterfly didn’t exist. My body adjusted instantly to its presence. I put the two free Sonic-brand batteries in the pink plastic battery case and turned the dial until the vibration started. On full, the noise was appallingly loud. She would hear it. Even at the lowest level, which is where I would have it when I put it on her (so that it would remain below the threshold of consciousness, would be a vibration that was perceptible only as a change of mood, not as an actual physical signal), it made a sound that was not so much a buzz as a kind of low chuckling. My only hope now, I realized, was that she wasn’t going to walk home, but was going to take the bus or the subway, where the transit noise would mask its noise. As for the feeling of the Butterfly on my own equipment: it was not positively unpleasant, but didn’t feel at all wonderful, either (maybe the Handi Wipe was part of the problem), which I was on the whole pleased about, since it made the fact that women come so hard with vibrators all the more mysterious and womanly and different from male pleasure.

• From Wild (2012)

  “What?” asked Greg, his hand around the shaft of his ax, but I only shook my head. “You’ve got two edges,” he continued. “The blunt edge is the adze. That’s what you use to chop your steps. And the other edge is the pick. That’s what you use to save your ass when you’re sliding off the side of the mountain.” He spoke in a tone that assumed I knew this already, as if he were just reviewing the basics before we got started. “Yep. The shaft, the head, the spike, the pick, the ad,” I said. “The adze,” he corrected. “There’s a z.” We were standing on a steep bank along the river, the closest thing we could find to simulate an icy slope. “Now let’s say you’re falling,” said Greg, throwing himself down the incline to demonstrate. As he fell, he jammed the pick into the mud. “You want to dig that pick in as hard as you can, while holding on to the shaft with one hand and the head with the other. Like this. And once you’re anchored in, you try to get your footing.” I looked at him. “What if you can’t get your footing?” “Well, then you hold on here,” he answered, moving his hands on the ax. “What if I can’t hold on that long? I mean, I’ll have my pack and everything and, actually, I’m not strong enough to do a single pull-up.” “You hold on,” he said dispassionately. “Unless you’d rather slide off the side of the mountain.” I got to work. Again and again I threw myself against the increasingly muddy slope, pretending that I was slipping on ice, and again and again I planted the pick of my ice ax into the soil while Greg watched, coaching and critiquing my technique. Doug and Tom sat nearby pretending they weren’t paying attention. Albert and Matt were lying on a tarp we’d spread out for them beneath the shade of a tree near Ed’s truck, too ill to move anywhere but to the outhouse several times an hour. They’d both woken in the middle of the night sick with what we were all beginning to believe was giardia—a waterborne parasite that causes crippling diarrhea and nausea, requires prescription medication to cure, and almost always means a week or more off the trail. It was the reason PCT hikers spent so much time talking about water purifiers and water sources, for fear they’d make one wrong move and have to pay. I didn’t know where Matt and Albert had picked up whatever they had, but I prayed I hadn’t picked it up too. By late afternoon we all stood over them as they lay pale and limp on their tarp, convincing them it was time they got to the hospital in Ridgecrest. Too sick to resist, they watched as we packed their things and loaded their packs into the back of Ed’s truck.

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

  Maureen Mackintosh, a clever girl with masses of long red hair, was one of the most politically radical students in college, and I found her distinctly alarming. I always expected her to treat me with disdain, and dreaded lest she strike up a conversation about Vietnam and Cambodia, in which I would certainly not be able to hold my own. And what on earth was an ex-nun doing campaigning for students to spend illicit nights together? To my relief, however, Maureen seemed untroubled by my presence as we set off for Miss Franklin’s apartment. We sat together, side by side, on a sofa in the dean’s room, drinking tiny glasses of sherry in an atmosphere that was distinctly chilly, while the champion of the virgin vote sat with her back to the window, her cat, Smokey, purring noisily on her knee. “No more concessions!” she replied when we formally requested that the new measures be withdrawn and the wire fence removed. She repeated the phrase like a mantra at intervals during the ensuing discussion, almost chanting it in a strangely expressionless falsetto. “No more concessions!” This irritated me. “You can’t call these ‘concessions,’ ” I pointed out. “You’ve taken away rights that have already been given to us. We’re simply asking for a return to the status quo, not for concessions.” I might as well have kept my mouth shut. “No more concessions,” Miss Franklin repeated. “The Common Room won’t accept this, Miss Franklin,” Maureen replied sternly. “If you don’t at least restore the old gate hours, we shall have to take action. And that barbed wire is extremely dangerous. You didn’t warn us. Somebody could have been seriously injured.” “Then she—or he—would only have themselves to blame,” Miss Franklin retorted smoothly. “You are here to be educated, not to indulge in unlicensed sex at all hours. Nor to organize childish demonstrations, at the expense of your studies.” Maureen sighed, and again I felt indignant. The remark was entirely uncalled for. Maureen’s political activities certainly did not interfere with her work. She had recently won one of the highly coveted and prestigious Kennedy Scholarships for postgraduate study in the United States, and was going to Berkeley, which, I gathered, was the new mecca for sixties revolutionaries. “I can only repeat,” she persisted, with admirable self-control, “that the Common Room will have to take action.” “No more concessions!” Miss Franklin sang implacably, turning away from us to give her attention to Smokey, and crooning endearments in his ear as he tried to climb over her ample bosom to the windowsill. I studied her with perplexity. All my life I had accepted the fact that some opinions were right and others wrong.

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

  When my dosage had been increased by a half tablet, it had poisoned my system and become toxic, making me stagger round like a drunk, unable to walk across the room in a straight line. I had also had to ask for time off to see my consultant, and that had not gone down well at all. “Leave the school, you mean?” I asked stupidly, playing for time. Perhaps, if I could get my wits together, I could talk my way out of this—until next time. But one look at the headmistress’s face dashed these hopes before I had even begun to articulate them to myself. She was positively beaming with benevolence, her face a mask of kindly implacability. She nodded. “For a long time, it has been marvelous to have you here— worth it for all of us,” she said, leaning back in her chair and gazing reflectively into the middle distance. “You’ve given a lot to the school. You don’t need me to tell you how much we’ve appreciated your contribution and how we’ve all been enriched by your talents. And I hope we’ve given something to you too.” She waited, while I hastily forced a gesture of assent, unable as yet to smile. “And yes, we’ve accepted your illness as the price we’ve had to pay. But now the demand is becoming too heavy, you see, and it isn’t worth it to us anymore.” She leaned forward, her face suddenly grave. “We can carry a sick member of staff, but we cannot carry a sick head of department.” I was silenced. I could see the justice of her words. I probably wouldn’t have lasted nearly so long in any other school. But what in heaven’s name was I supposed to do now? I tried again: “Perhaps I could go back to being an ordinary member of staff?” I flinched at the thought of the drop in salary. With my heavy mortgage, I could scarcely manage on my far from munificent earnings as departmental head, but even a severely reduced income would be better than no income at all. The head made a decisive gesture of refusal. “You know that isn’t the answer,” she said. “You know that wouldn’t work. Miss Cockburn, to whom I’m going to offer the department, would be miserable with you working under her. And you should know— you of all people—that nobody should ever, ever go backwards.” I gazed out of the window, trying to stifle my rising panic. A group of girls passed outside, laughing loudly. The head winced at the noise but, controlling her irritation, turned back to me. “And anyway, the job itself is too much for you. Look at yourself, my dear. You look ill; you are ill. I’m told you’ve been spending your weekends in bed.”

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

  But then, what did I know? I probably was in flight from my sexuality, though as no man ever displayed the slightest interest in me, I did not see what I could do about this. Dr. Piet smiled rather smugly when I said this, as though he knew better. Perhaps he did. In the interests of my own recovery, I ought to give him the benefit of the doubt. “I’m interested that it is only the old man’s head that you see.” I raised my eyebrows. “Well, your life seems to revolve around the intellect. You seem fixated on heads and brains,” Dr. Piet continued. “You never see any of the other parts of his body.” I reflected, wryly, that perhaps I ought to be thankful for small mercies. If Dr. Piet meant what I thought he meant, these visions could be a lot worse. “I think we’re going to look at your relations with your parents,” Dr. Piet continued, leaning back in his chair and looking at me in a pleased kind of way, as though I were a promising child who had come out with all the right answers. “You see, these panic attacks seem to me to relate to your early childhood. To some shock or deprivation that occurred while you were growing up. They are rather classic images.” Again, the nod of professional pleasure. “And then, of course, we have to find out why you went into a convent in the first place. That’s hardly a normal decision for a teenage girl. Until we get to the root of that—find out what had gone so wrong in your life that you decided to leave the world— and,” he added pointedly, “to leave your family” —he paused significantly—“we cannot really get to the root of your problem.” And so it began. I embarked on years of psychiatric sessions during which we raked over the memories of my unexceptional childhood. No doubt this conformed to the orthodoxy of the day, and in many cases I am sure that this is an effective way to treat the problems of adult life. But in my case, it simply did not work. The anxiety attacks, the terror, and the occasional loss of consciousness continued, and each hallucinatory episode pushed me further away from the rest of the world, making it even more impossible for me to get onto that merry-go-round. When I wrote Beginning the World, I used the conversations with Dr. Piet as a narrative device to explain what I thought was happening to me psychologically. But the truth is that I remember very little about them. I desperately wanted the treatment to work and cooperated as fully as I could, but Freud, I believe, once said that if you are suffering from toothache, you cannot engage in any productive analysis. You cannot even fall in love.

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

  Intellectually, everything was fine. I lived at the convent but attended lectures and tutorials with the other students, and did very well. I got a distinction in the preliminary examinations, which we sat in the spring of 1968, won a university prize, and was awarded a college scholarship. So far, so good. But as a religious, I felt torn in two. My elderly superior was bitterly opposed to the new ideas, and I fought her tooth and nail throughout the entire year. I am sure that I was quite insufferable, but I found it well nigh impossible to think logically and accurately in college, where I was encouraged to question everything, and then turn off the critical faculty I was developing when I returned to Cherwell Edge, and become a docile young nun. The stringent academic training I was receiving at the university was changing me at just as profound a level as the religious formation of the noviceship, and the two systems seemed to be irreconcilable. I was also increasingly distressed by the emotional frigidity of our lives. This was one of the areas of convent life that most desperately needed reform. Friendship was frowned upon, and the atmosphere in the convent was cold and sometimes unkind. Increasingly, it seemed to me to have moved an immeasurably long distance from the spirit of the gospels. Nevertheless, I struggled grimly on. To say that I did not want to leave would be an understatement. The very idea of returning to secular life filled me with dread. At first I could not even contemplate this option, which was surrounded with all the force of a taboo. But the strain took its toll, and in the summer of 1968 I broke down completely. It was now clear to us all that I could not continue. Everybody was wonderfully kind to me at the end, and in a sense, this made it even more distressing. It would have been so much easier to storm out in a blaze of righteous anger. But my superiors let me take as long as I needed to make my decision. I returned to college, and after a term of heart searching, I applied for a dispensation from my vows, which arrived from Rome at the end of January 1969. Writing Through the Narrow Gate, some twelve years later, was a salutary experience. It made me confront the past, and I learned a great deal. Most important, I realized how precious and formative this period of my life had been, and that despite my problems, I would not have missed it for the world. Then I attempted a sequel: Beginning the World was published in 1983. It is the worst book I have ever written and I am thankful to say that it has long been out of print.

• From Wild (2012)

  In the morning, I realized I didn’t have my Bob Marley T-shirt. I’d left it on that branch to dry the day before. Losing my boots was bad. But losing my Bob Marley T-shirt was worse. That shirt wasn’t just any old shirt. It was, at least according to Paco, a sacred shirt that meant I walked with the spirits of the animals, earth, and sky. I didn’t know if I believed that, but the shirt had become an emblem of something I couldn’t quite name. I reinforced my duct tape booties with another layer of tape and walked all through the humid day. The night before, I’d made a plan: I would follow this road wherever it led me. I’d ignore all the others that crossed its path, no matter how intriguing or promising they looked. I’d finally become convinced that if I didn’t, I’d only walk an endless maze. By late afternoon I sensed that the road was leading me somewhere. It got wider and less rutted and the forest opened up ahead. Finally, I rounded a bend and saw an unmanned tractor. Beyond the tractor, there was a paved two-lane road. I crossed it, turned left, and walked along its shoulder. I was on Highway 89, I could only assume. I pulled out my maps and traced a route I could hitchhike back to the PCT and then set to work trying to get a ride, feeling self-conscious in my metal-gray boots made of tape. Cars passed in clumps of two and three with long breaks in between. I stood on the highway for half an hour holding out my thumb, feeling a mounting anxiety. At last, a man driving a pickup truck pulled to the side. I went to the passenger door and opened it up. “You can throw your pack in the back,” he said. He was a large bull of a man, in his late forties, I guessed. “Is this Highway 89?” I asked. He looked at me, befuddled. “You don’t even know what road you’re on?” I shook my head. “What in the Lord’s name have you got on your feet?” he asked.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Five days?” I asked. I couldn’t exactly be upset. They were mailing me a new pair of boots for free, after all, but still I was frustrated and panicked. In addition to maintaining my schedule, I needed the food I had in my bag for the next section of the trail—the eighty-three-mile stretch that took me to Castle Crags. If I stayed in Burney Falls to wait for my boots, I’d have to eat that food because—with little more than five dollars left—I didn’t have enough money to spend the next five days eating from the park’s snack bar. I reached for my pack, got my guidebook, and found the address for Castle Crags. I couldn’t imagine hiking another blistering eighty-three miles in my too-small boots, but I had no choice but to ask REI to send them there. When I hung up the phone, I didn’t feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen anymore. I stared at my boots with a pleading expression, as if we could possibly work out a deal. They were dangling from my pack by their dusty red laces, evil in their indifference. I’d planned to leave them in the PCT hiker free box as soon as my new boots arrived. I reached for them, but I couldn’t bring myself to put them on. Perhaps I could wear my flimsy camp sandals for short stretches on the trail. I’d met a few people who switched off between boots and sandals while they hiked, but their sandals were far sturdier than mine. I’d never intended to wear my sandals to hike. I’d brought them only to give my feet a break from my boots at the end of the day, cheap knockoffs I’d purchased at a discount store for something like $19.99. I took them off and cradled them in my hands, as if by examining them up close I could bestow on them a durability they did not possess. The Velcro was matted with detritus and peeling away from the black straps at the frayed ends. Their blue soles were malleable as dough and so thin that when I walked I could feel the contours of pebbles and sticks beneath my feet. Wearing them was just barely more than having no shoes on at all. And I was going to walk to Castle Crags in these? Maybe I shouldn’t, I thought. Maybe I wouldn’t. This far was far enough. I could put it on my résumé. “Fuck,” I said. I picked up a rock and whipped it hard as I could at a nearby tree, and then another and another.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Thanks, thanks,” I kept saying, wiping the sweat from my face as we worked together to cram Monster into the trunk. We got it in eventually, and I climbed into the back seat with the dog and the man. The dog was a husky, blue-eyed and gorgeous, standing on the tiny floor in front of the seat. The man was lean and about the same age as the woman, his dark hair woven into a thin braid. He wore a black leather vest without a shirt underneath and a red bandanna tied biker-style over the top of his head. “Hi,” I murmured in his direction as I searched uselessly for the seat belt that was crammed irretrievably into the fold of the seat, my eyes skimming his tattoos: a spiked metal ball on the end of a chain on one arm and the top half of a bare-breasted woman with her head thrown back in either pain or ecstasy on the other; a Latin word I didn’t know the meaning of scrawled across his tan chest. When I gave up on finding the seat belt, the husky leaned over and licked my knee avidly with his soft and strangely cool tongue. “That dog’s got some motherfucking good taste in women,” said the man. “His name’s Stevie Ray,” he added. Instantly the dog stopped licking me, closed his mouth up tight, and looked at me with his icy black-rimmed eyes, as if he knew he’d been introduced and wanted to be polite. “I’m Spider. You already met Louise—she goes by Lou.” “Hi!” Lou said, meeting my eyes for a second in the rearview mirror. “And this here’s my brother Dave,” he said, gesturing to the man in the passenger seat. “Hi,” I said. “How about you? You got a name?” Dave turned to ask. “Oh yeah—sorry. I’m Cheryl.” I smiled, though I felt a blurry uncertainty about having accepted this particular ride. There was nothing to do about it now. We were already on our way, the hot wind blowing my hair. I petted Stevie Ray while assessing Spider in my peripheral vision. “Thanks for picking me up,” I said to conceal my unease. “Hey, no problem, sister,” Spider said. On his middle finger, he wore a square turquoise ring. “We’ve all been on the road before. We all know what it’s like. I hitched last week and motherfuck if I couldn’t get a ride to save my life, so that’s why when I saw you I told Lou to stop. Mother-fucking karma, you know?” “Yeah,” I said, reaching up to tuck my hair behind my ears. It felt as coarse and dry as straw. “What you doing out on the road anyway?” Lou asked from the front.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  She hadn’t rejected a helpless teenager. Still. Kurt said, “I left her three messages.” The woman whose apartment shared a kitchen with Claire’s, he said, would have found a way to get him word if something bad had happened, if Claire had never come home. “I’m worried, but I don’t have a reason to be worried. And there’s no way she was out that late.” Fiona didn’t mean to shout, but it came out too loud: “Can’t you just go over there?” “That’s not our—we have an arrangement. Not a legal arrangement, but if I ever showed up when it wasn’t my day, she’d split. She’s made that crystal clear.” Cecily said, “But in an emergency situation—” “No,” Kurt said. A siren blasted right outside the window. It was short—police warning someone to move out of an intersection maybe. Nevertheless, all three of them jolted, and Fiona’s heart started beating like a hamster’s. “Give me the address,” she said. “I’ll say someone at the bar gave it to me, and if that doesn’t work I’ll say I tricked you. I broke into your apartment and got it off an envelope.” It wouldn’t be far from the truth. “No, wait, I’ll say the detective found it.” Cecily put a hand on Kurt’s knee. “Wouldn’t that be for the best?” she said. “Then you’d know they were safe.” He seemed to relax, rather than bristle, under Cecily’s touch. If nothing good came of this for Fiona, at least maybe she’d have been responsible for the Pearce family reconciliation. Maybe Cecily could send her weekly updates on Nicolette, as she got to watch her grow up, as Fiona sat home alone in Chicago. Fiona handed him her phone. “Just type it into my GPS,” she said. “As far as she knows, I haven’t seen you in years.” Kurt sighed and took the phone. As soon as she had it back, Fiona grabbed her purse. She said, “If you want to wait here, you can.” Kurt squeezed Fiona’s shoulder with his giant hand. Saint-Denis was a zoo of blocked-off streets. The cab driver had asked three times if she was sure she wanted to head up there. “I wait to make sure you get in,” he said. “You here long? I wait to drive you back too.” She told him she’d be three minutes. She hoped she’d be coming out to tell him he could leave, to give him an extra tip. A young man was heading in the door right ahead of her, so instead of messing with the jumble of buzzers and names, she followed him into the narrow hallway. The place was labyrinthine, but she finally found number eight. A red plastic bucket and green plastic shovel outside the door. She knocked with her uninjured left hand, which felt wrong, unlucky.

• From Don't Feed the Monkey Mind: How to Stop the Cycle of Anxiety, Fear, and Worry (2017)

  cry and deny everything, saying it wasn’t her fault. Everyone in the office will side with her. She’ll go home and tell her husband what a jerk I am. He’ll get angry too and confront me in person, telling me that I’m unfair and out of line and that our friendship is over. Then he’ll tell everybody we know what a jerk I am, and they will all turn against me. Everyone I work with as well as my friends that I care about will hate me and I’ll be alone. When Eric read what he’d written, he could see that it was a little far-- fetched. “But that won’t stop me from worrying about it,” he said. “Good,” I told him. As long as it provokes the monkey into sounding the alarm it will be great to use at Worry Time. Like all tools, Worry Time will be most effective if practiced often and regularly. With my clients I recommend scheduling a Worry Time daily for at least a week. Remember that resilience builds with repetition. For a downloadable worksheet version of this exercise, visit http://www.newharbinger.com/35067. In addition to the resilience you will accrue from the exercise itself, you will have the added benefit of another kind of expansive strategy to use when you get blindsided by monkey chatter. You can say to yourself, I will worry about this during Worry Time tomorrow. Postponing worry until you are in control works because you’ve stopped feeding the monkey. When you don’t feed the monkey, you get the banana. You get new experience and learning that creates new neural pathways in your brain. You are learning that the content of anxious thoughts is not important and you don’t need to act on them. Those pressing what ifs and what abouts that once echoed in your head are beginning to sound more like what they are: Woo-- woo-woo! Monkey chatter. You can tolerate them. You are expanding!

• From Wild (2012)

  I did not. I only wanted it to be eleven o’clock so he’d leave with me and I could stop wondering whether I was a babe or a gargoyle and whether he was looking at me or he thought I was looking at him. We still had an hour and a half to go. “So what should we do, afterwards?” he asked. “Have you had dinner?” I told him I had, but that I was up for anything. I didn’t mention I was currently capable of eating approximately four dinners in a row. “I live on an organic farm about fifteen miles from here. It’s pretty cool at night, to walk around. We could go out there and I’ll drive you back when you’re ready.” “Okay,” I said, running my little turquoise-and-silver earring necklace along its delicate chain. I’d opted not to wear my Strayed/Starved necklace, in case Jonathan thought it was the latter. “Actually, I think I’m going to step out for some air,” I said. “But I’ll be back at eleven.” “Rad,” he said, reaching over to give my hand another squeeze before he returned to his station and the band started up. I walked giddily out into the night, the tiny red nylon bag that normally held my stove swinging on its cord from my wrist. I’d ditched most such bags and containers back in Kennedy Meadows, unwilling to carry the extra weight, but this bag I’d held on to, believing the stove needed its protection. I’d changed it into a purse for my days in Ashland, though it smelled faintly of gasoline. The things inside it were all secured in a ziplock bag that served as a very unfancy inner purse—my money, my driver’s license, lip balm and a comb, and the card that the workers at the hostel had given me so I could get Monster and my ski pole and my box of food out of their storage area. “Howdy,” said a man who stood on the sidewalk outside the bar. “You like the band?” he asked in a quiet voice. “Yeah.” I smiled at him politely. He looked to be in his late forties, dressed in jeans and suspenders and a frayed T-shirt. He had a long frizzy beard that went to his chest and a straight rim of graying hair that reached his shoulders from beneath the bald dome on top of his head. “I came down here from the mountains. I like to come and hear music sometimes,” the man said. “I did too. Came down from the mountains, I mean.” “Where do you live?” “I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.” “Oh, sure.” He nodded. “The PCT. I’ve been up on it before. My place is in the other direction. I’ve got a tepee up there that I live in about four or five months out of the year.” “You live in a tepee?” I asked.

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

  This, I must emphasize, was not because there was anything wrong with the school. Indeed, I was very impressed with it. Most of the girls seemed to like being there, the staff was excellent, and standards were high. It was also a humane place. I had passed my own school days alternately bored and frightened, but that was clearly not the case here. I even quite enjoyed the teaching, though not extravagantly so. People expected me to like my classes with the older girls best, but to my surprise, I much preferred the little ones. It was fun to watch them encountering Dickens and Shakespeare for the first time, and to catch them before they realized that a cool teenager was supposed to find these authors boring. Occasionally I would find myself completely wrapped up in a lesson. You cannot be a good teacher to every student, any more than you can be a good friend or a satisfactory lover to just anybody. But I could see that in the main I was doing a useful job, and I was grateful to have financial security for the first time since leaving the convent. The trouble lay not in the school but in myself. It was bad for me to be in another highly authoritarian institution, and I was keenly aware that I was slipping back into old craven habits of obedience and conformity. Instead of moving on and away from the constraints of the religious life, I felt that I was standing still. Indeed, sometimes I feared that I was actually losing ground, because in many ways school life seemed a parody of my convent years. The headmistress was a charismatic, unusual, and gifted woman, but listening to the tales of other teachers over the years, I have noted that this job has its dangers. A headmaster or headmistress has almost complete power in an enclosed world, and this often seems to go to their heads. Thus my headmistress at Dulwich tended to treat her staff like a temperamental parent. One day you were flavor of the month, the next, for no apparent reason, you were in the doghouse, your every request and suggestion refused, often discourteously, and your projects stymied. Then, a few weeks later, you were back in favor again. We were supposed to jump to attention if the head so much as sneezed. “The head is hopping mad!” the deputy would report, as though this were a catastrophe comparable to the outbreak of World War III.

• From Don't Feed the Monkey Mind: How to Stop the Cycle of Anxiety, Fear, and Worry (2017)

  need to sound confident, show no signs of anxiety, in other words be perfect —you will not make progress. You must create an expansive mind-set to go with your expansive strategy. Something like, I can sometimes be boring or sound stupid. I don’t need to hit the bull’s-eye; I just need to be on the target. Will you really believe this? Not at this point. You’ve been thinking with the perfectionist monkey mind-set for most, if not all of your life. You can, however, adopt a mind-set that seems truer, even if you do not trust it yet. The gardener who faithfully waters and weeds will see the seed sprout and grow into a lush plant. In the same way you, as you repeat your expansive strategy, will come to believe the mind-set you’ve been cultivating. The beautiful thing about expansive mind-sets and strategies is that they maintain cycles of expansion. Not having to hit the bull’s-eye every time opens up the whole target. There’s no limit to where you’ll be able to go. There’s a big world out there! Of course, thinking about a bigger world is going to mean greater anxiety. If you are feeling anxious right now, good! That means you are getting it. Yes, you will be more anxious when you drop a safety strategy and replace it with an expansive strategy. But in the short run, becoming more anxious is exactly what you need. You are standing up to your monkey mind by saying, I choose to be more anxious. I am willing to be imperfect. You are discrediting the perception of threat, something your monkey mind definitely notices because it means your monkey gets no banana! When you do this over and over again, your anxiety alarms will decrease and you will become more comfortable being yourself in social situations. You will also learn how to deal with occasional rejection, which makes you much more resilient. While all this may sound challenging, be assured that even my most anxiety-ridden clients have changed their strategies. So can you. I’ll be addressing the issue of handling anxiety through this transition in more detail in the next chapter. Right now, I want to present to you what some common expansive mind-sets and strategies can look like and how they work. The rule of thumb is that expansive mind-sets and strategies are, for the most part, the opposite of what you have been thinking and doing. You’ve been playing it safe; now you’re going to look for trouble. Let me