Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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

  I would pack my suitcases, all ready to fly off for a period of shooting, and then—sometimes when I was actually waiting for the taxi to take me to Heathrow—I would get a call telling me that the filming had been indefinitely postponed. Sometimes a trip was curtailed in midschedule, which meant that I spent my days zigzagging erratically, back and forth between London, Israel, and Europe. When we were able to shoot, the money came piecemeal, and there was always a bad moment at the end of the day when Joel and the producer, with their hearts in their mouths, went to the bank to see if the latest installment of funds had arrived to get us through the next twenty-four hours. Joel asked John to send in a British producer to supervise the finances, but John, for his own reasons, refused to do this. All this was very bad for the book, because the repeated interruptions damaged my concentration. Books need solid blocks of time, not a week here or a fortnight there. When I did get a sustained period to work on the manuscript, I had to work too fast, and all around the clock, because I was under pressure from the publishers to make sure that the book would be in print when the television series was screened. I felt strained, ill used, and miserably aware that I was cutting corners, not doing as good a job as I wished. One night I felt so distraught that the whole house seemed to be shaken by the strong winds blowing outside. I got little sleep, but was at my desk as usual early the next morning. Shortly after nine o’clock, my mother telephoned. “How are you getting on?” she asked, with obvious trepidation. “Oh, not too bad,” I replied wearily. “I’ve just finished the third draft of chapter three, and the first chapter—” “No, no, no!” she interrupted impatiently. “The storm! How is your house?” It was the night of the great hurricane of October 1987. “Oh!” I said wonderingly as she recited the catalogue of disasters—people killed, power lines down, trees uprooted, Kew Gardens irretrievably damaged, houses destroyed—and I then looked out at the devastation in my own street. “I thought it was a little windy!” By the summer of 1988 we had shot all my pieces to camera, but the production had come to a standstill. The company had exhausted its credit and we could neither film nor buy essential footage. Channel 4 declared the series bankrupt and pulled out. Three years’ work had gone down the drain, and my television career was in ruins. I felt abandoned. Joel had cracked under the strain, gone back to drink, and finished in a rehabilitation center.

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

  On the first anniversary of the fatwa there was yet more media ferment. I had written a short opinion piece in the books section of The Sunday Times, showing that Rushdie’s portrait of “Mahound” corresponded exactly with Islamophobic myths that had first been promoted by the Crusaders. On the day that the essay was published, I looked bleakly through the newspapers. My little contribution seemed a minnow beside the more authoritative articles by the literary heavyweights, and I felt suddenly overcome by a cold, pervasive dread. By failing to live up to our own standards of tolerance and compassion, by assuming that all Muslims were as vengeful as the ayatollah and that their religion was inherently violent and evil, we were laying up a store of trouble for ourselves in the future. Rightly or wrongly, many Muslims throughout the world believed that the West despised them. The tone of these articles would confirm them in their suspicions, and provoke some to extremism. Of course, we must defend the principle of free speech, but after Auschwitz we could not afford to indulge an old crusading prejudice which was manifestly untrue. Rushdie’s portrait of “Mahound” performed an important function in his novel. It was presented as fiction and delusion, as part of the theme of distortion and “monsterization.” But the writers who were denouncing Islam so vehemently in the papers this morning presented their views as hard, incontrovertible fact. Most of their readers would not know the true story of Muhammad, and many would probably accept verbatim this inaccurate depiction of Islam, thus compounding the problem. The trouble was, I said to myself as I sadly returned to the pile of newspapers, there was no accessible life of the Prophet to act as a counternarrative. The traditional Muslim biographies of Muhammad were written in a foreign idiom that could appeal only to a believer from the Arab world or the Indian subcontinent. It really was too bad that nobody had written a life of the Prophet to which Western people could relate.

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

  After the fiasco of the Crusades, my confidence was at such low ebb that these objections really struck home. I could already hear the ridicule and scorn of the reviewers. The general assumption was that nobody in the late twentieth century should take God seriously—least of all me. After all, this wretched God had lured me into a convent; his mythical perfection had made me chronically dissatisfied with myself; and his apparent indifference toward me had left me feeling spurned and hopeless. Who needed him? I had often declared that I had finished with God, and was much the better for it. Yet still, despite all the evidence I had so painfully amassed to the contrary, at some inchoate, unconscious level, I felt that God and I had unfinished business—even though I didn’t believe that he existed. Writing Through the Narrow Gate had reawakened that old longing for a more intense existence, shot through with transcendent meaning. This had quickly been submerged in the skeptical climate of the television world, but had surfaced occasionally at infrequent intervals. I remembered my drive from Jerusalem to Jericho, watching the sunrise over the surrounding desert. I saw again the Orthodox Jews arguing so passionately about God in the yeshiva, and the Muslim cleric studying the Koran in the al-Aqsa Mosque. I recalled my emotional identification with Saint Paul at Tre Fontane, when my voice had wobbled—just a little bit—when I had quoted his words “Now we see as through a glass darkly— but then, face-to-face!” Even though I considered faith a chimera, religion could still catch me unawares. Whatever my friends thought, God was not—quite—a joke. If I wanted to stay in the swing of things in London, it would be much more sensible to write a life of Fanny Burney. But despite the dismal predictions of the publishers, something in me refused to give up my God book. Maybe, like the mariner, I was moving toward a salvation of sorts “unaware,” my unconscious mind reaching out for what it knew I needed. In deciding to write about God, therefore, I knew that I was setting off on a lonely path, even though, in a sense, that was the last thing I wanted. On the other hand, I reflected, when I had come to an apparent dead end in the past, my life had sometimes taken a turn for the better. “Because I do not hope to turn again,” Eliot had reflected in Ash-Wednesday, “consequently I rejoice.” Like the mariner in his doomed ship, I seemed hopelessly adrift right now, but this had happened to me every five or six years with uncanny regularity.

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

  It can be a matter of trial and error, and at first, in my case it was often error. It was some years before my doctor brought me into hospital and, by carefully monitoring the dosage, found some truly effective medication. I had been advised to conceal my condition from the authorities. My doctors warned me that even though we lived in an enlightened age, the condition still carried a stigma, and that epileptics often found it difficult to gain employment. As I had been appointed to the post before my epilepsy had been diagnosed, I did not have to lie directly, but I just kept quiet about my disease. I was beginning to learn that virtually the only people who reacted to my problem in a balanced way were those with a medical training or those who had some firsthand experience of epilepsy. One of these was Sally, whose older sister had been a lifelong sufferer. Sally had come into the English department in my second year at the school. We became friends after I had a seizure during the staff Christmas lunch. This had been so mild that it was easy to pass it off as a faint, due to end-of-term exhaustion, but Sally knew at once what had happened. It was useful to have an ally. Teachers tend to pick up all kinds of germs and fevers from the children, and high body temperature can bring on an epileptic attack. This meant that whenever I caught one of these viruses, it took me a lot longer to recover than my colleagues. I had to take a great deal of sick leave, and this did not go unnoticed. Nor did the fact that I so often looked haggard and ill. School teaching is an extremely exhausting job: it is like doing a one-woman show, in which you are onstage for about seven hours every day. By the end of term, we all looked at death’s door. At coffee time we no longer laughed and chattered, and the head had no need to complain about the noise. We all sat around silently, staring into space like zombies. Sometimes—horror of horrors—we actually forgot to record our purchases in the Biscuit Book. My particular difficulty was that my drugs were debilitating, and this increased my natural weariness. Fatigue is one of the things that trigger my seizures, as does sleep deprivation. So it all became a vicious cycle. The more tired I was, the less resistance I had and the more flu bugs I caught from the children; the more seizures I had, the more exhausted I became.

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

  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. Would he look dull and drooling? I had never done anything like this and had no idea how I would cope. How would I occupy a brain-damaged child for hours at a time, week after week? As if reading my thoughts, Jenifer only increased my anxiety as she gave me some last-minute advice.

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

  The old lady was so obviously lonely that I didn’t have the heart to cut her off. When she wasn’t regaling me with lugubrious stories, she would descend upon me in a fury because she had inspected my flat earlier in the day and found a cobweb or an undusted shelf. This impertinent surveillance enraged me. I’d had enough of that kind of supervision in the convent and it was not good for me to experience it here, when I was making a bid for independence. But I managed to make a life for myself in London. Richard and Jackie frequently invited me to join them and their partners in a visit to the theater, a dinner, or a walk in the country. I started to entertain the handful of my former classmates who were now living in London. I would meet Rebecca for lunch or spend an evening with Charlotte in her room in Kilburn. There were visits to Jane in the Lake District and trips home for weekends in Birmingham. These last became more frequent as the work on my thesis drew to a close, because a woman in my mother’s office was typing it for me. It made sense for me to review the typescript in my parents’ home, so that my mother could take any corrections in to work with her on Monday morning. I was starting to feel more relaxed with my family. As I no longer looked skeletal and ill, they were not so worried about me, and the shared project of my thesis brought us all together. I had made a niche for myself in the world, something that had once seemed to be beyond my powers. True, I still experienced occasional moments of terror when my brain cracked open and the world became suffused with dread, but in other ways I could feel that my mind really was coming back to life. There were times when I still encountered the familiar emptiness, but sometimes I could feel a text calling to me and I was able to reply. I noticed that this tended to happen when there was some pressure. If I had a lecture to prepare for the following day, for example, I found that the thoughts and arguments would come while I was actually writing the piece, which took on a new life. Sometimes I needed another critic to start me off, but then I discovered that I could continue by myself and that, almost without realizing it, I was supplementing his insights with some of my own. It was like learning to ride a bicycle.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The conductor and a couple of stage-hands had hold of the roughs, and were trying to pull them into the wings. Another stage-hand stood nearby, dazed, and with a bleeding nose.We had Walter with us, for we had arranged to eat with him later, after the show. Now he looked at the scene before us, aghast.‘My God,’ he said. ‘You cannot go on with them in such a mood as this.’As he spoke, the manager came running. ‘Not go on?’ he said, appalled. ‘They must go on, or there will be a riot. It is entirely because they did not go on when they were meant to that the damn trouble - excuse me, ladies - started.’ He wiped his forehead, which was very damp. From the stage, however, there were signs that the scuffling, at last, was subsiding.Kitty looked at me, then nodded. ‘He’s right,’ she said to Walter. Then, to the manager: ‘Tell them to put our number up.’The manager pocketed his handkerchief and stepped smartly away before she could change her mind; but Walter still looked grave. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked us. He glanced back towards the stage. The roughs had been successfully carried off, and the singer had been placed in a chair in the wing across from us and given a glass of water. His clogs must have been thrown back on to the stage, or else some kind soul had delivered or retrieved them; at any rate, they now stood rather neatly beneath his chair and beside his bruised and naked feet. There were still some shrieks and whistles, however, from the hall.‘You don’t have to do it,’ Walter went on. ‘They may hurl something; you might get hurt.’Kitty straightened her collar. As she did so we heard the great roar, and the thunder of stamping feet, that told us that our number had gone up. In a second, rising doggedly over the din, there came the first few bars of our opening song. ‘If they hurl something,’ she said quickly, ‘we’ll duck.’ Then she took a step, and nodded for me to follow.And after all the fuss, indeed, they received us very graciously.‘Wot cheer, Kitty?’ someone shouted, as we danced our way into the beam of the limes. ‘Did you lose your way in the fog, then, or what?’‘Shocking awful traffic,’ she called back - the first verse was about to begin, and she was slipping further into character with every step she took -‘but not so bad as a road my friend and I were a-walking on the other afternoon. Why, it took us quite half a day to get from Pall Mall to Piccadilly...’ And effortlessly, seamlessly - and with me beside her, closer and more faithful than a shadow - she led us into our song.When that was over we headed back into the wing, to where Flora, our dresser, waited with our suits.

• From Wild (2012)

  Jonathan and I spotted each other the moment I entered; he waved at me from his unreachable place on a raised platform, working the lights. I got a glass of wine and stood sipping it in what I hoped was an elegant way, listening to the band near the low wall where I’d met Jonathan the night before. They were a fairly famous bluegrass band from the Bay Area. They dedicated a song to Jerry Garcia. The music was good, but I couldn’t focus on it because I was trying so hard to seem content and perfectly at ease, as if I would be at this very club listening to this very band whether Jonathan had invited me to or not, and, most of all, to be neither looking nor not looking at Jonathan, who was looking at me every time I looked at him, which then made me worry that he thought I was always looking at him because what if it was only a coincidence that every time I looked at him he was looking at me and he wasn’t actually looking at me always, but only in the moments that I looked at him, which would compel him to wonder, Why is this woman always looking at me? So then I didn’t look at him for three whole long bluegrass songs, one of which featured an improvisational, seemingly endless fiddle solo until the audience clapped in appreciation and I couldn’t take it anymore and I looked and not only was he looking at me, but he also waved again. I waved back. I turned away and stood extra still and upright, acutely aware of myself as an object of hot and exquisite beauty, feeling Jonathan’s eyes on my 100-percent-muscle ass and thighs, my breasts held high by the sweet bra beneath my slim-fitting shirt, my extra-light hair and bronze skin, my blue eyes made even bluer by the Plum Haze lipstick—a feeling which lasted for about the length of one song, at which point it reversed itself and I realized that I was a hideous beast with tree-bark-plucked-dead-chicken flesh on my hips and a too-tan, chawed-up face and weather-beaten hair and a lower abdomen that—in spite of all the exercise and deprivation and the backpack strap that for two months had squeezed it into what you’d guess would be oblivion—still had an indisputably rounded shape unless I was lying down or holding it in. In profile, my nose was so prominent a friend had once observed that I was reminiscent of a shark. And my lips—my ludicrous and ostentatious lips! Discreetly, I pressed them to the back of my hand to obliterate the Plum Haze while the music bleated on. There was, thank God, an intermission. Jonathan materialized by my side, squeezing my hand solicitously, saying he was glad I’d come, asking if I wanted another glass of wine.

• 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.