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

  When you cannot be happy until everything on your list is checked off, you are not allowing much opportunity for yourself to be happy. Not only will there likely be something you couldn’t quite get done, but there will be another list waiting for you to start on. When everything has to be nailed down and under control, what you’re trying to control is anxiety. Are you an over-checker? To ward off fears of financial disaster we monitor our stocks and the business news. To avoid feeling left out we check our social media, favorite sports team’s posts, or our text messages. These behaviors are perfectly acceptable in our culture. Are the kids safe at their friend’s house? Text them (again) and find out. Our smartphones make it possible to seek certainty whenever the urge hits, wherever we happen to be. But if you need to do a particular behavior in order to not feel anxious, that urge is a safety strategy, employed to neutralize perceived threats. There is also mental checking. When you left the house, did you remember everything you need? Did you close the garage door? Do you review things in your mind to be sure? Do you mentally monitor your physical sensations looking for signs that something is wrong? Lots of these behaviors do work, and they aren’t always problems. But when they are employed to reduce anxiety about a threat you’re overestimating or that you are underestimating your ability to cope with, the behavior is a safety strategy. For example, if your anxiety about feeling trapped in your seat keeps you from flying, then taking the train is a safety strategy. If you can’t tolerate the possibility that the train might be late, then renting a car is a safety strategy. And what about that recent terrorist attack? You never know where terrorists will strike. Maybe you shouldn’t be traveling at all right now, since you can’t be sure. “I Cannot Make a Mistake” Strategies For the perfectionist, not being allowed to make a mistake brings up a lot of anxiety. Picking a college, a job, a mate, or even a dessert could prove fatal if your choice turns out to be less than perfect. Your safety strategy might be to consult another friend, put the decision off, or in the case of the dessert, observe what others are ordering and choose the same. If everything you do on the job has to be perfect, safety strategies might include rewriting reports, repeating research, putting in overtime, or making excuses in advance for what you imagine might not be good enough. When you cannot make a misstep, interacting with others is like walking through a minefield. Don’t approach anyone; let them come to you. (It’s safer when you know they are already interested in you.) Think before you speak, and make sure you’re not misunderstood. Don’t ask questions that could make you sound stupid. Best not to state your opinion unless everybody

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

  supply of things to make certain of. Every waking minute you’ll be striving for that which is unattainable: complete certainty about all things. When your default protocol is to guarantee a good outcome in every situation, you wind up treating life itself as a threat—something to be checked on, analyzed, evaluated, controlled, and conquered. Instead of living fully and dealing with whatever may go wrong, you spend your precious days on earth worrying about what might happen. Maria Let me introduce a composite client of mine with this monkey mind-set. Maria’s presenting problem was her sensitivity to physical sensations, typically a sudden stabbing pain in her heart area, pressure in her head, flashes of light in her eyes, or tingling in her extremities. When she had one of these sensations, she worried that it might be a sign something was wrong, like a heart attack, a brain tumor, a detached retina, or a nervous system disorder. To ease her anxiety, she monitored the symptoms closely and looked them up on the Internet. Her doctor reassured her that they were harmless, and her tests showed that she was healthy, but Maria was spending more and more time and energy dealing with these sensations and she felt they were ruining her life. “I knew the pain I was having was probably harmless,” she told me after a trip to the ER, “but what if it was an aneurysm?” Although Maria was smart enough to recognize that random sensations are seldom pathological, her assumption was, I must be certain. Every sensation was guilty until proven innocent, and the cost of investigating them was wearing Maria down. Maria was hijacked, acting out of an intolerance of uncertainty. Nearly every anxiety sufferer I have met shares Maria’s mind-set: this assumption that certainty is not only possible, but necessary for our peace and happiness. The truth is just the opposite. No amount of preparedness can control every outcome. Life always provides adversity, for which we need flexibility and resilience. And life also provides pleasant surprises—joyous and peaceful moments that we can’t anticipate. These are wasted, sadly, on those of us who are only open to what we can be certain about. Some of the problems that those of us with a need to be certain have are: difficulty relaxing; difficulty making decisions; difficulty forming opinions; worrying about health, family, and finances; overplanning and getting upset when things don’t go as planned; inflexibility; obsessive-compulsive tendencies; and being overcontrolling. To assess how active this mind-set is for you, download the Intolerance of Uncertainty quiz at http://www.newharbinger.com/35067. Perfectionism Many of us like to think we have high standards. We don’t settle for ordinary; we aim for the stars. We expect the best for, and of, ourselves. This is the popular conception of perfectionist thinking. Alas, true perfectionists rarely feel this way. With the perfectionist

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

  Maria’s cycle of anxiety was completed and ready to roll again. Here’s what it looked like: Maria, of course, was not only feeding her monkey. She was thinking with it. Monkey logic dictated, Because I went to the emergency room and confirmed that my heart is okay, it is okay. Each turn of her anxiety cycle reinforced the I must be certain assumption of the monkey mind-set. Maria thought she needed certainty about her physical symptoms. What do you think you need to be certain about? Eric’s Perfectionism Eric’s anxiety was triggered by doubts about whether he was good enough to be accepted by others. Since he thought he needed to be perfect in order to be accepted at his management job, as well as socially, he had plenty of doubts. A great example was the time he had to make a decision about which vendor to contract with for a major software upgrade for his office. While they all promised to make things more efficient, there would be a potentially difficult transition period where everyone would have to learn whatever system he picked. To Eric, making the right choice was essential for maintaining his status in the company. To his monkey mind the decision was a primordial threat. If he were to pick a solution with a difficult learning curve, or one that didn’t work as well as everyone hoped, he would be judged a failure and in effect, be kicked out of the tribe. Eric managed his anxiety by working overtime researching the options. He interviewed reps from the various vendors extensively, compiled notes, and made multiple projections. After months of working overtime and fielding questions from his increasingly impatient team, he was still no closer to committing. Eric was in a cycle of anxiety. Every time the subject of the software decision came up his monkey mind flagged it as a threat and turned on the anxiety alarm. You must get this right. Do something! Instead of making the decision, Eric made another phone call to one of the reps, or did some more research, or made another pros and cons list. When he engaged in these safety strategies, his anxiety went down and, for the moment anyway, the crisis was abated. Eric’s safety strategies were keeping him not only from making a less-- than-perfect choice, but from making any choice. Every time he delayed a decision in response to the monkey’s alarm, he fed the monkey. Confirming the perception of threat around decision making programmed his monkey for more anxiety alarms in the future. Every monkey feeding also fed Eric’s perfectionist mind-set. Monkey logic dictated, Because I delayed the decision, I did not make a mistake and am safe. Here is Eric’s anxiety cycle in a diagram:

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

  would feel if he actually made a decision or started on a project. The message he sent to his monkey mind by distracting himself was that the threat was real and too much to bear. When Samantha thought about her son, she felt not only anxiety, but a profound sadness. She found that these emotions were less distressing for her if she kept herself busy, so she often brought work home with her and did extra cleaning and organizing around her house and yard. At best, these distractions worked only as long as she kept them up. The painful feelings returned in full force as soon as she stopped. Samantha’s distraction was sending a clear message to her monkey mind that the feelings themselves were dangerous, something that she could not handle. Even seemingly harmless little activities like me doing my nails and other household chores, when employed to distract me from the anxiety waiting for me at my laptop, become safety strategies. They confirm the threat that sitting down to write is dangerous. When we use distraction to avoid a perceived threat, whether that threat is triggered by a thought, a feeling, or a situation, it comes at a high cost. It not only guarantees anxiety in the future but it keeps us from following our heart’s desires. Here is a short list of common distractions that are used as safety strategies. Which of them do you use to feed your monkey? Media like TV, computer games, online searches, e-mail Staying busy with tasks at home or at work Engaging with others in person, texting, or using social media Staying busy with hobbies The second special safety strategy I want to highlight is, like worry and distraction, something you wouldn’t normally think of as a strategy to keep you safe. Trying to Relax When the perceived threat is anxiety itself, the safety strategy of choice is trying to relax. While it may sound nonsensical to suggest that trying to enter a state of relaxation might maintain anxiety rather than reduce it,

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

  sensations like a racing heart rate, sweaty palms, or nervous stomach, and 2) painful emotions like anxiety, frustration, and sadness. Both of these types of feelings are the monkey mind calling you to action. If you stop reacting to the monkey’s call, it will deliver more of the same discomfort, which will be as difficult to ignore as a fire alarm. For you to grow it will be necessary to override the monkey’s call to action, to replace your safety strategies with strategies that will, in the short run, elicit more negative feelings. Negative feelings, the very feelings that we find the most uncomfortable and challenging, are the feelings we need to process in order to grow. This is why I like to think of negative feelings as necessary feelings. If you want to expand your life beyond the monkey’s circle of safety, it is necessary that you feel them rather than try to distract yourself from them or bottle them up. When we choose to accept negative feelings as necessary, as simply a part of our growing process, three amazing things happen: We learn that we can handle the feelings. We contradict the monkey’s perception of threat, training it that we can handle the situation. We free ourselves to move with purpose, not allowing anxiety to dictate our actions. This is my challenge to you: Bring a new response to these necessary sensations and emotions. Rather than treating them as an alarm that something is wrong or a call to action, accept them as something to tolerate, a monkey’s tantrum. This response will build your resilience, allowing for new experience and learning that will feed your expansive mind-set and let you pursue your heart’s desires. A Course to Run For many of us the notion of purposely feeling negative sensations and emotions is so contrary to our experience and way of thinking that it sounds preposterous. It would be reasonable to ask, If I allow myself to feel these things, will they ever go away? It’s the only way they will ever go away. When we allow ourselves to

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

  Giving the monkey full voice, of course, does not mean following its lead. Simply notice the chatter without judging it or reacting to it. Notice the monkey like you notice the announcement at the airport warning you not to leave your baggage unattended. No matter how troubling or repetitive a thought is, just keep noticing it, over and over again. By simply noticing, you are allowing yourself to have negative thoughts —yes, even big bad scary ones you’d be embarrassed to share with anyone—- and training yourself not to treat them as a call to action. You are creating a healthier distance between you and the monkey, becoming an observer rather than a participant in the worry process. Therefore, when monkey chatter becomes loud enough to distract you, which it most certainly will, your practice will be to observe the anxious thought and move on. To remind yourself that you are declining to engage with your monkey’s chatter rather than trying to shut it up, I suggest you acknowledge these thoughts with a simple thank you. That’s right, be polite! The little critter, misguided as it is, is just trying to do its job of keeping you safe. Like a tantrum-throwing toddler, the monkey will not be quieted with reason. Like a fire alarm, it cannot be ignored. So acknowledge the monkey politely and move forward. Here’s what it sounded like for Eric when he got a barrage of chatter about his upcoming talk with his employee.

• From Bold Move

  For many years, I would take offense whenever people I encountered heard my accent or took one look at me and shifted to Spanish. Not only was it the wrong language, but I just wanted to be accepted as an American! Whenever this happened—and it happened often—my brain would start spinning and all I wanted to do was scream, “Can’t you see I’m American?!” My own acculturation process took years, but there is one funny story I recall early in my Boston days that represents the point in time where I began to feel confident enough to begin integrating my Brazilian identity back into my newfound American identity. I was trying so hard to be an American, but one bright sunny winter afternoon in my first year at MGH, we were discussing cultural identity and, as you probably guessed, I was not ready for this conversation, nor did I want to be a part of it. This was in the spring of 2005, and back then I had almost no real insight into my own ethnic identity. So as the director of our training program went around the room asking people about their ethnic identity, I began to get very anxious. By the time she got to me, all I could manage to do was blurt out, “I’m Latina!” My great friend Dr. Molly Colvin, an amazing neuropsychologist, also one of the most in-touch people I know, looked at me and said, “Damn, Luana. You must be having a really bad day. You never identify yourself as Latina!” And she was right! I knew that at that point, I needed to address my own acculturation journey. I was just not sure how to manage my own acculturation, which is how I came to understand patients like Stephanie. So in our own way, both Stephanie and I were dealing with culture clash, and this conflict was taking us further away from what mattered to each of us. Because of this, we would often defer to culture to dictate our actions, without ever asking why or looking into our own intrinsic values. Bringing things back to avoidance, let’s consider an important question: What made Stephanie’s behavior a form of avoidance? Well, when culture impeded on her personal values, Stephanie let the norms of her Chinese culture dictated by her parents set the course for her actions. (For me, it was American culture, dictated by my own desire to belong.) Did our actions make us feel better in the moment?

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

  This is not always comfortable; in fact, it has become something of a social liability, because I find myself more and more distressed by the disdain that so often peppers social conversation. I know how this puts a splinter of ice into the heart of the disdained. I tremble for our world, where, in the smallest ways, we find it impossible, as Marshall Hodgson enjoined, to find room for the other in our minds. If we cannot accommodate a viewpoint in a friend without resorting to unkindness, how can we hope to heal the terrible problems of our planet? I no longer think that any principle or opinion is worth anything if it makes you unkind or intolerant. Of course, toleration has its limits. We should cry out against injustice and cruelty wherever we find it, as the prophets did, especially when it occurs in our own society or on “our” side. It may be politically expedient to ignore the beam in our own eye while decrying the splinter in the eye of our enemy, but I do not see how it can be a religious option. But this pain is a small price to pay for the spirituality of empathy. Paradoxically, what I have gained from this identification with suffering is joy. This was something that I did not expect. And this habit of looking outside myself into the heart of another has put me outside the prism of myself. This ecstasy may not last for long, but while it lasts I experience an astonishing freedom. Self, after all, is our basic problem. When I wake up at three in the morning and ask myself, Why does this have to happen to me? Why cannot I have what X has? Why am I so unloved and unappreciated?—and I still have plenty of moments like this—I learn that ego is at the heart of all pain. When I get beyond this for a few moments, I feel enlarged and enhanced—just as the Buddha promised. It is important for me to do this, because my solitary lifestyle could imprison me forever in selfishness. In a relationship, you constantly have to go beyond yourself. Each day you have to forgive something, each day you have to put yourself to one side to accommodate your partner. Looking after somebody else means that you have to give yourself away. But I never have to do this. Because I travel such a lot, I cannot even have an animal to look after. So my science of compassion does for me what a husband, lover, child, or even a dog might have done in a different life.

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

  This was the point when you were supposed to reflect on the topics you had listed the night before. Finally you proceeded to “act,” which, for Ignatius, was the real moment of prayer. As a result of your deliberations, you made an act of will, applying the lessons you had learned to the day that lay ahead. There had to be a specific resolution. It was no good vaguely vowing to live a better life from that day forward. You had to settle for something concrete: to try harder with your sewing, for example, or to make a special effort not to think uncharitable thoughts about a sister who irritated you beyond endurance. Prayer, Ignatius taught, was an act of will. It had nothing to do with pious thoughts or feelings; these were simply a preparation for the moment of decision. Ignatian spirituality was never an end in itself, but was directed toward action and efficiency. He wanted his Jesuits to be effective in the world, and their daily meditation ensured that their activities would proceed from God. But this did not work for me. Every morning I resolved that this time I would crack it. This time there would be no distractions. I would kneel as intent upon God as my sisters, none of whom seemed to have my difficulties. I had never before had any problems of concentration. I had always been able to immerse myself in my studies for hours at a time. But to my intense distress, I found that I could not keep my mind on God for two minutes. The whole point of the careful preparation was to prevent this. It was acknowledged that at 6 a.m. we were likely to be less than fully alert and would need help in focusing our thoughts. But as soon as I sank to my knees, my mind either went off at a tangent or scuttled through a maze of pointless worries, fears, or fantasies, or else I was engulfed by the torpor of physical malaise. Like most adolescents, I craved sleep and experienced the 5:30 a.m. call as a violent assault. I often felt queasy with hunger and fatigue, and clung dizzily to the pew in front of me. At 6:30 the clock in the cloister chimed and we could sit down. But this sweet relief gave way to another trial, as I battled against sleep—and was comforted to see that even some of the older nuns listed and slumped in such a way that it was clear that they had succumbed. The minutes crawled by until the sacristan appeared to light the candles on the altar as a welcome signal that Mass was about to begin. At breakfast, an hour later, we were supposed to examine our meditation, going through a ten-point questionnaire: Had I made myself fully conscious of the presence of God? No. Had I made sufficient effort in the composition of place?

• From Bold Move

  My clients’ stories are not great, people will be bored by this book. What if I offend someone with the way I describe a story? What if people think I am a lousy clinician? What if people find out that I am scared that this book will not be good enough? What if I fail to finish this in time? What if I never finish this book? What if the editor thinks I am stupid? I will never be successful. I am such a failure. I will never be enough. With tears in my eyes, I said hello to my old core belief “I am not enough.” But at least I was able to uncover the enemy that was causing my avoidance. You can’t fight an enemy you don’t know. Facing the EnemyI won’t lie to you: taking space to uncover our deeper beliefs is a painful process that requires a lot of vulnerability. I myself ran from this for years. But avoidance will always run faster, so I invite you to take a minute to sit quietly and use the reflection below to uncover your own hidden filters. There are two ways I have seen my clients know that they have identified their core belief(s): either tears come down their face (at times even with a slight sense of relief) or they want to run in the opposite direction as fast as possible (to avoid!). Give it a try! One word of caution: We all have favorable and unfavorable core beliefs. This reflection focuses on the unfavorable ones because those are the ones getting us stuck. But don’t forget to also look at core beliefs that strengthen your self-esteem. When Is Retreating Not Avoidance?Before we end this chapter, it is important to understand that not every thought leads to avoidance. At the risk of stating the obvious, fleeing is appropriate in the face of real danger and is not a form of avoidance. Alternatively, let’s say you’re in a somewhat heated argument with your loved one and you call a time-out to retreat and get some perspective. Asking for time to think, reflect, and address a problem is not avoidance; it is a good coping skill and a powerful tool in the nonviolent communication tool kit! Another tool I find myself using often, which some of you can probably relate to, is to retreat to get some air when Diego is misbehaving. Sometimes a five-year-old does things that drive you to the very edge of your sanity, like the time Diego took an extra-large bag of pancake mix and lovingly dumped it all over our living room couch. I lost my mind.

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

  I remember spending whole afternoons sitting on the floor of my flat, staring ahead, sick with apprehension. I found it impossible to read; I could not even listen to music, but was in a state of continuous, slow-burning panic. I should have liked to have somebody to talk to. I had lost some of the reserve that had inhibited me when I first left the convent, and could see that it would be helpful to discuss my options. What could I realistically do if the worst happened? What were the chances of an appeal? How would I endure the shame and the disgrace? But since everybody I might have talked to about these things refused—seemingly on principle—even to discuss these possibilities, I was on my own. I used to read the thesis over and over, feeling alternately elated at some of its felicities, and in despair when I came across a passage that I knew, with chilly certainty, would antagonize Professor Courtney. As I had expected, the viva was a rout. Courtney was brilliantly sarcastic; the coexaminer, who had been so encouraging to me earlier, was clearly daunted by Courtney’s reputation and looked at me helplessly across the table. I argued back, of course, but I could see that it was no good. As I walked from the Examination Schools to the station, the glowing shops festooned with the hearts and cupids of Valentine’s Day seemed an unkind joke. During the journey home, I opened the corridor window and threw my copy of the complete works of Tennyson out into the dark, rainy night. I felt calmly pleased by this gesture, which seemed to release some of the tension that had accumulated over the last months. I felt stalled, almost in a state of suspended animation. Sometimes that evening I seemed to look down at myself as from a great height, as though all this were happening to somebody else. So when the letter came informing me that I had indeed failed, I found that I did not feel nearly as bad as I might have expected. I read the letter, nodded grimly to myself, tore it up, and continued my preparations for a morning’s teaching, feeling the same curious detachment. I told myself that I had, after all, known this was going to happen. There was nothing surprising about it. During those lonely weeks before the viva, I had lived with my failure and grown accustomed to it. Not so my colleagues. Richard and Jackie looked at me dumbfounded when I told them the news that morning. For once even Richard, a naturally voluble and ebullient soul, was lost for words. And when I phoned Jane with the news that night, I was astonished and touched when she burst into tears. I know perfectly well that if this had happened to somebody else—to Jane herself, for example—I should have been angry on her behalf. Yet because it had happened to me, all I could feel was cold, fatalistic acceptance.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Dallas. There’s never been that eureka moment. I remember back in fifth grade, we were playing volleyball at school, and it was this little charter school, nothing but Indians. And I remember taking a deliberate fall—a very exaggerated fall—because it garnered laughter. And I knew what I was doing. I knew that I was doing it for attention, but also it was a moment that made me feel good because it elicited a response from other folks—like the response that they got out of it. And the thing about organizing is … and I’m careful about who I speak it to or how I say it … is it’s a form of manipulation. You are using information. You’re using tactics to manipulate a situation or a response from people for the benefit of a movement or the benefit of your community or for the benefit of yourself. Comedy is of the same sort. Storytelling is the same process. You’re using the gift of speech or an action of your body to elicit a sort of response and manipulating emotion. You’re tapping into the core source code of who we are as human beings. I think there are so many people that rarely use the transformative power of humor and lightheartedness of stories. But it’s very dicey. It’s very careful, because it could really go into like kitschy, hipster-like new age—like, “let’s just talk about love and peace and the transformative power of crystals and energy,” and all this shit that just turns people off. A good number of people.99 I am confident enough that I know what I’m good at. I know what my strengths are, and I know my weaknesses. My experience of making people laugh and loving that. I like the idea of making people smile. So you have that. Then there’s this other experience of me being a six-foot-two big-ass Indian and going to college at Cal. And being hella aware that I fucking intimidate by just walking into a room. That walking down a street—if there’s women coming down the street on my side, I’m fucking hyper-aware that I’m a big fucking scary person. amb. Because of the socialization that they’re walking with? Dallas. Yeah, and legitimate concern, like, based off real-life experience. So it was just ingrained, you know, growing up in the movement and being around people, being aware of, like, “Oh, shit, I’m gonna cross the street. I’m’a make the conscious decision that I’m gonna remove that and move—step away.”

• From Bestiary (2020)

  It’s the earthquake that finally wounds a way to the gold: I sleep through it, but Jie claims it felt like the whole earth was operating on itself, scraping back its own skin, rearranging its organs. On our porch, one of the floorboards splits open and shakes off its scab of moss. Light spits from it and we flock to the crack like moths. Underneath the porch is a finger of gold, bedazzled with flies and reclined on a sheet of butcher paper. Ma dances on the kitchen table for a whole hour, her feet forgoing gravity. She stacks the gold on the not-altar, directly to the left of the photo so flat and dull in its frame. The gold is too exposed, like looking directly at someone’s bones. We are all looking at it now, the gold and the photo, our eyes alternating between the glow and its shadow, the payment and the cost. DAUGHTER Hu Gu Po (II) A week before I woke with a tail, my mother was outside in the front yard, arguing with the new neighbor about his encroaching eucalyptus tree. Its shadow bruised the side of our house all eggplant-black. Its sap ran fast as a nosebleed and hardened into shards of gold glass on our driveway. This was the first house I’d ever lived in—we’d moved in after my father left for the mainland, sending him the key inside a bubble-wrapped package, along with an assortment of my latest-lost baby teeth. The house had smoke-scarred windows and a balding lawn and squirrels that died in its walls and attracted funerals of flies. Our rent was paid in envelopes of cash my father sent back from the mainland. Every hinge in the house was loose and our doors fell out with the frequency of baby teeth. At night, we nailed our windows shut to keep them from panting open in the dry heat. The only grocery store in the city was so dim inside you had to bring a flashlight. Hundreds of advertisements and posters were taped to the windows so that no light was let in: The store was barricaded by the faces of missing daughters and posters of local psychics promising to predict CA lottery numbers. Coupons fled in flocks from the parking lot, offering discounts on pipa gao and tuoxie and dried tongue-looking meats that my brother and I licked and put back in the bin, disappointed that they didn’t make a sound in our mouths. _ My mother chose this city because it was a drivable distance to LA and Agong, but still far north enough from Ama that they spoke only on the phone: Today my mother pointed at the chasms in our concrete driveway, flooding with rare rain from the week before. She threw her wire hairbrush at the neighbor, and when he didn’t turn from his mailbox, she said: Look at these!

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Our piss is a gradient, darkening from clear to amber as we run out of water. At night, we pull over and sleep with the seats reclined, one back window open, headlights on in case of nocturnal animals. In case Ba wanders off, we paint his name with engine grease on the back of his windbreaker, along with these words written by Jie: DO NOT APPROACH. To keep him from sleepwalking, we knot three seatbelts around his limbs at night. Ba’s breath humidifies the whole car, and in the morning we wake with our windows steamed, our bodies hammocked in heat. Jie drives in a spine shape, swerving between lanes, uncontained. We pass Texas and unzip its border with New Mexico, which looks like the same state but thirstier, the cacti more nipplelike, asking for our mouths around them. The desert floor breeds rows of button cacti, and I’m tempted to wander out one night and undress them of their spines. Jie leans her head while she drives, half of her face frying against the window, the left half browning more than the right. I tell her she looks like two women splitting one mouth. Go deep-throat a cactus, she says. Go back to sleep. I dream it: my throat perforated with needle-holes, my throat turning into a sprinkler every time I try to drink. Jie and I buy corn dogs and packaged pies at convenience stores, where the clerks look at us like we’re a species of upright armadillo, yellow and armored. They watch through the window as Jie pumps gas, sometimes asking where we’re going, sometimes asking where we’re from. We say Taiwan even though we’ve never called it that, and the cashier grins big as a window: We see his missing teeth, we smell what he eats. He says he bombed Taiwan back during the war. Says it looked pretty from the air, a severed green finger floating in the sea. Jie tells him that Taiwan’s silhouette looks more like a finger flipping you off, then runs out of the store with a stolen lighter up her sleeve. The packaged fruit pies dye our spit different colors, and when Ba sleeps at night with his mouth ajar, I can see his tongue glowing blue-raspberry. We stop at a seafood restaurant somewhere left of Texas, though the closest sea is the one we dream. There’s a live fish tank two feet from our table, and when the waiter hears us speak his dialect he bags us a fish for the road even though we’ve got no fire to cook it. Finally, we fry it on the hood of our car, the sun seething through flesh. The fish tastes metallic, too much memory of the sea in its bones.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  For nearly three years Calvin wandered as a fugitive evangelist under assumed names436 from place to place in Southern France, Switzerland, Italy, till he reached Geneva as his final destination. It is impossible accurately to determine all the facts and dates in this period. He resigned his ecclesiastical benefices at Noyon and Pont l’Evèque, May 4, 1534, and thus closed all connection with the Roman Church.437 That year was remarkable for the founding of the order of the Jesuits at Montmartre (Aug. 15), which took the lead in the Counter-Reformation; by the election of Pope Paul III. (Alexander Farnese, Oct. 13), who confirmed the order, excommunicated Henry VIII., and established the Inquisition in Italy; and by the bloody persecution of the Protestants in Paris, which has been described in the preceding section.438 The Roman Counter-Reformation now began in earnest, and called for a consolidation of the Protestant forces. Calvin spent the greater part of the year 1533 to 1534, under the protection of Queen Marguerite of Navarre, in her native city of Angoulême. This highly gifted lady (1492–1549), the sister of King Francis I., grandmother of Henry IV., and a voluminous writer in verse and prose, was a strange mixture of piety and liberalism, of idealism and sensualism. She patronized both the Reformation and the Renaissance, Calvin and Rabelais; she wrote the Mirror of a Sinful Soul, and also the Heptameron in professed imitation of Boccaccio’s Decamerone; yet she was pure, and began and closed the day with religious meditation and devotion. After the death of her royal brother (1547), she retired to a convent as abbess, and declared on her death-bed that, after receiving extreme unction, she had protected the Reformers out of pure compassion, and not from any wish to depart from the faith of her ancestors.439 Calvin lived at Angoulême with a wealthy friend, Louis du Tillet, who was canon of the cathedral and curé of Claix, and had acquired on his journeys a rare library of three or four thousand volumes.440 He taught him Greek, and prosecuted his theological studies. He associated with honorable men of letters, and was highly esteemed by them.441 He began there the preparation of his Institutes.442 He also aided Olivetan in the revision and completion of the French translation of the Bible, which appeared at Neuchâtel in June, 1535, with a preface of Calvin.443 From Angoulême Calvin made excursions to Nérac, Poitiers, Orleans, and Paris. At Nérac in Béarn, the little capital of Queen Marguerite, he became personally acquainted with Le Fèvre d’Étaples (Faber Stapulensis), the octogenarian patriarch of French Humanism and Protestantism. Le Fèvre, with prophetic vision, recognized in the young scholar the future restorer of the Church of France.444 Perhaps he also suggested to him to take Melanchthon for his model.445 Roussel, the chaplain and confessor of Marguerite, advised him to purify the house of God, but not to destroy it.

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

  1. The strategy gives only temporary relief and must be repeated. 2. The strategy takes you away from either your goals or your values in life. When you are examining a questionable strategy, these are the questions to ask: Are you repeating the behavior? Safety strategies are always part of a pattern—a cycle of anxiety. Are you giving up your long-term interests or compromising your personal values in exchange for short-term anxiety relief? If the answer is yes to these questions, you’ve found a safety strategy. Behavior and Mental Strategies There are two types of safety strategies. The first type consists of behavioral safety strategies, the actions we take that feed the monkey mind. These behaviors can be obvious, like not going to a party because you feel uncomfortable meeting new people, or subtle, like going to the party but waiting for people to approach you instead of approaching them. My doing chores instead of writing, Eric’s avoiding decisions, Maria’s Googling symptoms, and Samantha’s checking up on her son were all behavioral safety strategies. The second type of safety strategy is not easily observable in our behavior. I am speaking of the mental safety strategies we employ to keep anxiety at bay. Rehearsing what you are going to say before engaging with someone at the party or second-guessing what stupid thing you may have said or done at the party the following day are mental safety strategies. Other common mental safety strategies include making lists in your mind so that you don’t forget something, reviewing your actions to make sure you did not forget to do something important (such as turning off the stove), and monitoring physical sensations that might be linked in your mind to a health concern or possibly to a panic attack. But the most universal mental safety strategy is worry. I know it is counterintuitive to think about worry as a safety strategy. Worrying certainly doesn’t make us feel any safer...or does it? When I first started writing books I worried about my writing skills, as

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

  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. “You’ll have to find your own way,” she explained. “Find your own special thing to do with him. He tends to put us all into watertight compartments, and won’t let anyone ever encroach on somebody else’s territory. I believe this kind of ritual behavior is quite common with autistic children. Nanny is the only one who is allowed to read to him; he and I play backgammon—or try to.” She gave a short bark of a laugh. “He usually loses his temper. And he’ll help me in the garden or we’ll go for a walk. Just now, he’s out with my husband, who takes him for long drives. Though that’s not ideal really,” she added. “Herbert is not the world’s best driver. Anyway”—she brightened—“I’m sure you’ll find something. It’s really not difficult—not as hard as it sounds. He’s basically very open and loving. He generally adores grown-ups. He’ll be very eager to be your friend.” I hoped so. “What about other children?” I asked. “Does he have friends at school, for instance?” Jenifer shook her head. “No. Children worry him. Jacob is very tall for his age, you see, and he gets alarmed when little people scurry about. They’re too noisy. And I suppose they’re a bit frightened of him, and he senses that.” She stretched out her thin, brown legs and contemplated her feet, clad in clumsy men’s sandals. “That’s one of the reasons why we’ve never sent him away. To a home or hospital.” She frowned, and her tone darkened. “Lots of people said that we should do that, but it’s ludicrous!”

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

  This new sensitivity was not always comfortable, because I found that I could hear a kind of crusading aggression all around me in contemporary society. I heard it in Israel, when I listened to the Israelis and Palestinians condemning each other, wholly unable to appreciate each other’s position. It was there again when British politicians attacked their opponents with bitter relish, and even in apparently civilized debates between intellectuals and literary critics on the radio. There was an edge of unpleasant self-righteousness as people gleefully demolished their opponents. I heard it all the time in London, when even my most liberal friends inveighed wittily—and often unkindly—against this or that. I certainly heard it in Mrs. Thatcher. So my study of the Crusades changed me, making me determined always to try to listen to the other side, and at least try to understand where the enemy was coming from. Had the Crusaders done that, a moral catastrophe could have been averted. Studying the Crusades had confirmed me in my conviction that stridently parochial certainty could be lethal, especially in religious matters. We lived in a global age now, and it was dangerous to assume, without question, that “we” had the monopoly of truth and justice. We had started working on the television series in the summer of 1985, and the project was initially supposed to take a year—two at the most. Three years later, however, the film was still unfinished, for reasons that were never entirely clear to me. Something had gone badly wrong. I could hear it in Joel’s muttered imprecations, and in the uneasy behavior of the crew. Our old camaraderie had gone, and been replaced by a high level of tension. 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.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “ ‘… but palliative,’ ” I finished, eager to prove to her that I was no clerical robot, but rather a typist who reflected on whatever he was asked to type. “Got it.” “How about pain levels?” she asked. I snapped my finger several times to test how my wrist felt. “I feel the usual tingling in the base of my palm and some significant forearm involvement.” “Fine,” she said. “We can go back to the keyboard later if we need to. I want you to put it aside now. Good. Except for your arm pain, are you comfortable? Are you ready to start masturbating?” I told her I was. “Okay, in just a minute I’ll ask you to start.” I lay at peace, with my hands resting on my chest. I heard some more murmured conversation on the intercom, then, “Arno, why don’t you go ahead and start.” “Can I lift my knees?” “Can he lift his knees?” I heard her ask. Then: “Better not. We lose you on one of the axial monitors. Is it going to be a problem to proceed with your legs flat?” “Not at all—it’s fine,” I said. “Can you see me? I mean, not my nerves, but me?” “Yes. We have several video monitors in addition to the MR image.” “Oh,” I said. “Be sure to let us know any changes in the pain you feel,” she said. “Keep a running commentary, if you can.” I hesitated, then plunged ahead. “The problem is that the pleasure from one source masks the pain from the other source,” I said. “I think that’s part of the reason it’s gotten this bad. But, okay, I’m touching my—penile organ now. I have it, as I guess you can see, in the thumb-and-finger grip that we discussed. We might call it the Kokomo grip. I’m beginning to tug on it slowly, using the Kokomo grip, and at the moment I feel no distinct pain—well, there is a warm twinge, but nothing bad.” Since I had avoided all orgasms for three days, I expected to have little trouble getting hot and nasty, even enveloped as I was in an electromagnetic field so powerful that it could potentially suck oxygen tanks and scissors and other ferrous objects lethally into the chamber with me. When I was fully erect, I held my richard vertically for a moment by its base, wanting everyone in the control room to get an eyeful of it on the monitors. “Hold that for a second,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, unexpectedly. “Don’t move. We need to get a fix on those R-points. Just hold still. Good. Great. Good. You still comfortable?” “I think so.”

• From Wild (2012)

  I stood near the soda machines up against the gas station building, watching people come and go, trying to work up the nerve to approach one of them, hoping I’d sense that I was safe from harm when I saw the right person. I watched old desert-grizzled men in cowboy hats and families whose cars were full already and teenagers who pulled up with music blasting out their open windows. Nobody in particular looked like a murderer or rapist, but nobody in particular didn’t look like one either. I bought a can of Coke and drank it with a casual air that belied the fact that I could not stand up properly because of the unbelievable weight on my back. Finally, I had to make a move. It was nearly eleven, pitching steadily into the heat of a June day in the desert. A minivan with Colorado plates pulled up and two men got out. One man was about my age, the other looked to be in his fifties. I approached them and asked for a ride. They hesitated and glanced at each other, their expressions making it apparent that they were united in their silent search for a reason to say no, so I kept talking, explaining in quick bursts about the PCT. “Sure,” the older one said finally, with obvious reluctance. “Thank you,” I trilled girlishly. When I hobbled toward the big door on the side of the van, the younger man rolled it open for me. I gazed inside, realizing suddenly that I had no idea how to get in. I couldn’t even attempt to step up into it with my pack on. I’d have to take my pack off, and yet how? If I undid the buckles that held the backpack’s straps around my waist and over my shoulders, there would be no way that I could keep it from falling so violently away from me that it might rip my arms off. “You need a hand?” the young man asked. “No. I’ve got it,” I said in a falsely unruffled tone. The only thing I could think to do was turn my back to the van and squat to sit on the doorframe while clutching the edge of the sliding door, letting my pack rest on the floor behind me. It was bliss. I unclipped my pack’s straps and carefully extricated myself without tipping my pack over and then turned to climb inside the van to sit beside it.