Disappointment

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)

  And I was also determined not to fall into the trap of making the book merely a clever, shallow rebuttal of God’s existence. That would be not only boring and predictable, but also inappropriate. This could not be a wholly cerebral book, because images of God had, surely, much to tell us about the pathos of human aspiration. Nobody thought much of the idea, however, and it was a long time before my new agent found a publisher. “It can’t be done,” said one of the editors who saw my synopsis. “It’s impossible to condense such a huge idea into a single volume.” “Who’s going to read it?” asked another. “Religious people won’t want to hear that their God is on a par with the gods of other faiths, and unbelievers won’t be interested.” “It’s so religious !” sighed a friend who worked in one of the houses that had rejected the book. “Karen, don’t write this book now! You need to do something more mainstream.” More secular, she meant. “You read English at college. Perhaps you could do something literary? A new biography of Fanny Burney or George Eliot.” “What about a travel book?” Charlotte asked. “You enjoyed the travel you did with the Israelis, didn’t you? Why not go on a journey to somewhere important. Japan, for instance. What about a look at modern Japan?” Anything, it seemed, would be better than God. This was sensible advice. After all, I wasn’t a believer, so why let my career be hamstrung by this religious stuff? The book on the Crusades had been a disaster and the dismal sales figures would not endear me to a future publisher. Better to make it clear that I had turned over a new leaf and abjured my unprofitable past. Yet despite the lack of encouragement, I refused to relinquish the project. Why? It was not as though I were passionately in love with the subject. I had rarely read a book about God that was not, at least in part, abstract and dull. Why should my own be any different? I had no training in philosophy or metaphysics, and might write something hopelessly naïve. And why go on producing religious books in Britain, where only about 6 percent of the population attended a service on a regular basis? It seemed a doomed and even a self-destructive project. Many found the very idea hilarious. “Hi, Karen—how’s God?” they would ask, as though inquiring about a mutual acquaintance. Others raised their eyebrows in mild disapproval. “Do you think you can find anything new to say? Do we really need yet another book about God?”

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  But the masseur was not real, I decided. He was only my transient sexual angel who kept reappearing with his heavenly message in my bedroom at preappointed hours. Perhaps, I thought, deep in my unexamined soul, I really am a conventional girl who simply got thrown out of orbit, and a boyfriend is what I need. Perhaps the masses knew something I didn’t about men and women and love and sex. So I also tried dating. Six weeks per male, quick to sex, oral, but every time they fucked me I felt fucked over and fired them, one by one. They’d get in, get off, roll over, and I’d feel used and underpaid. So I kept calling the masseur—whom I paid. It was a better deal. Disappointment is a great teacher—if one survives the lacerations to one’s romantic ideal. After my marriage ended I was willing, open, and angry, and nothing that others did or “society” suggested in terms of conducting relationships necessarily held any merit for me. Everything I knew hadn’t worked, so I was free to try anything. Most of all, I had valuable firsthand experience that “relationships” that exist in “real life” sooner or later lose their erotic excitement. Not a particularly original notion, but one I now owned. At the same time, being a dreamer, I was adamant that there had to be another way. All was now backwards to me: fuck love and love sucking. I was discovering that while the theatrical stage left me numb and afraid and invisible, the sexual stage brought out a spontaneous theatricality and confidence that I knew was my truest self—or at least the one that amused me most. So, like a sexual scientist, I set out to test my theories, to adjust them as needed, and to formulate new ones as they evolved. I had already lost everything, so I had nothing to lose. Thus I vacillated between experiments in the nightmare of attachment with nice-nice sex and the thrill of naughty sex without attachment—take your Tantra and shove it up your yoni. There were only two rules that governed my behavior. One was relentlessly safe sex—I became the Queen of Condoms. The second was the importance of quality control. If the sex isn’t awesome, or at least fascinating, get out, stop, shift gears, and change direction with minimum discussion. There were, as a result, plenty of discarded bodies floating in the moat around my castle, but the drawbridge was always down, inviting new specimens into my laboratory. They came in droves. NEW YEAR’S EVE

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

  It will force me to finish the damn thesis.” “And then what?” I pursued. I had recently been discovering feminism, which as yet was only of academic interest to me. So far men had scarcely impinged upon my life, though I could see that in the future, when I would have to compete with men for jobs, my gender would count against me. We entered Holywell Manor and climbed the stairs leading to Jane’s apartment. It did seem unjust that Jane, who was by far the abler of the two, should sacrifice her career for Mark’s. “Then what? God knows!” Jane shrugged. We entered the lovely modern flat that had come with her prestigious junior fellowship. “The outlook is fairly bleak. I told Dorothy Bednarowska the news yesterday, and she just said: ‘Oh Jane, I am so sorry!’ Not exactly a ringing endorsement for the plan! But there is a university at Lancaster—and if I got a job there I could commute, I suppose.” She put on the kettle for coffee. “If not, it’ll be me and the kitchen sink—not forgetting the sheep, of course.” She looked thwarted. And indeed, what became of highly educated women who married men less clever than themselves? I didn’t know what I should do, if ever I were in Jane’s position. I knew that I would resent any man who would take that kind of sacrifice for granted, and I did not envy Mark. Jane was a powerful lady and I did not fancy his chances if she were cooped up in an isolated manor house for too long. Now, my sister, Lindsey, was quite different. She had called in to see me a few days earlier to tell me that she was emigrating to Canada. I began to tell Jane the story as we sat down with our coffee. “Your sister—the famous actress?” Jane asked with raised eyebrows. “I thought she was starring in Crossroads. What’s she doing in Canada?” Lindsey had trained as an actress, rather to my parents’ dismay. For a time they had had the dubious pleasure of saying that they had two daughters: one was an actress and the other a nun. We did not meet very often, since we had such different lives and interests. Lindsey led a highly precarious life in London, doing odd typing and waitressing jobs while “resting” between plays. She had grown up tall, sexy, and glamorous and always made me feel an ugly duckling that had no hope of turning into a swan.

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

  He did, too: white jersey, brown cord trousers, and hair brushed and curly. “Now, Jacob, you look at the papers while I make our toast.” “Karen.” He put his head round the door. “You won’t be angry, will you, if I spill coffee all the way down the front of my white jersey?” “Not if it’s an accident, no.” “But if I do it on purpose?” “Then I’ll be very angry indeed.” “Because, Karen, I’m going to do it!” He picked up his mug and regarded me hopefully. “Don’t you dare!” I thundered predictably. “Oh, don’t be severe!” Jacob beamed . “I shall be very severe indeed, if you’re not sitting in your place in two seconds flat!” “Oh, don’t be displeased!” As he returned to the dining room, I heard him mutter: “Karen was extremely oppressive with Jacob. ‘Don’t you dare do it!’ she cried angrily . . . Jacob looked crestfallen and pleaded with Karen. ‘Oh, don’t be displeased,’ he begged wistfully.” When, an hour later, Mass began, Jacob behaved beautifully. He stood with his eyes closed and his hands joined, fingers pointing heavenward. He must have learned this in school. “You don’t have to stand like that all the time,” I whispered. He nodded gravely. During the hymns and music, he listened intently, head averted, a strange half smile of approval on his lips. Rapturously, he flung his head back and inhaled the incense. “Karen,” he whispered luxuriantly between sniffs, “I like coming to Blackfriars, I really do!” Well, Jenifer had been right. Jacob really was getting something from this. But what was it doing for me? This morning, the ritual seemed remote, arbitrary, and to have nothing to do with my own perplexities. This was the new vernacular Mass, the creation of the Second Vatican Council. It was lively, fresh, and cheerful— perhaps a little too cheery for my taste. It was all so sensible and matter-of-fact. It suggested that God was well disposed toward us and could be approached in a casual, confident spirit, as though he were a congenial boss. But God was not my friend. I could see now that he never had been. And this service was so wordy. The old liturgy, punctuated by singing that gave the congregation time for reflection, had had a silent, contemplative core. But we now seemed afraid to stop talking, and were reminding God insistently that he had created the world and redeemed us, as though he were too absentminded to recall these deeds. I cast my mind back to Mrs. Moore in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, confronted by the abysmal echo of the Marabar caves and finding no help in “poor, talkative little Christianity.” Perhaps we were afraid that if we stopped chattering to God in this way, the empty silence would cause him to vanish. As perhaps he had.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Our purpose is not to raise a debate about the use of terms like “radical,” “reactionary,” and “conservative.” Rather, it is to insist that the post-Pauline, pseudo-Pauline letters are anti-Pauline with regard to major aspects of his theology. They represent, as we argue in the next chapter, a taming of Paul, a domestication of Paul’s passion to the normalcy of the Roman imperial world in which he and his followers lived. We do not want to complicate matters too much by introducing a fourth Paul, but the nature of our sources requires it. As mentioned earlier, over half of the book of Acts is about Paul. By the same author who wrote the gospel of Luke, Acts was most likely written near the end of the first century, some thirty years or so after Paul’s death. The literary form of Acts is very different from that of the letters, for it is a narrative—indeed, the only narrative about Paul that we have in the New Testament. It focuses more on Paul’s activity than on his message. In it are the stories of Paul’s conversion to be a follower of Jesus, told three times; his three missionary journeys; and his arrest in Jerusalem, imprisonment, and appearances before a variety of officials. Then he is taken to Rome as a prisoner to make his appeal to the emperor. Acts ends with Paul under house arrest in the capital of the empire, still preaching the gospel. Because Acts does not report Paul’s death, some scholars have argued that Acts must have been written while Paul was still alive, which would mean the early 60s at the latest. This argument pre sumes that the purpose of Acts was to provide a “life of Paul” and that the most plausible explanation for the lack of mention of Paul’s death is that he hadn’t yet died. But the purpose of Acts, the plan of the book, is to tell the story of the spread of the gospel from Jerusalem to Rome (see, for example, Acts 1:8). And so Acts ends appropriately with Paul preaching the gospel in the capital of the empire. For the author to have ended with, “And then Rome executed him,” would have been an odd climax, to say the least. To return to the question of the use of Acts as a source for Paul, there is significant scholarly disagreement about the degree to which the portrait of Paul in Acts is consistent with or different from the radical Paul of the genuine letters. Acts reports much that Paul’s letters do not. This is neither surprising nor particularly significant, given the different literary genres. However, when there is overlap between Acts and the letters, Acts is sometimes consistent with the letters and sometimes not, making it difficult to assess the historical accuracy of Acts when there is no overlap.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Massachusetts for religious reasons. The tall tales we unthinkingly absorb when young somehow remain within; the result is a narrowly conceived sense of national belonging productive of the most uncompromising of satisfying myths: “American exceptionalism.” We are unique and different, and the absence of class is one of our hallmarks. Exceptionalism emerges from a host of earlier myths of redemption and good intentions. Pilgrims, persecuted in the Old World, brave the Atlantic dreaming of finding religious freedom on America’s shores; wagon trains of hopeful pioneer families head west to start a new life. Nowhere else, we are meant to understand, was personal freedom so treasured as it was in the American experience. The very act of migration claims to equalize the people involved, molding them into a homogeneous, effectively classless society. Stories of unity tamp down our discontents and mask even our most palpable divisions. And when these divisions are class based, as they almost always are, a pronounced form of amnesia sets in. Americans do not like to talk about class. It is not supposed to be important in our history. It is not who we are. Instead, we have the Pilgrims (a people who are celebrated at Thanksgiving, a holiday that did not exist until the Civil War), who came ashore at Plymouth Rock (a place only designated as such in the late eighteenth century). The quintessential American holiday was associated with the native turkey to help promote the struggling poultry industry during the Civil War. The word “Pilgrim” was not even popularized until 1794. Nevertheless, the “first” Thanksgiving has been given a date of 1621, when well-meaning Pilgrims and fair-minded Wampanoags shared a meal. The master of ceremonies was their Indian interpreter, Squanto, who had helped the English survive a difficult winter. Left out of this story is the detail (not so minor) that Squanto only knew English because he had been kidnapped and sold as a slave to an English ship’s captain. (Coerced labor of this kind reminds us of how the majority of white servants came to America.) Squanto’s friendship, alas, was a far more complicated affair than the fairy tale suggests. He died of a mysterious fever the very next year while engaged in a power struggle with Massasoit, the “Great Sachem” of the Wampanoag confederation. 7 In spite of the obvious stature of a Washington and a Jefferson, and Virginia’s settlement thirteen years pre-Pilgrim, the southern states lagged behind the scribbling northerners in fashioning a comprehensive colonial myth to highlight their own cultural ascendancy in the New World. Here’s what we have: Less a story than a mystery, there persists to this day a morbid curiosity

• From Naked Ambition

  [pleasant music] - [Sarahjane] As the 60s go on, and she's working with models who have grown up in a culture that has a little bit more sexual liberation, there's a lot more daringness, a lot more untidiness, let's say. Instead of the Bouffant Beauties, who she worked with for a long time, you get these long-haired hippies, these really just natural beauties. - Into the late 60s and the early 70s, when suddenly they wanted to see genitals, it was a huge bar. Women did not feel proud of their pussies. They didn't have any ego about that. That was a part they didn't want people to look at, and it was a huge barrier. And it meant a complete change in the kind of women who would take their clothes off. [upbeat music] - I think that nudity, it's really a cyclical phenomenon. I think it comes, it gets very liberal and extreme, and it goes back, reacts the other way. And it just seems to be a cycle in entertainment. [pleasant music] - Being a figure in Miami put Bunny in a really optimal position to get involved in the next wave of sexual expression. [upbeat music] - [Dian] When you get into the 70s, suddenly artistry just wasn't important anymore. - Nobody cared about pinup in the 70s, it was kinda like that was old fashioned. - Guccione, with Penthouse, introduced pubic hair. Playboy waited about a year, and then they came out with pubic hair. [upbeat music] Then you got a guy named Larry Flint. He came out in 1976 with Hustler. [upbeat music] This was another revolution. - Was a market chef, Larry Flint and his enterprises and Penthouse Magazine. - All that was important was getting the genitals, get those genitals in your face. [upbeat music] - You know, that's just hardcore porn. You don't need a great photographer like Bunny to do that. - Bunny did try somewhat to adapt to the new market, but when they wouldn't accept her work, she wasn't willing to compromise. - She was struggling to still try to do the same kind of milder photography that had made her success in the beginning without a real audience. - As pinup gets overshadowed by porn, Bunny really starts to pull back. There was a period where mom couldn't cross that line, because the photos were getting so trashy in the men's magazines, they were not at all respectful. - Then in the late 60s and early 70s, feminism was kind of born in that generation's incarnation. And it was extremely anti pornography and, by association, anti nudity. - The marchers' aim was clear, let's kill the $4 billion industry that exploits females and female bodies, young and old. It has nothing to do with sex, with love, with erotica, it is violence.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  It was a disgusting low-class habit, and the nurse should have consulted her before encouraging me in such vulgar behavior. She said she was going to give that woman a piece of her mind, by golly. “After all,” Mom said, “I am your mother, and I should have a say in how you’re raised.” • • • “Do you guys miss me?” I asked my older sister, Lori, during one visit. “Not really,” she said. “Too much has been happening.” “Like what?” “Just the normal stuff.” “Lori may not miss you, honey bunch, but I sure do,” Dad said. “You shouldn’t be in this antiseptic joint.” He sat down on my bed and started telling me the story about the time Lori got stung by a poisonous scorpion. I’d heard it a dozen times, but I still liked the way Dad told it. Mom and Dad were out exploring in the desert when Lori, who was four, turned over a rock and the scorpion hiding under it stung her leg. She had gone into convulsions, and her body had become stiff and wet with sweat. But Dad didn’t trust hospitals, so he took her to a Navajo witch doctor who cut open the wound and put a dark brown paste on it and said some chants and pretty soon Lori was as good as new. “Your mother should have taken you to that witch doctor the day you got burned,” Dad said, “not to these heads-up-their-asses med-school quacks.” • • • The next time they visited, Brian’s head was wrapped in a dirty white bandage with dried bloodstains. Mom said he had fallen off the back of the couch and cracked his head open on the floor, but she and Dad had decided not to take him to the hospital. “There was blood everywhere,” Mom said, “but one kid in the hospital at a time is enough.” “Besides,” Dad said, “Brian’s head is so hard, I think the floor took more damage than he did.” Brian thought that was hilarious and just laughed and laughed. Mom told me she had entered my name in a raffle at a fair, and I’d won a helicopter ride. I was thrilled. I had never been in a helicopter or a plane. “When do I get to go on the ride?” I asked. “Oh, we already did that,” Mom said. “It was fun.” Then Dad got into an argument with the doctor. It started because Dad thought I shouldn’t be wearing bandages. “Burns need to breathe,” he told the doctor. The doctor said bandages were necessary to prevent infection. Dad stared at the doctor. “To hell with infection,” he said. He told the doctor that I was going to be scarred for life because of him, but, by God, I wasn’t the only one who was going to walk out of there scarred. Dad pulled back his fist as if to hit the doctor, who raised his hands and backed away.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Or among the dangerously promiscuous, those who didn’t distinguish between the sexes or who slipped into the tepid waters of dimly lit love grottoes and swamps. But like so many reasonable ideas that seem less bright in the harsh illumination of general distribution, it was soon exported to this land of tidy shrubs and the Junior League. Maybe the key party first touched suburban ground on Long Island, on the bay side; it might have landed in New Jersey, in Bernardsville or Princeton; or it might have emerged in Westchester, or even as far north as the Boston suburbs. Or maybe even California, where lax-moraled filmmakers and artists lived contiguously with taxpayers and families. Whatever its true origin, or its distribution (its Poisson Distribution), west to east, south to north, it undeniably appeared in Fairfield County in the early seventies. The rules were appallingly simple. The men tossed their house keys into a convenient container—or hung them on pegs or spread them like a buffet on the front table or on the master bed—and the women, at evening’s end, selected a set at random. And then the party retired to taste novelty. Sometimes the men looked on as the women selected—leering, suggestive, hopeful, disappointed, or despairing; sometimes the women wore blindfolds fashioned from metaphorically rich garments, black silk stockings, for example; sometimes, the proceedings took place with a joyless resolve, as if the participants were merely plugged into a circuitry of compulsion. In New Canaan, word had come of the key parties long before the first had been thrown. Local marriages awaited key parties the way a smart boy, already having pored over the dictionary definition of masturbation, awaits the day when he will understand it. The first one, thrown by some younger, unhappier residents over in the West School district, on Ponus Ridge, was viewed publicly with contempt but privately with much interest. And this contradictory posturing became the rule. At the Armitage party, held in the summer of 1972, partners at competing law firms bedded one another’s wives, and women who were best of friends compared notes on the prowess and endowment of local men. The ramifications of these first parties took some time to emerge. Love had woven its tapestry, and the Armitages, the Sawyers, the Steeles, the Boyles, the Gormans, the Jacobsens, the Hamiltons, the Gadds, the Earles, the Fullers, the Buckleys, the Regans, not to mention the Bolands, the Conrads, the Millers, and others, had followed its complex thread. But the revelations of this inquiry weren’t so surprising. No one returned with tales of dark new terrains—anal sex or urolagnia or masochism or coprophagy; in fact, the Armitage’s couples coupled in the way they always had. But they walked with a new jauntiness. For a day or two. Their hearts twittered with novelty. Then silence took hold of the participants.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Until very recently, this was the only sort of story that non-trans publishers and media producers would allow transsexual women to tell. And while I respect any trans woman who has been brave enough to share her story with the world, the media’s narrow focus on the most palatable or sensationalistic transsexual storylines has resulted in making invisible the vast diversity of perspectives and experiences that exist among trans women. Further, this has dumbed down the intricate and difficult relationships many of us have with our own genders and physical bodies. It has also erased the difficulty we face in dealing with the gender stereotypes that other people project onto us because we are women and because we are transsexuals. Other people who know me from my work as a transgender activist and trans-focused performance poet might have assumed that I was working on a “transgender revolution” book: one similar to those books by Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg, and Riki Wilchins that influenced me so much when I was first coming out; one that challenges readers to look beyond the gender binary; one that encourages all transgender people (whether they are transsexuals, crossdressers, genderqueers, drag artists, etc.) to recognize that we are all in the same boat, all victims at the hands of the same rigid cultural gender norms. While I do believe that all transgender people have a stake in the same political fight against those who fear and dismiss gender diversity and difference in all of its wondrous forms, I do not believe that we are discriminated against in the same ways and for the exact same reasons. I have found that the ways people reacted to me back when I identified as a mostly closeted male crossdresser, or as a bigendered queer boy, were very different from one another and yet again different from the way people react to me now that I am an out transsexual woman. The focus on “transgender” as a one-size-fits-all category for those who “transgress binary gender norms” has inadvertently erased the struggles faced by those of us who lie at the intersection of multiple forms of gender-based prejudice. And while I agree with many of the points “shattering-the-gender-binary”-themed books regularly make, I have come to the realization that they only tell part of the story. The idea that all anti-trans discrimination arises from the fact that, as transgender people, we “transgress binary gender norms” does not resonate completely with my personal experiences. As a somewhat eccentric kid, I was given plenty of leeway to opt out of boys’ activities and to cultivate an androgynous appearance and persona. I was sometimes teased for being different, for being an atypical or unmasculine boy, but it was nothing compared to venom that was reserved for those boys who acted downright feminine.

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

  We might look like we’re hitting it out of the park, but we feel like we’re striking out. For those of us who struggle with it, perfectionism is a misnomer: it’s not about striving to be perfect. Instead, it’s about never feeling good enough. * * * Interestingly, at the heart of perfectionism is something downright magical: conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is the least sexy superpower. Detail- oriented super vision! Single-handedly crush the marshmallow test! Clear the highest standards in a single bound! But it is the most potent trait for a good life. Dr. Angela Duckworth, author of the book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, and three colleagues examined almost ten thousand American adults and identified conscientiousness as the most consistent predictor of both objective and subjective success—it plays a role in everything from income to happiness to life satisfaction. Conscientiousness is deeply rooted; the word dates from the 1600s and distills down to conscience, our inner sense of right and wrong. It means caring deeply—caring about doing things right, caring about doing a good job, caring about being a good person. We care deeply about, and for, those around us. But at some point, conscientiousness can tip over into unhelpful perfectionism. Trailblazing Oxford University colleagues Drs. Roz Shafran, Zafra Cooper, and Christopher Fairburn* posit that clinical levels of unhelpful perfectionism emerge when we keep pushing despite adverse consequences; we keep hammering away at the nail long after we’ve smashed our thumb. Two core elements lie at the heart of clinical perfectionism, both of which made my eyebrows shoot up in recognition. First is a hypercritical relationship with oneself. We are our own worst critics. We focus on flaws rather than what’s going well, what is lacking rather than what’s good. When we don’t fulfill those high expectations for ourselves, we are hard on ourselves, but when we do, we decide the expectations were insufficiently demanding in the first place. Second is an overidentification with meeting personally demanding standards, which Shafran and colleagues call overevalution. Our evaluation of ourselves as a person is contingent upon our performance. In other words, we conflate meeting all our expectations for ourselves (or failing to do so) with our sense of self.

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

  But there are no social skills deficits in social anxiety (I’ll talk more about this in chapter 16), so I knew something else was going on. Rosie talked about the conference, about feeling increasingly dispirited as easy groups formed around her. “It’s like not knowing how to speak the local language,” she said of her brushes with social anxiety. To compensate, she said, “I’ll spend hours planning my approach to something social. But if it doesn’t go as planned, I get really mad at myself. I’ll analyze things afterwards to see what went wrong so it doesn’t happen again. I’m twenty-five. I should really know how to have a conversation, right? So there’s really no excuse for making any mistakes. Talking should go smoothly. I shouldn’t be offending anyone, make anyone feel bad, and I should be smart, confident, and sensitive. Oh, and witty. I need to be witty. And don’t say, ‘Be yourself.’ I hate that. If I was myself, I’d act all awkward, weird, and pretentious.” Welcome to the stratosphere of perfectionism. No wonder we can’t breathe. Here we find the fourth myth of social anxiety: I have to perform perfectly. We’ve crossed a line into unrealistically high standards, rigid and relentless adherence to those standards, and, most important, a belief that one’s self- worth is contingent upon the results. Indeed, in a culture that places the standard at “flawless” it’s no wonder we’re anxious. But “perfectionism” is actually a misnomer. Few of us expect our lives—social or otherwise—to be truly perfect. Instead, perfectionism is about never being good enough. As Rosie talked about the conference, as well as other social situations she’d found herself in since then (lab meeting, showing a visiting scholar around the lab, and one excruciating bar hop with her classmates), she let the rules she’d been holding herself to slip. I must always sound intelligent. I should always have something interesting to say. There should never be gaps or silences in conversation. I should always project an air of easy confidence. I am responsible for keeping my conversation partner interested at all times. I have to be entertaining. I have to perform well. I have to make a good impression. I must connect with everyone. People need to like me. If I am not funny or cool, people will not want to be around me. Feeling pressured yet? Perfectionists have unrealistic criteria for success and broad criteria for failure. Just listening to her rules made me feel hopelessly inadequate, which made total sense; I’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who could excel under those expectations. In an illustrative study, leading social anxiety researcher Dr. Stefan Hofmann of Boston University investigated the link between sky-high standards and social anxiety.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  As a transsexual, I find myself dealing with this same phenomenon all the time, only with gender. Whether people realize it or not, most of us value, treat, and relate to women and men very differently, although not necessarily in a conscious or malicious way. Rather, like our attitudes about beauty and attraction, these prejudices are practically invisible to us, as they are woven into our social fabric. So when I tell someone that I used to be male, they are often dumbfounded at first, as if they have difficulty reconciling that someone who seems so naturally female to them could have once been something they consider to be so completely different. The fact that a single individual can be both female and male, or ugly and beautiful, at different points in their life challenges the commonly held belief that these classes are mutually exclusive and naturally distinct from one another. Coming face-to-face with an individual who has crossed class barriers of gender or attractiveness can help us recognize the extent to which our own biases, assumptions, and stereotypes create those class systems in the first place. But rather than question our own value judgments or notice the ways that we treat people differently based on their size, beauty, or gender, most of us reflexively react to these situations in a way that reinforces class boundaries: We focus on the presumed “artificiality” of the transformation the subject has undergone. Playing up the “artificial” aspects of the transformation process gives one the impression that the class barrier itself is “natural,” one that could not have been crossed if it were not for modern medical technology. Of course, it is true that plastic surgeries and sex reassignments are “artificial,” but then again so are the exercise bikes we work out on, the antiwrinkle moisturizers we smear on our faces, the dyes we use to color our hair, the clothes we buy to complement our figures, and the TV shows, movies, magazines, and billboards that bombard us with “ideal” images of gender, size, and beauty that set the standards that we try to live up to in the first place. The class systems based on attractiveness and gender are extraordinarily “artificial”—yet only those practices that seem to subvert those classes (rather than reaffirm them) are ever characterized as such. Shows depicting plastic surgery, gastric bypasses, and sex reassignments are designed (whether consciously or unconsciously) to single out and exaggerate the supposed “artificial” nature of these procedures, thus giving the audience the opportunity to enjoy the spectacle of these dramatic transformations without ever bringing into question the authenticity of the class barrier that is being crossed. The more dramatic the change, the more “artificial” the whole process will inevitably seem.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  The filmmaker was noticeably disappointed when I showed up looking like a somewhat normal guy, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. She eventually asked me if I would mind putting on lipstick while she filmed me. I told her that wearing lipstick had nothing to do with the fact that I was transgender or that I identified as female. She shot a small amount of footage anyway (sans lipstick) and said she would get in touch with me if she decided to use any of it. I never heard back from her. When audiences watch scenes of trans women putting on skirts and makeup, they are not necessarily seeing a reflection of the values of those trans women; they are witnessing TV, film, and news producers’ obsessions with all objects commonly associated with female sexuality. In other words, the media’s and audience’s fascination with the feminization of trans women is a by-product of their sexualization of all women. The Media’s Transgender Gap There is most certainly a connection between the differing values given to women and men in our culture and the media’s fascination with depicting trans women rather than trans men, who were born female but identify as male. Although the number of people transitioning in each direction is relatively equal these days, media coverage would have us believe there is a huge disparity in the populations of trans men and women. 5 Jamison Green, a trans man who authored a 1994 report that led to the city of San Francisco’s decision to extend its civil rights protections to include gender identity, once said this about the media coverage of that event: “Several times at the courthouse, when the press was doing interviews, I stood by and listened as reporters inquired who wrote the report, and when I was pointed out to them as the author I could see them looking right through me, looking past me to find the man in a dress who must have written the report and whom they would want to interview. More than once a reporter asked me incredulously, ‘You wrote the report?’ They assumed that because of my ‘normal’ appearance that I wouldn’t be newsworthy.” 6 Indeed, the media tends to not notice—or to outright ignore—trans men because they are unable to sensationalize them the way they do trans women without bringing masculinity itself into question. And in a world where modern psychology was founded upon the teaching that all young girls suffer from penis envy, most people think striving for masculinity seems like a perfectly reasonable goal. Author and sex activist Patrick Califia, who is a trans man, addresses this in his 1997 book Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism: “It seems the world is still more titillated by ‘a man who wants to become a woman’ than it is by ‘a woman who wants to become a man.’ The first is scandalous, the latter is taken for granted.

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

  Do these and your confidence will catch up. Move forward by living your life. 8. ____________________ 9. ____________________ 10. ____________________ What will working your way through your Challenge List be like? Most of the time, it will be tough but well worth it. You’ll find that your confidence catches up. You’ll discover what you never knew was in you all along. But other times it may not go so well. You’ll disappoint yourself. You’ll pull out all the stops of your bravery, and nothing will change. You’ll feel like trying to stretch your range is futile. Your Inner Critic will tell you to sit down, shut up, and keep your head down. This isn’t for you, it will say. You weren’t built to have confidence. Plus, once in a while, something bad will happen. People are judgy; people talk. There are haters out there. But if your practice doesn’t go as planned, ask yourself who was acting inappropriately. For her Challenge List, Camilla asked a stranger for the time, but the stranger ignored her. Who was out of line, Camilla or the stranger? Julio asked a question in a meeting and his boss blew him off. Again, who acted poorly, Julio or his boss? Remember Replace and Embrace from chapters 5 and 6? They’re not just a running start; you can use them as cleanup, too. Ask yourself how truly horrible was the experience? It feels cringe worthy now, but who will remember in a few days? (Probably no one besides you.) How often do things like this happen to people? (Probably often.) How many people has this happened to? (Lots—chalk one up for the human experience.) For example, for his Challenge List, Dante asked a question in class, but the professor didn’t understand what he meant. Dante tried to explain but tripped over his words. The professor looked perplexed and gave an answer that didn’t match the question. Dante felt embarrassed, but looking around, he saw none of the other students seemed to care. And a couple weeks later, when Dante went to office hours, the absentminded professor didn’t even seem to remember him. Clearly, it was no biggie. Finally, ask yourself a question that should sound familiar by now: How can I cope? For example, Winnie would always leave church as soon as it was over to avoid lingering and getting stuck in conversation. One Sunday, for her Challenge List, she stayed, determined to face her fears. But before she could say good morning to anyone, she got cornered by the church’s resident eccentric—a harmless but oddball elderly lady who smelled strongly of mothballs and sported dried toothpaste at the corners of her mouth. Winnie endured for twenty minutes before she excused herself and ran to her car. After calming down, she asked herself what she could do. How could she cope?

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

  For Johnny Carson, biographers theorize that Johnny’s persona, Johnny Carson the Entertainer, was created to win the approval of a specific person. His mother, Ruth, didn’t like boys; they were dirty and nasty, she said. Her favorite child was her daughter, Catherine. So Johnny’s persona, lore has it, was created to get positive attention from Ruth. If he could just be funny enough, successful enough, famous enough, maybe she would be proud of him. He didn’t do it for himself; he did it for approval that, sadly, turned out to be unattainable. Reportedly, at the height of Johnny’s fame Ruth once watched his Tonight Show monologue in the presence of a New York Times reporter, switched off the TV, and pronounced, “That wasn’t funny.” So here’s the difference between structure that hinders you and structure that’s a stepping-stone to the ultimate role of being yourself: the role should come from within, not from someone else. It can’t come from your impossible-to-please mother, your boss, your current crush, American society, or whoever else. Instead, your role should be chosen and inhabited only by you. Think of it this way: Pretend you are a building. Creating a persona chosen by someone else sets up a false front. Picture an old Wild West town: tumbleweeds rolling by, horses tied to their hitching posts in front of the buildings on Main Street. Looks like a solid settlement, right? But peek behind the imposing fronts and you’d find the buildings were often just canvas tents and a wooden floor, shoddy structures at best. Indeed, the cost and danger of hauling building materials to a town that may or may not survive the boom-and-bust economy of the Old West was prohibitive. But business owners realized they needed to project an image of success and stability to lure in customers. So they poured their resources into erecting impressive false fronts. They attended to the image but neglected the actual building. Playing a role that is chosen for you is like constructing a false front. Your precious resources get poured into the image while the actual building—the real, authentic you—is left wanting. The false front may be impressive or even intimidating, but its intention is to fool, to deceive. 1 By contrast, playing a role you choose yourself is like erecting scaffolding. With scaffolding, temporary structure is placed around a building in order to construct or repair it. The scaffold grants access and provides safety while you shore up the building, incorporate new elements, or add finishing touches. Then, when the work is done, the scaffolding is no longer necessary—it can be removed, but the new, improved building remains. Giving yourself some structure by playing a role you choose allows you to build up and reinforce the real you. * * * So how might this work in real life? How to assign yourself some structure so you can build up the real you?

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

  They caught up—the usual—what are you doing now, where are you living, how long has it been, how time flies. The years had been hard on Deena, but now she had a steady job at the local transportation authority and was in a relationship, a good guy after a string of bad boyfriends. Jim told her about his divorce. “I’m so sorry,” she said. Then, “Before you leave, can I talk to you in private?” Jim felt his heart in his throat. “Sure,” he croaked. They moved to the front steps and sat side by side in the waning light. She lit a cigarette and politely blew the smoke away from him. After a moment, she said, “You know, I thought you didn’t like me. It hurt me, because I thought you were a really great guy and I liked you. I wasn’t stupid—all these guys would come along, all these older guys, who wanted one thing. I had guys hitting on me all the time. It bothered me. But I knew I could talk to you. You actually listened, you were a gentleman, and that’s what I wanted. I knew you were the one for me.” Jim was speechless. “You thought I didn’t like you?” he said eventually. “It was the opposite.” Deena turned and looked at him for a long time. Then she smiled and gently punched his arm. She took a long drag from her cigarette. “What could have been.” * * * I met Jim at Boston’s sprawling Massachusetts General Hospital on a crisp February day. Months of kicking himself after the barbecue at Rosaleen’s had spurred him to make an appointment. Jim easily could have continued on as he was—lost love, failed marriage, emerging from his home after a weekend to squint in the bright sun of yet another Monday morning. But after his conversation with Deena, he decided enough was enough. It was time for a change. When he told me the story, I asked Jim what he thought would have happened with Deena under different circumstances. He chuckled and gazed out the window. “If I had done the opposite all those years ago we might be coming up on our thirtieth anniversary. I want to feel less anxious so I can live my life,” he said. “Absolutely,” I said. “We’ll do that, but how about in a different order? You’ll feel less anxious by living your life.” I wish I could shout that last sentence from the rooftops. With a bullhorn. Over and over again. It’s almost impossible to retreat from the world and reemerge transformed, like a cocoon transforms a caterpillar into a butterfly. Instead, humans learn and change on the job. Put another way, rather than reading about how to ride a bicycle, we have to get on the bicycle. It is wobbly at first. We fall. But eventually our muscles and mind learn.

• From Bold Move

  How: Is it doable? It’s time to create an action plan. What do you need to carry out each of these actions? Action: [Your Notes] Action: [Your Notes] Action: [Your Notes] 4. When: Is it scheduled? Break out your calendar. When will you complete the steps you outlined above? [Your Notes] Working and Reworking My Bold Plan I created two bold plans for myself: one related to well-being and one related to impact. For well-being, I set the goal of exercising twenty minutes a day, five days a week, in the morning before Diego woke up, for one month. Is this a workable step? Is it aligned with my value of well-being? I thought so, but I failed miserably in the first week, even though I really tried. I hadn’t exercised for two years and was carrying forty pounds more than my pre- COVID self, so it turned out not to be achievable. But failure is just good data for the next success, and so I didn’t get discouraged. This is something I often see my clients do: create a plan that might have been doable in the past but is perhaps too ambitious given a current reality (e.g., post-COVID Luana creating steps as if she were still pre-COVID Luana). So, if this is your first attempt at creating workable steps, I would suggest you take whatever you created and break it down in half. The point here is to set yourself up for success instead of sabotaging yourself into failure. This is an arbitrary exercise, so you may as well rig it in your favor! For instance, if I were advising someone on writing a book, I might say, “Make your first step one page per day. Literally one page. Take fifteen minutes, or take two hours, but when you hit the end of that page, you stop. Done for the day. No más.” This might seem pathetically easy, but it’s also wildly sustainable. And this exercise is all about sustainability. After bombing in my own attempt, I went back to the drawing board and came up with an even more workable step: exercise ten minutes, three times a week, before lunch, for one week. This was definitely better and I was able to stick to it! It did take major work to open up that ten minutes before lunch three times a week, which is an important point: if your goals don’t make it onto your calendars, they will never happen! The trick here is to really look at your calendar, put your workable step in the place where you think you will be most likely to succeed, and then go for it.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  At the time, I was voraciously reading everything I could get my hands on related to trans experiences and issues. As I read, I kept stumbling upon past instances of anti-trans-woman discrimination from within the lesbian and feminist communities. These included derogatory anti- trans-woman remarks by influential feminist thinkers such as Mary Daly, Germaine Greer, Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan, and of course Janice Raymond (who, in addition to writing the anti-trans screed The Transsexual Empire, tried to convince the National Center for Health Care Technology to deny transsexuals the right to hormones and surgery); stories about transsexual “witch hunts,” in which committed lesbian-feminists like Sandy Stone and Beth Elliott were publicly outed, debased, and exiled from the lesbian community solely for being transsexual; and of course, transwoman-exclusion policies, such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s euphemistically named “womyn-born-womyn-only” policy, which was retroactively instated in the early 1990s after an incident in which a woman named Nancy Burkholder was expelled from the festival when it was discovered that she was trans. 2 While I found it disappointing that people who identified as lesbians and as feminists would come down so harshly on another sexual minority, I cannot say that I was really surprised. After all, practically every facet of our society seemed to hate or fear trans people back then, and these incidents seemed more like a symptom of society-wide transphobia rather than something unique or specific to the lesbian community. And as I was giving thought to becoming involved in trans activism myself, there seemed to be plenty of other, more practical and relevant issues for me to take on. But in the years that followed, I experienced a number of changes in my life that would considerably reshape my views on this matter. For one thing, there was my physical transition and the countless social changes I experienced as a result of being perceived as female. But for me, being trans didn’t merely involve learning how to navigate my way through the world as a woman. I have the privilege of being appropriately gendered as female, so in my day-to-day life, when I am forced to come out to someone, nine times out of ten it is not as a transsexual, but as a lesbian. It happens every time somebody asks me if I am seeing someone and I reply, “Actually, I have a wife.” It happens every time Dani and I dare to hold hands or kiss in public.

• From Bold Move

  In that moment, I not only saw my dreams slip away from me, but I also felt as if I didn’t belong (in this institution, in this career, on this team). My thoughts began to spiral: If I’m not a medical doctor (MD), I’ll never direct a research lab! I don’t belong and I never will! Although there were a million ways I could have handled the situation— including discussing it further with my superiors—I avoided. And I did so in a super reactive way. Literally minutes after that brief interaction with the director of the lab, I practically ran back into my office and decided that I was going to apply to another job and leave this position. If I was never going to be a leader and belong at Mass General, I better go somewhere else, and fast. While from your perspective this might seem a bit rash, at the time I didn’t think this was avoidance at all. In fact, I thought I was being super proactive! It all seemed quite logical. As such, I immediately started to research job openings in psychology, wrote out cover letters, and even went as far as asking a few trusted colleagues for letters of recommendation. As long as I was doing something, I felt slightly better (avoidance is powerful!). Yet, after a weekend of preparing to apply to dozens of academic jobs all across the country, I still didn’t feel fully better. That is when David called me out. He gently asked me why I was so upset with my boss, and it wasn’t until I began explaining the situation that I realized I just felt threatened, like I didn’t belong at all because of my degree (or lack thereof). David asked me if I really intended to move to a new city, or if there was another way to address this problem. In talking things out rationally (hello, prefrontal cortex!), I realized that I was once again in avoid mode. I had reacted to her “MDs only” comment by getting ready to apply to jobs that I didn’t even want. While preparing to apply for these jobs helped me feel better, the relief was only momentary. And this relief was not without its consequences, for just like the pressure cooker that blows its lid, leaving a huge mess in its wake, I then had to go and explain to my colleagues that I was in fact not leaving MGH after all (embarrassing!). As you can see, fighting avoidance is hard, even for “fancy academics” like me (okay, only fancy because of my great red glasses!). But trust me, it can be done, and I will help you plot out a roadmap in the next chapter. But before we get there, let’s consider another reason why we might find ourselves stuck in reactive avoidance: attachment anxiety. To do that, let me share a bit more about my client Filomena.