Guilt

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 Pillar of Salt (1953)

  How often, as I returned home at five o’clock, with the night already seeping into the narrow streets and the sky a deep blue-black, did I plan to make my peace with my parents and to be a considerate and useful son! I thought I knew the necessary gestures: salted almonds or pistachio nuts for my mother on Friday nights, sympathy for my father over his asthma and a show of interest for his business worries, to offer to run errands, fix the electric iron and the light switches. All these flickers of filial devotion generally sparked up in me after family rows and were the ultimate product of the remorse that I never admitted. I would be touched by the exemplary behavior of famous men who had remained faithful sons throughout their lives. The more the parents lacked understanding for the career, the work, and the ambitions of their sons, the more the latter must have enjoyed the feeling of having done their duty with a model filial piety. I needed but to cross the threshold of our flat to find again its ambivalent atmosphere so full of bitterness, of slight but constant hostility, of claims on my feelings, all justified up to a point; at once, I became grouchy, deprived of my gratitude, discouraged. On Friday nights, when dinner had been varied and plentiful, family life was like a cloudless sky. No sooner had the first star appeared than my parents entered upon their day of rest; they would then be in good spirits, ready for a pleasant chat of which I was often the subject: “Remember what you wrote us from the summer camp: ‘You must carry me up! You must!’“ The whole family would laugh and I would try to smile although the story had already been repeated a thousand times. I found it more painful to be reminded now of the nonsense I had written than of my childhood panic. I could spot in their insistence on this little story a reproach that was also a revenge, half-resentful and half-affectionate. In effect, they were saying: “Remember, once you were weak and helpless. You think you are strong now and can do without us. When you needed us, we protected you.” I could see their increasing bitterness and disapproval of the turn my life was taking. It was neither pride nor resentment that separated me from my parents, but a far more penetrating emotion, that of guilt. I had been tutoring other kids ever since my fourth year in high school, so I was almost completely independent — financially, at least. I never dreamed of reproaching my parents with failing to give me what they had not given me: they had never had anything to give. But they made me feel guilty for what I didn’t give to them.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I have a sense of all that I leave out—the lacunae, especially the dreams, the hallucinations. Also, the lies are left out, a desperate necessity to embellish. So I do not write them down. The journal is therefore a lie. What is left out of the journal is also left out of my mind. At the moment of writing I rush for the beauty. I disperse the rest, out of the journal, out of my body. I would like to come back, like a detective, and collect what I have washed off. For example, the terrible, divine credulity of Hugo. I think of what he could have noticed. The time I came back from Henry’s room and washed myself, he could have seen the few drops of water that fell to the floor; stains on my underclothes; rouge rubbed off on my handkerchiefs. He could have questioned my saying to him, “Why don’t you try and come twice?” (as Henry does), my excessive fatigue, the rings under my eyes. I keep my diary very secret, but how often I have written in it while sitting at his feet by the fire, and he has not tried to read over my shoulder. When Eduardo made Hugo lie down, close his eyes, and respond to words—“love,” “cat,” “snow,” “jealousy”—his reactions were amazingly slow and vague. Jealousy alone brought an immediate response. He seems to refuse to register, to realize. That is good. It is his self-protection. It is the basis of the odd liberty I have in spite of his powerful jealousy. He does not want to see. This arouses such a pity in me that at times it maddens me. I would like him to punish me, beat me, imprison me. It would relieve me. I go to meet Dr. Allendy to talk about Eduardo. I see a handsome, healthy man, with clear, intelligent, seer’s eyes. My mind is alert, expecting him to say something dogmatic, formulistic. I want him to say it, because if he does, this will be another man I cannot lean on, and I will have to go on conquering myself alone. We talked first about Eduardo, how he had gained in strength. Allendy was glad I had noticed a keen difference. But now we came to a difficult point. “Did you know,” asked Allendy, “that you have been the most important woman in his life? Eduardo has been obsessed with you. You are his image. He has seen you as mother, sister, and unattainable woman. To conquer you means conquering himself, his neuroses.” “Yes, I know. I want him to be cured. I do not want to deprive him of his newborn confidence by telling him that I don’t love him sensually.” “How do you love him?” “I have always been attached to him ideally. I am now, but not sensually. There is another man, a more animal man, who really holds me strongly.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  My father swore that none of my brothers or sisters would stay in school a day longer than was necessary for the school certificate. In the name of justice, they must help him. Besides, modern education didn’t lead anywhere; a good artisan is worth more than a scribbler, and business is more certain than a diploma. Without his having to ask them overtly, the children started quitting school, one after the other, very early. Worn away by my father’s daily reminders of their expense, frightened by his asthma attacks, they felt guilty and spontaneously began to want to find a job. When I managed insidiously to persuade them to stay till the sixth year, all they gained thereby was a final examination at the end of the year. Convinced of their failure in spite of the heavy sacrifices already made, they were sure that the struggle was futile, and didn’t even dare turn up for the test. But I myself had now gone too far and was too conscious of my own ambition to turn back. On the contrary, the constant aggression, the mournful speeches which ceaselessly strengthened my feelings of guilt, all this gave a considerable importance to my studies. I brought to them a kind of passion, an avidity that my schoolmates could not understand, pleasant amateurs that they were. Like Loriot’s chocolates, so expensive for me, I swallowed as much of it all as I could. For whole years, I raced against time, making each day, each hour of my life count and conform literally to a strict schedule. I wanted to come up in the world, to succeed, but succeed at what? I wasn’t sure, but still had to keep going. I set myself provisional goals, stations on the long road I traveled: to win this prize and get ahead of that student. Since, at that age, knowledge and experience are so easily confused, my teachers believed me very mature and told me so. My major teacher in the third year noted “an energetic intellect” on my report card at the end of the year. I had the highest average in the second year and was probably Marrou’s best student in the first. The kids at school told me, and they would certainly not have made it up to please me, that Poinsot, our philosophy teacher, had said: “He’s the most intelligent student I’ve ever had, and I’ve been teaching for sixteen years.” One day I read that intellectual and sexual precociousness went together, and that many famous men had also been sexually very gifted.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Instead of peace, there was only more unpleasantness. When my father put on his cap and picked up his prayerbook to officiate, he seemed to become cramped as if a stranger were staring at him in mockery; and if I too put on a cap and stood up whenever required, I felt that I was watched by him and the rest of the family, as if they unmasked me in spite of my play-acting. It was an intolerable situation. As luck would have it, the younger children began having difficulties similar to mine. Frightened at their own audacity, they would look to me for support; but I refused to give it to them. When they began a destructive argument, they sought my eyes, but I looked away guiltily. My father answered quickly and brutally, not wanting to reopen the burning debates, ashamed before an adversary who was voluntarily silent. We ended by avoiding the ceremonies of minor importance and observed only the most solemn ones. And, I must admit, as I had nothing to offer in its stead, I was sometimes sorry to have shaken the world of their traditions. ~ 6. THE DANCE ~ The women of our house had already been living a good week in joyous anticipation of a mystery that made them forget all their dissensions. They tried to remain solemn about it, but were too excited to be able to conceal their wild childish happiness. Actually, they were busy organizing a dance, with Negro musicians and the sacrifice of a live white cock, for the purpose of exorcizing and saving Aunt Maissa. The poor woman really needed saving. Her brothers had married her off to an old man of sixty who had the reputation of being very rich. The marriage brokers had affirmed that he owned several houses. When they had been questioned, the ignorant tenants of these houses had confirmed the ownership. But the clever old rascal, in spite of his curled up mustache, his upright posture, and the great care he devoted to his dress, was only the rent-collector for an estate-management corporation. His twenty-year-old bride didn’t even obtain the standard of living that might have compensated her, by flattering her feminine vanity, for the essential element of marriage that was lacking, and helped her forget its absence. Still, her brothers had managed to marry off a girl who had no dowry, though this is the nightmare of families like ours. It turned out, nevertheless, to be a bad deal: she became hysterical and, having soon exhausted her husband, bounced back on her brothers, a pauper with two sick children.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  In the first days after the declaration of war, a few Italian planes flew so high above the city that they could not be seen, and they dropped some light bombs at random on the countryside. Although the first bursts of antiaircraft gunfire frightened us, the apparent inefficiency of the aggressor soon allayed our fears. Jokes were made about the poor Italians who were more afraid of our antiaircraft fire than we were of their bombs! For a while, we continued to use the trenches in the middle of the street, and I got into the habit of taking with me a book on psychology. Before long we were using them as refuse dumps, and the children took possession of them for their games. Besides, this war meant nothing to us, nor any other war, for that matter. Not since any man or community could remember had we ever been involved in an armed conflict; those were European games and disasters, and we bore the consequences of them because our fate was linked with that of Europe, but neither our minds nor our hearts were preoccupied. When the Italians finally stopped their timid flying expeditions, the war ceased to have anything to do with our everyday life. Even the pogrom which today seems to me so significant was only an accident, a part of our way of life. And then, all of a sudden, one day we found ourselves right in the middle of the tragedy. When I think how little I foresaw at the time what was about to come and actually did come, how politically ignorant I was, I cannot understand why I still suffer such confused remorse, so much repressed self-criticism and dissatisfaction with myself. Perhaps because I might have acted more wisely, perhaps because the acute self-awareness that I have since contracted like a disease does not allow me now to recognize the young man that I was at that time. My whole conduct was based on impulse. I lived through that period like any mediocre imbecile, stunned by hunger and exhaustion, believing any piece of gossip and reacting exactly like all the others. Or is it simply that I feel indebted to my age for not having been carted off to hell or had my nails torn out of my fingers or lost a leg or an arm in a slave-labor camp? This is required by the times, whether one be the hangman or the victim. I don’t feel victimized enough, and it tortures my conscience.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I have a bad night after the play. Hugo gets up in the early morning to bring me medicine, a sleeping pill. “What is the matter?” he asks. “What do you feel?” He offers the refuge of his arms. The first time I come back from Henry’s room, stunned, I find difficulty in talking in my usual lively way. Hugo sits down, takes up his diary book and writes wildly about me and “art” and how everything I do is right. While he reads this to me, I bleed to death. Before the end he begins to sob. He doesn’t know why. I get on my knees before him. “What is it, darling, what is it?” And I say this terrible thing: “Do you have an intuition?”—which, because of his faith and his slow senses, he cannot understand. He believes Henry only stimulates me imaginatively, as a writer. And it is because he believes this that he sits down to write also, to woo me with writing. I want to cry out, “That is so young of you; it’s like the faith of a child.” God, I’m old, I’m the last woman on earth. I am aware of a monstrous paradox: By giving myself I learn to love Hugo more. By living as I do I am preserving our love from bitterness and death. The truth is that this is the only way I can live: in two directions. I need two lives. I am two beings. When I return to Hugo in the evening, to the peace and warmth of the house, I return with a deep contentment, as if this were the only condition for me. I bring home to Hugo a whole woman, freed of all “possessed” fevers, cured of the poison of restlessness and curiosity which used to threaten our marriage, cured through action. Our love lives, because I live. I sustain and feed it. I am loyal to it, in my own way, which cannot be his way. If he ever reads these lines, he must believe me. I am writing calmly, lucidly while waiting for him to come home, as one waits for the chosen lover, the eternal one. Henry makes notes on me. He registers all I say. We are both registering, each with different sensors. The life of writers is another life. I sit on his bed, with my rose dress spread around me, smoking, and as he observes me, he says he will never take me into his life, to the places he has told me about, that for me all the trappings of Louveciennes are right and fitting, that I must have them. “You couldn’t live otherwise.” I contemplate his sordid room and exclaim, “I think it is true. If you put me in this room, poor, I would start all over again.” The next day I write him one of the most human notes he has ever received: no intellect, just words about his voice, his laughter, his hands.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  There would need to be a table for the telephone to the projectionist, she said, then stopped to consider the empty shelf . “And whatever I’ll need for Dolby Sound,” she added then. As I describe these very clear memories I am struck by what they have in common: each involves her trying to handle adult life, trying to be a convincing grown-up person at an age when she was still entitled to be a small child. She could talk about “My IRA” and she could talk about “Dolby Sound” and she could talk about “just noticing” she had cancer, she could call Camarillo to find out what she needed to do if she was going crazy and she could call Twentieth Century–Fox to find out what she needed to do to be a star, but she was not actually prepared to act on whatever answers she got. “Little Toys” could still assume equal importance. She could still consult her pediatrician. Was this confusion about where she stood in the chronological scheme of things our doing? Did we demand that she be an adult? Did we ask her to assume responsibility before she had any way of doing so? Did our expectations prevent her from responding as a child? I recall taking her, when she was four or five, up the coast to Oxnard to see Nicholas and Alexandra . On the drive home from Oxnard she referred to the czar and czarina as “Nicky and Sunny,” and said, when asked how she had liked the picture, “I think it’s going to be a big hit.” In other words, despite having just been told what had seemed to me as I watched it a truly harrowing story, a story that placed both parents and children in unthinkable peril—a peril to children more unthinkable still because its very source lay in the bad luck of having been born to these particular parents—she had resorted without hesitation to the local default response, which was an instant assessment of audience potential. Similarly, a few years later, taken to Oxnard to see Jaws , she had watched in horror, then, while I was still unloading the car in Malibu, skipped down to the beach and dove into the surf. About certain threats I considered real she remained in fact fearless. When she was eight or nine and enrolled in Junior Lifeguard, a program run by the Los Angeles County lifeguards that entailed being repeatedly taken out beyond the Zuma Beach breakers on a lifeguard boat and swimming back in, John and I arrived to pick her up and found the beach empty. Finally we saw her, alone, huddled in a towel behind a dune. The lifeguards, it seemed, were insisting, “for absolutely no reason,” on taking everyone home.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  She crossed her arms across her chest, but low, more toward the belly, and huddled next to the couch on the floor, rocking herself, hitting her forehead with her fist. “What do I do, Lord, what do I do?” “I’m calling Uncle Ray,” I said. Davey knew the number, recited it while I called him at the new houses. Half an hour later, he was home, his mouth set in a thin line. “I didn’t mean it,” Starr said, her hands in front of her like an opera singer. “It was an accident. You’ve got to believe me.” Nobody said anything. We left Starr crying in monotonous sobs, took Davey to the emergency hospital, where they popped his shoulder back in, taped it down. We concocted a story about how we were playing on the river. He jumped off a rock and fell. It sounded stupid even to me, but Davey made us promise not to say it was Starr. He still loved her, after everything. EASTER. A pure crystalline morning where you could see every bush and boulder on the mountain. The air was so clean it hurt. Starr was in the kitchen fixing a ham, pushing little points of cloves into the squares she’d scored into the top. She’d been sober for two weeks, taking a meeting a day. We were all making an effort. Davey’s sling was a constant reminder of how bad it could get. Starr put the ham in the oven, and we all went to church, even Uncle Ray, though he stayed behind in the car for a minute to get stoned before he came in, I could smell it as he passed by me to take the seat between Owen and Starr. Her eyes begged Reverend Thomas for a dose of the Blood. I tried to pray, to feel once again that there was something bigger than just me, someone who cared what I did, but it was gone, I could no longer detect the presence of God in that cinder-block church or in what was left of my soul. Starr yearned toward the sagging Jesus on the pearwood cross, while Uncle Ray cleaned his fingernails with his Swiss Army knife and I waited for the singing to start. Afterward we stopped at a gas station and Uncle Ray bought her an Easter lily, the promise of a new life. At home, the trailer smelled of ham. Starr served up lunch, creamed corn, canned pineapple rings, brown-and-serve rolls. Ray and I couldn’t look at each other, or it would all start again. We looked at the little kids, we played with our food, congratulated Starr on her cooking. Ray said Reverend Thomas wasn’t half bad. We had to put our eyes anywhere but on the other one’s face.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  18Ido not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree, the Harvard MBA, the summer with the white-shoe law firm. Those of us less inclined to compliment ourselves on our parenting skills, in other words most of us, recite rosaries of our failures, our neglects, our derelictions and delinquencies. The very definition of success as a parent has undergone a telling transformation: we used to define success as the ability to encourage the child to grow into independent (which is to say into adult) life, to “raise” the child, to let the child go. If a child wanted to try out his or her new bicycle on the steepest hill in the neighborhood, there may have been a pro forma reminder that the steepest hill in the neighborhood descended into a four-way intersection, but such a reminder, because independence was still seen as the desired end of the day, stopped short of nagging. If a child elected to indulge in activity that could end badly, such negative possibilities may have gotten mentioned once, but not twice. It so happened that I was a child during World War Two, which meant that I grew up in circumstances in which even more stress than usual was placed on independence. My father was a finance officer in the Army Air Corps, and during the early years of the war my mother and brother and I followed him from Fort Lewis in Tacoma to Duke University in Durham to Peterson Field in Colorado Springs. This was not hardship but neither was it, given the overcrowding and dislocation that characterized life near American military facilities in 1942 and 1943, a sheltered childhood. In Tacoma we were lucky enough to rent what was called a guest house but was actually one large room with its own entrance. In Durham we again lived in one room, this one not large and not with its own entrance, in a house that belonged to a Baptist preacher and his family. This room in Durham came with “kitchen privileges,” which amounted in practice to occasional use of the family’s apple butter. In Colorado Springs we lived, for the first time, in an actual house, a four-room bungalow near a psychiatric hospital, but did not unpack: there was no point in unpacking, my mother pointed out, since “orders”—a mysterious concept that I took on faith—could arrive any day.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  A third example: I remember very clearly the doll’s house she constructed on the bookshelves of her bedroom at the beach. She had worked on it for several days, after studying a similar improvisation in an old copy of House & Garden (“Muffet Hemingway’s doll’s house” was how she identified the prototype, taking her cue from the House & Garden headline), but this was its first unveiling. Here was the living room, she explained, and here was the dining room, and here was the kitchen, and here was the bedroom. I asked about an undecorated and apparently unallocated shelf. That, she said, would be the projection room. The projection room. I tried to assimilate this. Some people we knew in Los Angeles did in fact live in houses with projection rooms but to the best of my knowledge she had never seen one. These people who lived in houses with projection rooms belonged to our “working” life. She, I had imagined, belonged to our “private” life. Our “private” life, I had also imagined, was separate, sweet, inviolate. I set this distinction to one side and asked how she planned to furnish the projection room. There would need to be a table for the telephone to the projectionist, she said, then stopped to consider the empty shelf. “And whatever I’ll need for Dolby Sound,” she added then. As I describe these very clear memories I am struck by what they have in common: each involves her trying to handle adult life, trying to be a convincing grown-up person at an age when she was still entitled to be a small child. She could talk about “My IRA” and she could talk about “Dolby Sound” and she could talk about “just noticing” she had cancer, she could call Camarillo to find out what she needed to do if she was going crazy and she could call Twentieth Century–Fox to find out what she needed to do to be a star, but she was not actually prepared to act on whatever answers she got. “Little Toys” could still assume equal importance. She could still consult her pediatrician. Was this confusion about where she stood in the chronological scheme of things our doing? Did we demand that she be an adult? Did we ask her to assume responsibility before she had any way of doing so? Did our expectations prevent her from responding as a child? I recall taking her, when she was four or five, up the coast to Oxnard to see Nicholas and Alexandra. On the drive home from Oxnard she referred to the czar and czarina as “Nicky and Sunny,” and said, when asked how she had liked the picture, “I think it’s going to be a big hit.”

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  I recently read for the first time several fragments of what she had referred to at the time she wrote them as “the novel I’m writing just to show you.” She must have been thirteen or fourteen when this project occurred to her. “Some of the events are based on the truth and the others are fictitious,” she advises the reader at the outset. “The names have not yet been definitively changed.” The protagonist in these fragments, also fourteen and also named Quintana (although sometimes referred to by other names, presumably trials for the definitive changes to come), believes she may be pregnant. She consults, in a plot point that seems specifically crafted to “confuse the diagnostician and frustrate the psychotherapist,” her pediatrician. The pediatrician advises her that she must tell her parents. She does so. Her idea of how her parents would respond seems, like the entire rest of the plot point involving the pregnancy, confused, a fantasy, a manifestation of what might be extreme emotional distress or might be no more than narrative inventiveness: “They said that they would provide the abortion but after that they did not even care about her any more. She could live in their suburbia house in Brentwood, but they didn’t even care what she did any more. That was fine in her book. Her father had a bad temper, but it showed that they cared very much about their only child. Now, they didn’t even care any more. Quintana would lead her life any way she wanted.” At this point the fragment skids to an abrupt close: “On the next pages you will find out why and how Quintana died and her friends became complete burnouts at the age of eighteen.” So ended the novel she was writing just to show us. Show us what? Show us that she could write a novel? Show us why and how she would die? Show us what she believed our reaction would be? Now, they didn’t even care any more. No. She had no idea how much we needed her. How could we have so misunderstood one another? Had she chosen to write a novel because we wrote novels? Had it been one more obligation pressed on her? Had she felt it as a fear? Had we?

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  A third example: I remember very clearly the doll’s house she constructed on the bookshelves of her bedroom at the beach. She had worked on it for several days, after studying a similar improvisation in an old copy of House & Garden (“Muffet Hemingway’s doll’s house” was how she identified the prototype, taking her cue from the House & Garden headline), but this was its first unveiling. Here was the living room, she explained, and here was the dining room, and here was the kitchen, and here was the bedroom. I asked about an undecorated and apparently unallocated shelf. That, she said, would be the projection room. The projection room. I tried to assimilate this. Some people we knew in Los Angeles did in fact live in houses with projection rooms but to the best of my knowledge she had never seen one. These people who lived in houses with projection rooms belonged to our “working” life. She, I had imagined, belonged to our “private” life. Our “private” life, I had also imagined, was separate, sweet, inviolate. I set this distinction to one side and asked how she planned to furnish the projection room. There would need to be a table for the telephone to the projectionist, she said, then stopped to consider the empty shelf. “And whatever I’ll need for Dolby Sound,” she added then. As I describe these very clear memories I am struck by what they have in common: each involves her trying to handle adult life, trying to be a convincing grown-up person at an age when she was still entitled to be a small child. She could talk about “My IRA” and she could talk about “Dolby Sound” and she could talk about “just noticing” she had cancer, she could call Camarillo to find out what she needed to do if she was going crazy and she could call Twentieth Century–Fox to find out what she needed to do to be a star, but she was not actually prepared to act on whatever answers she got. “Little Toys” could still assume equal importance. She could still consult her pediatrician. Was this confusion about where she stood in the chronological scheme of things our doing? Did we demand that she be an adult? Did we ask her to assume responsibility before she had any way of doing so? Did our expectations prevent her from responding as a child? I recall taking her, when she was four or five, up the coast to Oxnard to see Nicholas and Alexandra. On the drive home from Oxnard she referred to the czar and czarina as “Nicky and Sunny,” and said, when asked how she had liked the picture, “I think it’s going to be a big hit.”

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

  These were the kinds of calls they prayed for. Despite the outward celebration, on the inside I felt awful—guilty. It seemed cruel that I was OK while Dad’s fate hung in the balance. My incredible news felt as if I were intentionally pouring alcohol on his open wound. This isn’t fair! Why me? Why not him? Why ask why? I know better. While my fear of dying was fading to a more manageable level, my fear of losing Dad was on the rise. I knew he wasn’t a statistic; he was a real person with real hopes and real potential. Just because the five-year survival rate for people with pancreatic cancer is only 10 percent didn’t mean he couldn’t be one of the “lucky ones.” Every patient’s circumstances, genetic makeup, and capacity to heal are different. But I still couldn’t shake the idea that I knew where this was ultimately going. That my dad wouldn’t make it. The reality is that fear and anxiety are a huge part of loss. They’re so deeply intertwined that they often get all tangled up in each other. Yet, few of us expect to feel these feelings to the degree that we do while in the thick of a crisis. But for all the panic and paralysis fear and anxiety cause, they are normal states of mind. This doesn’t mean we enjoy feeling this way. Truly, I’d rather gnaw my arm off than get caught in one of those hideous thought cyclones. Yet lightly feather-dusting such big emotions in therapy sessions was barely scratching the surface. I’d feel better for a hot second, only to be swept away an hour later by out-of-control feelings. It was exhausting. Because I was still a newbie at understanding the interconnected complexities of complicated emotions, I wasn’t always aware of what was happening in my body or how to cope when I felt flooded. If you struggle with these strong emotions, this chapter will give you a few new perspectives and tools to soothe your system. Let’s start with the basics. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FEAR AND ANXIETY People often confuse fear and anxiety because they can feel the same way in our bodies—the heart pounding, the sweaty palms, the racing thoughts. And while they’re both designed to keep us safe, they’re actually different. Fear is automatic. It’s designed to protect us from tangible and immediate threats. Fear signals a clear and present danger, prompting us to take instant action—pronto. See tiger. Run. Survive. Voilà! Fear has done its job. It comes on in a burst and has a beginning, middle, and end. Though we can be afraid of something from the past or future—like getting into a car accident again or losing another job—more often than not, we confuse that kind of fear with anxiety. In fact, many of us who identify as being fearful are probably more anxious than we fully understand.

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

  These were the kinds of calls they prayed for. Despite the outward celebration, on the inside I felt awful—guilty. It seemed cruel that I was OK while Dad’s fate hung in the balance. My incredible news felt as if I were intentionally pouring alcohol on his open wound. This isn’t fair! Why me? Why not him? Why ask why? I know better. While my fear of dying was fading to a more manageable level, my fear of losing Dad was on the rise. I knew he wasn’t a statistic; he was a real person with real hopes and real potential. Just because the five-year survival rate for people with pancreatic cancer is only 10 percent didn’t mean he couldn’t be one of the “lucky ones.” Every patient’s circumstances, genetic makeup, and capacity to heal are different. But I still couldn’t shake the idea that I knew where this was ultimately going. That my dad wouldn’t make it. The reality is that fear and anxiety are a huge part of loss. They’re so deeply intertwined that they often get all tangled up in each other. Yet, few of us expect to feel these feelings to the degree that we do while in the thick of a crisis. But for all the panic and paralysis fear and anxiety cause, they are normal states of mind. This doesn’t mean we enjoy feeling this way. Truly, I’d rather gnaw my arm off than get caught in one of those hideous thought cyclones. Yet lightly feather-dusting such big emotions in therapy sessions was barely scratching the surface. I’d feel better for a hot second, only to be swept away an hour later by out-of-control feelings. It was exhausting. Because I was still a newbie at understanding the interconnected complexities of complicated emotions, I wasn’t always aware of what was happening in my body or how to cope when I felt flooded. If you struggle with these strong emotions, this chapter will give you a few new perspectives and tools to soothe your system. Let’s start with the basics. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FEAR AND ANXIETY People often confuse fear and anxiety because they can feel the same way in our bodies—the heart pounding, the sweaty palms, the racing thoughts. And while they’re both designed to keep us safe, they’re actually different. Fear is automatic. It’s designed to protect us from tangible and immediate threats. Fear signals a clear and present danger, prompting us to take instant action—pronto. See tiger. Run. Survive. Voilà! Fear has done its job. It comes on in a burst and has a beginning, middle, and end. Though we can be afraid of something from the past or future—like getting into a car accident again or losing another job—more often than not, we confuse that kind of fear with anxiety. In fact, many of us who identify as being fearful are probably more anxious than we fully understand.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  In this way, we could have information that either was consciously unknown to the child or might be dangerous to uncover given her fragile state. We learned that at age two, Anna was present when her father shot her mother in the shoulder and then took his own life. An additional detail that compounded Anna’s symptoms was provoked by an experience she had prior to the picnic. She had been infuriated when Mary’s sixteen-year-old son Robert bullied her twelve-year-old brother. There was a strong possibility that Anna had been harboring ill will toward Robert before the drowning, and was seeking retribution at that time. This raised the likelihood that Anna might feel profound guilt about Mary’s death—perhaps even believing (through magical thinking) that she was responsible for it. I ask the female nurse to gently cradle and support Anna’s injured arm. This could help Anna contain the frozen “shock energy” locked in her arm, as well as heighten the child’s inner awareness. With this support, Anna would be able to slowly (i.e., gradually) thaw and access the feelings and responses that could help her come back to life. “How does it feel to be inside of your arm, Anna?” I ask her softly. “It hurts so much,” she answers faintly. Her eyes are downcast, and I say, “It hurts bad, huh?” “Yeah.” “Where does it hurt? Can you show me with your finger?” She points to a place on her upper arm and says, “Everywhere, too.” There’s a little shudder in her right shoulder followed by a slight sigh of breath. Momentarily, her drawn face takes on a rosier hue . “That’s good, sweetheart. Does that feel a little better?” she nods, then takes another breath. After this slight relaxation, she immediately stiffens, pulling her arm protectively toward her body. I seize the moment. “Where did your mommy get hurt?” She points to the same place on her arm and begins to tremble. I say nothing. The trembling intensifies, then moves down her arm and up into her neck. “Yes, Anna, just let that shaking happen, just like a bowl of Jell-O—would it be red, or green, or even bright yellow? Can you let it shake? Can you feel it tremble?” “It’s yellow,” she says, “like the sun in the sky.” She takes a full breath, then looks at me for the first time. I smile and nod. Her eyes grasp mine for a moment, then turn away. “How does your arm feel now?” “The pain is moving down to my fingers.” Her fingers are trembling gently. I speak to her quietly, softly, rhythmically. “You know, Anna, sweetheart … I don’t think there is anybody in this whole town that doesn’t feel that, in some way, it was their fault that Mary died.”

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  However, they tell us precious little about how we can change “undesirable” emotions such as sadness, anger and fear. Nor do they shed much light on how people change in general. Whether we admit it or not, we all want to change something fundamental about ourselves. Most likely though, being human, our first effort may be targeted at changing whoever is in our line of sight. We look for ways to get others to change—be they our spouses, employers, children or parents—and search out ways to cajole or coerce them to get with the program. With a modicum of insight, however, we will probably recognize that deep change must occur first within ourselves. Yet, just how this long-term change process occurs remains elusive. In the attempt to improve our lives, we may urge ourselves with the familiar refrains: “Just apply yourself … Start exercising tomorrow … Cut down on the sweets, booze, shopping … Pull yourself together … Come on, shape up, work out … You can do it if you really want.” And so it goes over and again. These exhortations and good intentions are all admirable efforts at what we call self-control. While this ability is an important life skill, it is often modest in what it can accomplish and is fraught with obvious shortcomings. Frequently, this strategy only works in the short run, leading us blindly into the quicksand of guilt and self-recrimination. Ironically, there are some days when it is no simple matter just to schedule a dental appointment or arrange for an annual medical exam. Consider the following snapshot of goal setting: On Monday, John and his wife conclude that they could use some extra income for their daughter’s dental braces. John, seeking a raise, summons his capacity for self-control. While keeping in mind his value to the firm, he awaits a strategically opportune moment. When he receives a generous compliment from his boss during their routine Friday meeting, he is cued to delicately broach the topic of the raise. In order to hold all of this information in check, until the ripe moment, his brain must employ volitional memory. John’s voluntary memory has to keep his clandestine intentions intact for four days. That’s not too hard, but not simple either. Anyone who has ever said to herself, midweek, “This weekend I will go the gym and work out,” knows how elusive it can be to keep that intention fresh. To get up on Saturday, pull the jogging shoes out of the closet and go to the gym before family responsibilities crowd out precious personal time is no small achievement. Accomplishing the larger, longer-range goals, such as losing weight, “making ourselves” more attractive or creating more freedom in our lives, can be so intimidating that we may give up early or never approach them at all—even at serious costs to our health and well-being. This is where self-control falls short.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  From my dreams he culls the consistent desire to be punished, humiliated, or abandoned. I dream of a cruel Hugo, of a fearful Eduardo, of an impotent John. “This comes from a sense of guilt for having loved your father too much. Afterwards I am sure you loved your mother much more.” “It is true. I loved her tremendously.” “And now you seek punishment. And you enjoy the suffering, which reminds you of the suffering you endured with your father. In one of your dreams, when the man forces himself into you, you hate him.” I feel oppressed, as if his questions were thrusts. I am in a terrible need of him. Yet analysis does not help. The pain of living is nothing compared to the pain of this minute analysis. Allendy asks me to relax and tell him what goes on in my mind. But what goes on in my mind is the analysis of my life. Allendy: “You are trying to identify yourself with me, to do my work. Have you not wished to surpass men in their own work? To humiliate them by your success?” “Indeed not. I constantly help men in their work, make sacrifices for them.” I encourage, admire, applaud them. No, Allendy is very wrong. He says, “Perhaps you are one of those women who are friends not enemies of man.” “More than that. My original dream was to be married to a genius and serve him, not to be one. When I wrote my book on Lawrence, I wanted Eduardo to collaborate with me. Even now I know he could have written a better one, only it is I who have the energy, the impulse.” Allendy: “You know about the Diana complex, the woman who envies man his sexual power.” “I have felt that, yes, sexually. I would have liked to have been able to possess June and other beautiful women.” There are ideas which Allendy abandons, as though he were sensing my susceptibility. Every time he touches upon my lack of confidence I suffer. I suffer when he touches on my sexual potency, my health, or my feeling of solitude, because there is no one man in whom I could confide entirely. I lie back and I feel an inrush of pain, despair. Allendy has hurt me. I cry. I cry also with shame, with self-pity. I feel weak. I don’t want him to see me cry and I turn away. Then I stand up and face him. His eyes are very soft. I want him to think me a superior woman. I want him to admire me. I like it when he says, “You have suffered a great deal.” When I leave him, I am in a dream, relaxed, warm, as if I had traversed fantastic regions. Eduardo says I am like a hen sitting on her eggs. Allendy: “Why, exactly, were you upset last time?” “I felt that some of the things you said were true.”

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He is glad to have seen me, like an instrument, giving out all its range of sounds. Humanly, I have lost something. Faith, perhaps. In place of that blind openness to him, I summon my cleverness. Later, when he weeps while telling me his father is starving, I sit paralyzed and my pity does not flow. I would give anything to know if he has sent his father some of the money I have given him, starving himself to do so. All I need to know is: Can he lie to me? I have been able to both love him and lie to him. I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes. When I loved Henry, as I did those four days, I loved him with a naked body that had shed its costumes and forgotten its lies. Perhaps it is not so with Henry. But love, in all this, trembles like a spear in a sand dune. To lie, of course, is to engender insanity. The minute I step into the cavern of my lies I drop into darkness. I have had no time to write down the lies. I want to begin. I suppose I have not wanted to look at them. If unity is impossible to the writer who is a “sea of spiritual protoplasm, capable of flowing in all directions, of engulfing every object in its path, of trickling into every crevice, of filling every mold,” as Aldous Huxley said in Point Counter Point , at least truth is possible, or sincerity about one’s insincerities. It is true, as Allendy said, that what my mind engenders fictionally I enrich with true feeling, and I am taken in, in good faith, by my own inventions. He called me “ le plus sympathique ” of the insincere ones. Yes, I am the noblest of the hypocrites. My motives, psychoanalysis reveals, possess the smallest degree of malevolence. It is not to hurt anyone that I let my lover sleep in my husband’s bed. It is because I have no sense of sacredness. If Henry himself were more courageous, I would have given Hugo a sleeping potion during Henry’s visit so I could have gone and slept with him. He was too timid, however, to steal a kiss. Only when Hugo had left did he throw me on the ivy leaves, in the back of the garden. I once spent four days with a passionate human lover. That day I was fucked by a cannibal. I lay exhaling human feelings, and I knew at that precise moment he was nonhuman. The writer is clothed in his humanity, but it is only a disguise.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I remembered the day she took me to Cal Arts. I was intimidated by the students, they seemed pretentious for people with funny haircuts, and their work was ugly. It cost ten thousand dollars a year to go there. “Don’t think about money,” Claire said. “This is the place, unless you think you want to go east.” We’d sent in the application in November. I had to forget all that now. I sat cross-legged next to her on the bed, counted the pills in the jar. For Insomnia. There were still plenty. More than enough, and the last person who would ever think about me was gone. My mother? She just wanted possession. She thought if she could kill Claire, she would get me back, so she could erase me some more. I felt the pull of that dark circle, the neck of the bottle. It was a rabbit hole, I could jump down it and pull it in after me. You never knew when help might come. But I knew. It came and I turned my back, I let it go down. I pushed my savior out of the life raft. I panicked. Now I reaped my despair. I sat with the jar in my hand, watching that winter sky’s blush, weak pink strained through blue haze, coming through the angle-pruned branches and weeping boughs of the elm. Sunset came so early now. She loved this time of day, loved feeling beautifully melancholy and sitting under the elm, looking up into its branches, dark against the sky. In the end, I didn’t take the pills. It seemed too grandiose, a big gesture, fraudulent. I didn’t deserve to forget that I had turned my back on her. Oblivion wiped the books clean. It was too easy. I was the keeper of the butterflies now. Instead, I dialed Ron’s pager, added the 999 that meant emergency. I sat back down and waited. RON SAT NEXT TO ME on the bed, his shoulders sagging like an old horse’s back and his face pressed into his hands, as if he could not look at one more thing. “You were supposed to watch her,” he said. “You were the one who left.” He gasped, and broke into long, shuddering sobs. I never thought I would feel sorry for Ron, but I did. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he pressed his hand over mine. It occurred to me I could make him feel better. I could stroke his hair, and say, It’s not your fault. She had problems we couldn’t have helped, no matter what we did. That’s what Claire would have done. I could have made him love me. Maybe he would keep me. He held my hand and stared down at her silk slippers beside the bed. “I’ve been afraid of this for years.” He pressed my hand to his cheek. I could feel his tears spill over the back, seeping between my fingers.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He says, “I’ve never seen you look so beautiful. I have never felt your power so strongly. What is the new confidence in you?” He desires me, just as he did that other time, after John’s visit. My conscience dies at that moment. Hugo bears down on me, and I instinctively obey Henry’s whispered words. I close my legs about Hugo, and he exclaims in ecstasy, “Darling, darling, what are you doing? You’re driving me wild. I’ve never felt such joy before!” I cheat him, I deceive him, yet the world does not sink in sulphur-colored mists. Madness conquers. I can no longer put my mosaics together. I just cry and laugh. After a concert, Hugo and I left together, like lovers, he said. That was the day after Henry and I acknowledged certain feelings at the Viking. Hugo was so attentive, so tender. It was a holiday for him. We were having dinner in a restaurant in Montparnasse. I had invented a pretext to call at a friend’s for Henry’s first love letter. It was in my pocketbook. I was thinking of it while Hugo asked me, “Do you want oysters? Take oysters tonight. It’s a special night. Every time I go out with you I feel as if I were taking my mistress out. You are my mistress. I love you more than ever. I want to read Henry’s letter. I excuse myself. I go to the washroom. I read the letter there. It is not very eloquent, and I am touched by the fact. I don’t know what else I feel. I return to the table, dizzy. This was where we met Henry when he returned from Dijon and where I realized I was happy he had returned. On another occasion Hugo and I go to the theatre. I am thinking of Henry. Hugo knows, and he shows the same old tender uneasiness, the desire to believe, and I reassure him. He himself had given me a message that I should call Henry at eight-thirty. So before the play we go to a cafe, and Hugo helps me to find the number of Henry’s office. I joke about what he is going to hear. Henry and I do not say very much: “Did you get my letter?” “Yes.” “Did you get my note?” “No.” I have a bad night after the play. Hugo gets up in the early morning to bring me medicine, a sleeping pill. “What is the matter?” he asks. “What do you feel?” He offers the refuge of his arms. The first time I come back from Henry’s room, stunned, I find difficulty in talking in my usual lively way. Hugo sits down, takes up his diary book and writes wildly about me and “art” and how everything I do is right. While he reads this to me, I bleed to death. Before the end he begins to sob.