Situational Anxiety

I got my second shot of the Moderna vaccine. Even though I am at peak immunity, I’m not eager to be around the herd. To tell the truth, I recently experienced a considerable amount of anxiety at an outdoor gathering even though most were masked, and those without masks were vaccinated. People offered their hands for shaking, hugged one another. It made me feel very unsettled. The anxiety doesn’t have any rational underpinnings, I know, but I’m not ready to be around so many people. Attending a movie in the theater seems unimaginable to me today. I know that my risk factor is low, but distance feels better than proximity where people are concerned. Now I have new valise of unease to match the rest of my emotional baggage.

Mostly, this pandemic has helped me reduce the circle of people I associate with to only those people I want to be around. That’s good with me. I had already been thinning my circle of associates for years. And thankfully I don’t have a job that forces me to be around other people too much. I don’t even have job, really. Who says it sucks to be an under-employed freelancer?  (Well, I say it sucks, but not because I get to do it outside the purview of most the dullards and philistines in charge.) I’m not sure how others feel about it. Most people probably don’t worry. And why should you? I tend to ruminate on things that slide off the backs of others. In fact, I can spend the better part of a day or week rehashing conversations that happened twenty years ago, beating myself up the whole time about decisions I made at the turn of the century. Interacting with people tends to amplify those tendencies.

I did visit a therapist once. She was a nice woman who grew up food-insecure. We talked about my preoccupation with myself for a bit before she began to tell me about her story. She grew up poor, scavenging food from dumpsters. But she worked hard, overcame poverty, and emigrated to the US where she found a profession and made a life for herself. As an adult, her unstable childhood affected her greatly. She fixated on cookies. She couldn’t maintain even the slightest bit of concentration if she knew there was a cookie nearby. She wanted it, and nothing could distract her from it. It got so bad that she couldn’t attend social events where there might be cookies because she wanted them all. Eventually, she mastered that desire with cognitive therapy. She worked to identify the roots of the desire, to focus on the changes that it manifested in her body—the physical sensations that accompanied the desire. Through practice and attention, she was able to successfully focus her mind during these episodes and break the cycle of rumination. This is a truncated version of the story, but eventually she could go to parties. She could even eat cookies without eating all the cookies. Needless to say, I felt pretty stupid.

This woman had real problems. What did I have, other than a nearly overwhelming sense of ennui? Here I am—a profligate asshole who has experienced more depravation than deprivation—and I can’t get over some perceived slight from ten years ago? How fucking petty. I knew that ruminating on my past decisions and actions was a first world sort of disorder, but this was something I couldn’t stop. It filled almost every thought. Mainly, I was convinced that I had fucked everything up—my whole life. Talking to her gave me perspective, but it also contributed to a feeling that I hadn’t any right to feel how I felt. I was physically healthy, with a nice family. I didn’t have a job, sure, but lots of people were unemployed. I just felt I needed to buckle down and get through it. Put the old nose to the grind stone. It was easier said than done.

I didn’t continue with that therapist for long, but I did try another person who actually read aloud to me passages from some institutional manual on the subject. I know there are good therapists and therapy works for many people. Those weren’t the best things for me at the time. Trust me on this. I started some antidepressants and cut out drinking (something I go back and forth on, but hope to have put it behind me), and the cyclical thinking actually abated to a manageable level—a sort of 38th parallel of mental well being above which my overly critical self was contained. That self might rattle its saber once in a while, fire salvos of self-loathing into the world of my more secure and accepting self. The meds gave me respite from myself. With that little bit of distance, I was able to begin examining myself and my thought patterns without the tremendous pressure a constant sense of failure exerts on the body and mind. I don’t think I’m cured of this malady. I still take the antidepressants and I still get locked into ruminative spirals from time to time, but now I am able to recognize them for what they are—manifestations of my own very fucked up brain chemistry, not reflections of the true inner me—and break the cycle.

Of course, the armistice needs a lot of attention to be maintained. I’ve found writing about my experience to be helpful in clarifying thoughts and feelings, identifying their source, etc. I think a lot about my first therapist, and not only about her preoccupation with cookies, which in spite of everything I find charming and absurd. I only wish my own preoccupations were more interesting.

I am better today than I was then but, again, I haven’t been cured of anything. I do try my best to identify the negative, oppressive feelings I sometimes have by first noticing the physical sensations that accompany them. Those sensations last much longer than the thoughts that trigger them.

Picking up on my own physical distress has done a lot for me. And I recognize a sort of sickening feeling that accompanies any new thoughts of being around too many people. I know that I shouldn’t worry about it, that I have little risk for the sort of catastrophic outcomes we are reminded of, daily. Still the feeling persists. We should expect to ferry some emotional baggage through this pandemic. The media assault is a relentless stream of sensationalism and castigation.

What should we believe? It changes daily.