Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

by Daniel Smith

  I did as she said. I laid my right hand on my stomach, closed my eyes, and breathed. I felt my belly rise and fall. In through the nose, four, out through the mouth, six. In through the nose, four, out through the mouth, six . . . At first, nothing happened. It was difficult even to sit still, let alone to focus on the numbers. I almost stood and bolted for the stairs. Then, gradually, I felt it working. Somewhere within me things shifted. My blood chemistry recalibrated. Ions flipped their charge. Molecules realigned. The organism settled. Behind my eyelids the dark was now a dampening dark rather than the dark of terrifying space. I felt, as I opened my eyes to the bending trees, as I imagined I was meant to feel. I felt lucid.

  My mother is far from the only therapist to tout the powers of the breath. Anxious people breathe too quickly, and from the upper parts of the lungs, increasing the heart rate and throwing off pH balance and resulting in all sorts of unpleasant physiological changes. Learning to breathe slowly and more deeply is sound advice. “Once a client of mine can control his breathing patterns in a variety of situations, I believe he is 50 percent along on the road to success,” writes one anxiety specialist. “For some people, identifying and mastering breathing patterns will completely end their symptoms and resolve their problems.”

  Unfortunately, this has not been the case for me. Breathing techniques have helped, but they haven’t been able to resolve the problem—probably because my anxiety is so cerebral. For true change, I require higher-order instruction. Whatever help breathing did bring, meanwhile, it didn’t bring for years, until I was ready to put in the time needed to change my habits. On that day in the library I was too desperate for a new mind, and too quick to despair. Sitting, all was well. I felt renewed. But when I stood up, I was aghast to find it all falling back into place: the fear, the tightness, the confusion, the icicle. And it was, for having been briefly better, even worse, like waking from a nightmare only to find that the waking was part of the nightmare.

  Later that day, curled in my bunk bed, another image occurred to me—that of a series of strips from an old Peanuts compendium I owned in which Pig-Pen decides that it is at last time to go home and take a shower. There he is in the first frame, all fresh and combed and gleaming. Then he takes one step out of the house and wham! (he actually says, “Wham!”), he’s back in his accustomed state of filth and dishevelment. What else was going to happen? Being filthy and disheveled was who Pig-Pen was, and he knew it. “I’ve learned not to expect too much from a shower,” he tells Linus with admirable stoicism. “I have to be satisfied if it just settled the dust!”

  • • •

  When my breathing lessons didn’t end my calls home—when they didn’t even reduce their frequency—my parents decided it was time to pay a visit. On a cool Saturday morning they picked me up at the same spot in front of my dorm where they’d dropped me off, just weeks earlier, and together we drove into Boston for the most uncomfortable tour of a city since Mussolini was dragged through Milan on a meat hook.

  My father parked the car in an underground garage and we walked. We started on Newbury Street, with its shoe boutiques and pearl-bedecked women window shopping; proceeded past McCloskey’s orderly bronze ducklings in the Public Garden; past the sunbathers and loiterers in the Commons; past the gleaming, gilded State House and brutalist City Hall; and finally made our way down the terraced slope of Government Center, where we sat to talk on a bench in the shade.

  In hindsight, this was not the best place for my parents and me to stop. The shade in which we sat was cast not by trees or buildings but by the New England Holocaust Memorial, a monument which, I have always suspected, was engineered not to commemorate the greatest atrocity in human history but rather, in some perverse municipal joke or unconscionable psychological experiment, to evoke dread and fear in the minds of passersby. The memorial consists of a line of six glass towers, each of which is five stories tall and hollow. Into the interiors of the towers, which represent the six main Nazi death camps, the numbers of all six million victims of the Holocaust have been inscribed, and all day every day an ersatz smoke rises through steel grates at the towers’ bases, as if to declare that even now and here, decades later and thousands of miles away, the fires of the Final Solution continue to burn.

  It isn’t just its design, however, gruesomely literal as that is, that makes the memorial so unsettling. It’s also its location. For some bizarre, unfathomable reason, the authorities in charge decided to construct the memorial on a concrete island alongside one of the city’s most congested downtown streets, just around the corner from the shopping mecca Faneuil Hall and directly opposite four—count them, four—Irish pubs. To be compelled in the middle of one’s day to contemplate the mass immolation of one’s European brethren is destabilizing. To be compelled to do so while a Paul Revere impersonator vomits in the bushes next to you is inhumane.

  It is inhumane because it is liable to have appalling results. If you are already in an unsettled frame of mind, the sight and setting of the memorial could bring on a psychophysical onslaught of tremendous proportions—a sudden, almost revelatory flash of malignant-seeming power that overturns whatever mechanisms of biochemical equilibrium you possess, causing you to sweat, gasp, cower, tremble, and shrink, and that just as suddenly wipes out all of your cherished intellectual and interpretative functions, leaving you with nothing but a devolved, bargain-basement cognition capable only of the blunt detection of bodily danger, which it always, and almost always incorrectly, finds.

  In short, you might have a panic attack.

  • • •

  People who are not pathologically anxious tend to think of panic as merely the purest form of anxiety. In the common view, a panic attack occurs when anxiety increases to the point at which it can no longer increase anymore: panic is the final marking on the anxiety thermometer. This view isn’t wrong, exactly, but it is incomplete. Anxiety and panic are related, and the relationship is one of degree. But they are also radically different experiences.

  To explain what I mean, here is an example from my own life. It’s an unexceptional example, mundane and maybe boring. I’m truly sorry about this. I would defend myself by observing that anxiety and panic happen to be mundane phenomena, i.e., even when they are caused by extraordinary things like war and rape, they tend to occur when things are ordinary and predictable and relatively stable, against a backdrop of normal, everyday experience. This, of course, is one of the features of anxiety and panic that make them suck so bad.

  The example I have is a work example: a writing example. It happened while I was working on the fourth paragraph of the preceding section, the one that starts, “It isn’t just its design, however, gruesomely literal as that is, that makes the memorial so unsettling.”

  A disclaimer. Writers like to believe their job is tougher on the nerves than other jobs. They like to pass around cool, pithy statements to this effect, like this one, from the screenwriter Gene Fowler: “Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” Or this suspiciously similar one, from the sportswriter Red Smith: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” Or this one, from the poet Graycie Harmon: “Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum.” I don’t subscribe to the exceptionalist school of writing, however. It’s true that writing has psychological pitfalls—oppressive deadlines, poor pay, baring one’s soul to an indifferent world—but so do all jobs. Even the imperative to make choice after choice without clear guidance—allegedly the most nerve-wracking part of the profession—isn’t exclusive to writing. What is probably true is that, for reasons having to do with solitude and a high allowance for self-obsession, writing attracts a greater percentage of anxious people than other professions. What is definitely true is that writers are better than most people at articulating their neuroses, and more dedicated to the task.

  So: the paragraph. I’d begun writing it th
e day before. My goal was to finish it and then to write at least five hundred additional words before the day ended. I had four-and-a-half hours, nonnegotiable. During much of the period in which I have been writing this book my workdays have been restricted to the hours during which my daughter is at preschool—9 a.m. to 3 p.m.—with forty-five minutes lopped off either end for travel, chores, and sundry caffeinated-beverage-prep, e-communicative, and excretory acts. Consequently, I have been obliged to use time wisely, always aware of a very slim margin for professional error.

  I got a good jump on the day. I was at my desk at 9:35 a.m., sipping Earl Grey out of an Aunt Sally’s Original Creole Pralines mug and staring at a legal pad on which were written the provisional lines, “But it isn’t just its design, gruesomely, horrifically literal as it is, that makes the Holocaust Memorial so damned unsettling. It is a matter, also, of its terrible location.” This was encouraging. They were awful lines, but it was easy to see why they were awful. By 9:50, after some preliminary dawdling, I’d managed to amputate the most offensive bits, editing the lines down to, “But it isn’t just its design, gruesomely literal as it is, that makes the memorial so damned unsettling. It is a matter, also, of its terrible location.” By 9:55 I’d changed “it” to “that” in the first sentence and cut “terrible” from the second sentence. At 9:57 I cut the starting conjunction and squeezed an “however” in there. At 9:59 I cut “damned.” At 10:02 I contracted “it is,” cut “a matter” and “of,” and took “also” out of commas. It was a nice run. After twenty-seven minutes, I was ready to move forward into actual writing.

  The blank space in front of me didn’t feel like a Fowlerian void. I knew what came next. I had strong memories of the incongruence between the memorial and its setting. I remembered the pubs and the smell of stale Guinness that wafted out when someone opened a door. I remembered Faneuil Hall being nearby because I could never forget the image of tourists eating clam chowder with sporks as they read the famous Niemöller poem off a plaque at the memorial’s base, the poem that starts, “First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.” I had indeed once seen a Colonial impersonator puke beside the memorial, and for some reason I was pretty sure he was supposed to be Paul Revere. But what occurred to me as I stared at the page was that my memories weren’t detailed enough. This all happened fifteen years ago. How many pubs were there? Where exactly was Faneuil Hall vis-à-vis the memorial? Are there in fact bushes beside the monument into which Paul Revere could vomit?

  To answer these questions, I turned to the Internet. What did memoirists do before Google Maps? I dragged the cute yellow homunculus onto Congress Street and clicked on those floating white carets that glide you digitally down the road. I clicked the “Satellite” button and surveyed Boston like God, or a Kennedy. I typed “bar” into the “Search nearby” field and counted all the red balloons that popped up. I was having a good time. And that was when, drifting comfortably in cyberspace, I began to sense my mind slipping off its moorings. It was a cognitive slipping. My thoughts began to drift from the screen and alight on other things, peripheral things: what I was going to make for dinner that night; what my daughter had meant when on the way to school that morning she’d said, “poopy is fun!” (how was poopy fun, exactly? making it? flushing it? playing with it? I should find out); whether I should commence defensive tactics against the hairs that had already taken over my shoulders and upper back and were now threatening to march south; whether it was going to rain; why, despite more than three decades of life, I still hadn’t been to Montana . . .

  All this was typical, of course. Everyone gets distracted. What wasn’t typical was what followed, which was the emergence and blossoming of anxiety. It started with a simple effort to regain focus. At first I was able to swat away most of the distracting thoughts, like gnats. But like gnats, the thoughts always returned, and in force, so that before long swatting them away changed from an effort to get back to my primary occupation to the primary occupation itself. I changed, sitting there at my computer, from a writer to a thought-swatter.

  That was Phase One: the thought swarm. Phase Two was a perplexity about what to do next, a desire to find a way back to a state of undistracted productivity. This phase didn’t last long. It never does, because the thing about thought swarms is that not only do they make rational, directed thinking hard to come by, they make the effort at rational thinking so frustrating that all you want to do is escape. And so I soon entered Phase Three. This was the self-hatred phase, where my energy went toward demeaning myself for being the sort of writer who allows himself to become distracted and confused after only an hour of work, which is to say the bad kind, the kind doomed to failure. At this point I made the mistake of looking at the clock. It was half-past noon, which meant that my workday was halfway done, which meant that my workday was halfway wasted, wasted by my ineptitude and lack of psychic strength, an analysis that conjured an image of my editor, a really lovely woman who likes me and wants to see me succeed, deleting my name from her electronic Rolodex, shaking her head as she does because she can’t believe she was foolish enough to sign up a writer whose potential was so obviously fated to be destroyed by his weaknesses—the very weaknesses that were supposed to be the subject of the book she had signed up, which made it all that much sadder. And that—at around 12:40—is when I began to hyperventilate, sweat, and look nervously around me, and make little birdlike chirping noises, and run my fingers through my prematurely graying hair like those put-upon middle-aged men in commercials for tax-prep services. That’s when I began to tremble, and cry a little. That’s when the desire mounted to go running out of my office, out into the street, and down the block, in order to burn off the overwhelming sense that I had doomed myself because of a couple of hours of tough writing. That’s when, instead of running down the block, I called Kate and, getting her voicemail, laid my head on my desk, closed my eyes, and begged whoever might be listening for a half-hour of blissful unconsciousness. Just a half-hour, to reset my brain.

  This was an unpleasant experience, and pretty much ruined the rest of the day. But it wasn’t a panic attack. It was what I would call an anxiety attack—an 8.3, I would calculate, on my personal anxiety scale. The scale runs from zero to ten, zero being catatonic and ten being the guy in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, where, psychologically speaking, you’re on a bridge surrounded by faceless strangers who are unable or unwilling to help you and the sky is blood-orange red and swirling and hectic and everything is so bleak and awful that you’d rather die than spend another second where you are.

  A panic attack is worse than that. A panic attack is off the charts. A panic attack means you’ve ascended through every stage on the scale and then broken right off it, fallen right off the edge of the earth into some kind of neurotic satori, where anxiety isn’t even a factor anymore because anxiety is related to thinking, and with panic there is no thinking. Panic is pure reflex. It is a reversion to a state of being in which you are a kind of puppet to forces above and outside you, forces whose only purpose, once they have caused you to panic, is to get you to stop panicking. When you are in the midst of a panic attack you are no longer human. You are no longer a reasoning being. You are an animal under attack, indistinguishable from the animals whose panic Charles Darwin, who himself suffered from crippling panic attacks, described in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals:

  With all or almost all animals, even with birds, terror causes the body to tremble. The skin becomes pale, sweat breaks out, and the hair bristles. The secretions of the alimentary canal and of the kidneys are increased, and they are involuntarily voided, owing to the relaxation of the sphincter muscles, as is known to be the case with man, and as I have seen with cattle, dogs, cats, and monkeys. The breathing is hurried. The heart beats quickly, wildly, and violently; but whether it pumps the blood more efficiently through the body may be doubted, for the surface seems bloodless and the strength of the muscles soon f
ails. In a frightened horse I have felt through the saddle the beating of the heart so plainly that I could have counted the beats. The mental faculties are much disturbed. Utter prostration soon follows, and even fainting. A terrified canary-bird has been seen not only to tremble and to turn white about the base of the bill, but to faint; and I once caught a robin in a room, which fainted so completely, that for a time I thought it dead.

  All through our walk across Boston my anxiety hovered at around a 5.5 on my anxiety scale. The comfort of my parents’ presence might have tamped it below the halfway mark (no small accomplishment) had I not been mortified that they’d had to come all this way, or if their coming wasn’t going to be followed in less than thirty-six hours by their leaving, either with me, which would be unspeakably shameful, or without me, which would be unspeakably awful. The point at which the mental needle started to migrate upward was, first, when the Holocaust Memorial came into view, shouting Genocide! Genocide!, and then again when my parents and I found a bench and my father started to talk. We were seated in front of a bronze statue of a man from a different era, wearing that era’s uncomfortable clothes. Beyond that were the towers and the fake smoke and the tourists strolling through it all, and, farther still, the strenuously charming trattorias of the North End, where we’d decided to go for lunch. I thought I caught my father looking pleadingly in their direction before he draped his arm over my shoulder and said, “So. Pal. How are you doing?”