by Cathy Alter
“Do you need a push to be more outgoing?” asked Beck in the title deck of her column. This month, Beck had developed an Index of Dread, an exercise aimed at achieving “superior social fitness” by logging daily activities in a journal and then rating how inclined or averse you are to actually doing each task. The story art showed a color-drenched photo of four peas nestled in a pod. A fifth pea had already jumped ship and was about to roll off the page.
I have never been a renegade pea. Safe and cautious, afraid to try new things, I never even bothered to learn how to parallel park. My worries reach far back and are troubling and unusual. In nursery school, I developed a profound fear of eye patches and beards. (But strangely enough, not pirates.) I wouldn’t eat in restaurants that displayed dead animals on their walls—deer heads, stuffed pheasants in flight, stunned-looking raccoons balancing on tree stumps. This fear was very hard to manage, by the way, in Vermont, where my aunt had a ski house and I routinely ruined any stabs my family ever made at dining out.
“You came out of the womb worrying,” my mother told me.
More recently, I dreaded the horrible things Karl was going to do to me. The likelihood of romance had stirred up a big pot of neuroses and I, shifting into anxiety overdrive, had begun to fantasize about all the ways Karl was going to fail me. The last time we had been together, I told him the suspense was unbearable. “Can you just do it already?” I begged.
“Do what?” he answered.
“Drop the other shoe.”
My vulnerability triggered an overflowing fear of abandonment that would gush, if history predicted current behavior, into a twisted maze of inner voices and self-doubt, releasing a wooden mallet to Karl’s knee, sending another tasseled loafer into the stratosphere and down onto my head. Ta-dah! I was the Rube Goldberg of neediness.
It was time to build a new contraption. One that puffed out confetti every time I tried something new or scary. One that held up a pair of prescription glasses so I could begin to see change as a gorgeous cinematic adventure. One that kicked me, with a tender foot, to just get out there and stop worrying about what, specifically, was out there.
At least this is what I was thinking about as I was swimming around in Oprah’s pool with Martha Beck. “Keep fear from running your life,” she enthused from the shallow end. And what I first saw as a pair of lead boots was, in fact, Martha holding out a life preserver.
So I grabbed it. This month, I would jump into unfamiliar waters. “If you consistently avoid a particular type of social interaction—perhaps professional situations in which you fear being criticized, friendships that invite disclosure of personal secrets, or any discussion that might lead to an argument,” explained Beck, “it might help to do a little resistance training of your own.” Martha was right. There was something really transformational in taking an active role in my life. To do this, I had to get out of my comfort zone, away from my laptop, away from my merlot and must-see television.
I had to go camping.
It was an idea that I had been batting around since Karl invited me to join him and a few of his friends in Monterey, California, to watch the American leg of the MotoGP, an around-the-world race on motorcycles. To defray the cost of the trip, the group was going to camp on the sanctioned grounds of the racetrack, which they had reserved for the low, low price of forty dollars.
With a complete lack of experience with the great outdoors, I wasn’t just getting out of my comfort zone—I was excommunicating it entirely. But the giddy realization that Karl wanted to spend three solid days with me overrode any fears I had about bathing in a lake or cooking beans over an open flame—that’s what you did when you camped, right?
Only after I accepted the invitation did the compound subject of tent and me really sink in.
“Does he realize he’s camping with the princess and the pea?” was my mother’s response upon hearing my plans. She urged me to inform Karl that most Jews prefer hot and cold running water and toilets that flush. “Tell him you want to stay in a five-star hotel.”
Obviously, I don’t come from an outdoorsy family. In all the years my brother David and I enjoyed the pool in our backyard, I never saw my father go in above the waist. He usually avoided touching the water altogether and preferred instead to lie on a floating king-size mattress, a red velvety extravaganza whose presence was the signal for my brother and me to STOP MONKEYING AROUND!
And my mother, who puts on full makeup just to take out the trash and refuses to visit me in Washington between April and September because she thinks it’s too hot, my mother thought I had joined a cult when, as a Brownie, I told her how much I liked singing campfire songs.
My experiences with sleeping bags were all indoors and on carpet, at various preteen slumber parties. ( Where I always unfurled my bed in the room’s most isolated spot and still never slept more than a few hours.)
I phoned my brother David, the only person related to me with authentic open-air experience, which he gained when his best friend Ken gave him a fishing pole for his bar mitzvah.
When I informed him that I was about to go camping on the side of a motorcycle speedway and asked if he had any pointers, he laughed his head off for about ten minutes and finally said, “Get ready for a lot of drinking and farting.”
Even though I knew this camping weekend would be good for me, I had a panic attack as soon as I’d purchased the roundtrip ticket to California. On the phone with the airline, I even had absentmindedly doodled some important instructions to myself. I had written, over and over in pressed-hard ballpoint pen, Do not freak out! I left in just eight days.
I needed Martha Beck to talk me down from the ledge. Her Index of Dread exercise was created precisely for precipice-teetering moments like this, and drafting my own Index of Dread was the first step toward solid ground. To begin, instructed Beck, “Take a few minutes every evening to jot down a list of things you plan to do the following day, and with whom.”
Below, printed on the first page of a green spiral notebook, I imagined my to-do list for the upcoming camping trip.
Next, I assigned each item a score, which represented the actual Index of Dread ( IOD) or “level of resistance to that activity.” A score of zero meant I was not anxious at all. A score of ten, however, meant I’d rather lick the floor of a Greyhound bus terminal.
“Picture one event at a time,” Beck continued, “as vividly as possible.” In my head, I did a Hollywood movie montage of me interacting with each listed element and then awarded my points.
And here I thought the facilities were at the root of my anxiety. But after completing this portion of Beck’s exercise, I saw that my true fear rested in the company I would be keeping. The truth was, Karl’s friends scared the shit out of me. They were like a Brett Easton Ellis novel come to life. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to keep up—with their drinking, late hours, and general need for speed (motorcycle-and drug-related). Mostly though, I feared these people were well aware of my weaknesses and were just waiting for the right moment to expose and seize upon them for sport. (“I predict a lot of crying around the campfire,” was how my friend Daragh, who knew this crowd, sized up the situation.)
Before I could wrap up Beck’s lesson in social unrest, I had to carry out all the activities on my IOD list. Once I completed each task, I had to stroll down memory lane and reconsider how much I actually enjoyed doing it. Beck called this last step the Enjoyment Evaluation, or EE. I saw it as perception versus reality. Because I wasn’t at this part in the experiment yet, I set the article aside, so I wouldn’t spoil the ending. But without reading too much ahead, I predicted that by the time I got to the EE, I would have derived more pleasure from each experience than my majestic pessimism originally allowed.
This made a lot of sense. Isn’t the anticipation of an unpleasantness, a flu shot, say, usually much worse than the actual experience? It was one of the reasons I stayed married for far longer than I should have. The prospective feeling of abandonment
was unbearable—until he was actually gone.
After I finished with Oprah, I wanted the rest of the magazines to give me a pep talk. On a conscious level, I was looking to them for any advice they might have about preparing for a camping trip. But what I was really asking for was validation, in story or picture form. I needed them to give me a sign that I would be okay.
That I was looking for safety in a magazine with Lindsay Lohan on the cover did not sneak by me. (Bedecked in a marigold silk Dior tunic and a diamond Bulgari necklace, Lohan didn’t strike me as the sort of girl who would wear Merrell hiking boots and convertible nylon pants.) I had gotten into the habit of reading the magazines back to front (to me, the meatiest stuff seemed to fall after all the front-of-the-magazine product kowtowing). Which meant, in Elle, the first thing I hit was the Numerology page. After doing some surprisingly complex calculations to determine my special number, here was what I read about the number 4.
With or without your permission, July picks you up and sends you out of town. You’ll be refreshed and revived by the experience, and you may even learn something new. Leave your safe ways behind (they will still be there when you return) and expand your horizons.
Elle was giving me a clear sign from the integer gods, an arithmetical thumbs-up! In an instant, I stopped feeling like I was heading off on a death march. It was exactly the brand of encouragement I had craved from my shrink, a pink-faced Swede named Dr. Oskar, who sat in direct opposition to this trip. (“I don’t like this for you,” he said in an accent even more fun to impersonate than Bruno’s. “Yah, yah. You need to stay in the hotel and look at the pretty mountains over brunch.”)
The planets continued their alignment in British Harper’s Bazaar, a souvenir from Jeanne’s recent trip to England for a writing seminar in Chichester. (Now that she was seeing some forward action on my part, Jeanne had dropped her suit against me and made a contribution to my cause with this magazine, and I, seeing this as an emblem of forgiveness, had decided to bend the rules to allow for it.) In a piece on trends called “Dirty Pretty Things,” Kate Spicer reported, “Getting down to nature in the great outdoors is the hottest new pastime for modern glamour girls.” According to Spicer, bluebloods have embraced “getting grubby” as “a statement of style, not a dirty, windcheater-wearing secret.”
Look what a little reframing could do to a once horrifying idea. Camping was hot! With the right spin, a North Face backpack had the potential to unseat the Balenciaga Le Dix as the new “it” bag.
And Patagonia, I told myself as I walked into their chalet of a store, was just like Barneys—but with more Polartec. I had brought along the article from British Harper’s as my style guide. One of the women pictured wore a mod white anorak and Jackie O sunglasses, so I was aiming for a Courrèges-goes-high-performance look. Unfortunately, most of the clothing at Patagonia looked like it was made out of the Snuggles bear. The fact that I was going to resemble a mascot concerned me. This was an appearance I drastically wanted to avoid, so I sounded the alarm, announcing to anyone who looked my way, “I’m going camping!”
“No WAY!” high-fived a guy who could have been Keanu Reeves, if Keanu ever decided to move through life with a bandanna tied around his neck.
Patagonia Keanu had actually camped in Monterey before, which really shouldn’t have come as such a surprise.
“Do they have real bathrooms there?”
“That depends where you’re camping,” he said, pulling various things made out of nylon and zippers from the racks.
“At the Laguna Seca Racetrack.”
Keanu’s expression turned to one of Big Sky country. In other words, his mouth was wide and open. “Um, that’s kind of not real camping,” he finally said, putting back some of the items he had originally pulled for me.
I walked out with a curry-colored pullover and a performance base layer (Patagonia-speak for long johns), items that would be functioning as my pajamas. I also left secure in the knowledge that there probably won’t be any “facilities” where I’m going.
“Pet, you need to get out of this,” begged Richard, of the formerly fabulously gay duo. Richard had gone solo ever since he sobered up and cut his ties from Ronald, who had sunk even deeper into drink, drugs, and debt (to Richard, mostly).
Richard and I trolled the aisles of Filene’s Basement, consulting a page torn from Real Simple headlined “If You’re Packing for a Weekend.” Specifically, we were hunting for two items: a pair of sneakers that would pancake flat in order to save valuable suitcase space, and an appropriate bag into which to pack them. The visual of me wheeling my monogrammed Hartmann luggage out on the range was right out of Private Benjamin (“does this come in anything other than green?”).
“Do you think Frette makes sleeping bags?” he pondered, whipping out his cell phone as if he were about to make an urgent call.
“Too bad they don’t make toilet paper.” This trip had fast become a scatological obsession for me.
Richard was operating under the delusion that I would fly to San Francisco (our first point of arrival before driving the rental to Monterey) and then part ways with the motorcyclists. “Let them go be among the bikes,” he proposed, “and you go check into the Fairmont and spend the weekend shopping at Gump’s.”
Believe me, I had already come up with the same avoidance plan. Even as I purchased a Swiss Army ballistic duffel bag and Nike neoprene sneakers, I was toying with the idea of just not going. It was like the more sporting goods I acquired, the more I started to panic.
To make matters worse, the morning before my departure, Jeanne and I went for a walk. As we paused midway to stretch our calves on a section of a fence, she looked at me very seriously and said, “Cathy, this trip will either make or break your relationship with Karl.”
She was right. It was such a hugely obvious fear; why hadn’t I already put it into my head—and onto my IOD list—to begin with? So far, my relationship with him was unfolding under ideal conditions—hand-in-hand walks around the Hirshhorn, candlelit dinners at cloth-napkin restaurants, Tempur-Pedic pillow talks into the wee hours. What if I became overtired and got weepy? What if his friends annoyed the shit out of me and I got bitchy? What if it rained the entire time and I got trench foot?
Who knew what kind of prima donna meltdown I was capable of?
The first thing I did when I returned home from the walk was email my friend Jane in San Francisco. “Are you going to be around this weekend?” I wrote. “I’m about to chicken out of a camping trip and hoped I could stay with you.” It would have been shameful to let a pair of nonrefundable tickets go to waste.
When Karl came over that evening, I sat him down, gave him a beer, and took a deep breath. “I think when we get to San Francisco, I’m going to stay and visit my friend and meet you at the airport for the return trip home.”
He tilted the neck of his beer bottle toward him, gauged he didn’t have enough to adequately slug down, and said quietly, “I didn’t see that one coming.” It was like I had just announced my desire to become a circus clown. “But why don’t you want to go?” he asked, finally looking at me. “What’s changed?”
“Nothing’s changed,” I told him. “I was never wild about the idea of going. I was just so focused on the idea of going away with you, I tried not to think about where we were going. But now that I’m thinking about it, I’m thinking I made a mistake.”
“But why?” he asked again.
“I’m not as hearty as you think,” I replied before jumping off the deep end. “I’m scared you’re going to see a side of me you won’t like,” I told him. “Or what if I get tired and mean? What if I only want to drink two beers and go to bed early and everyone else makes fun of me and I start to cry? And what if you think that I’m asking you to choose between me and your friends and you start to resent me and leave me all alone in the tent?”
Karl didn’t say anything for a while. Maybe he thought I still had more run-on sentences to go. Or maybe he had just neve
r seen hormones on parade before and was struck mute. As inappropriate as it was to be thinking this, an idea for an article suddenly popped into my head. I’d call it, “You Really Fucked Up. Now What?”
Finally, Karl put his beer down and took my hand into his own, which was cool and dry. “It would mean a lot to me if you were there, and I’ll do everything I can to make you comfortable and happy.”
I was crying by now, realizing that I had fulfilled my own prophecy of presenting to Karl the most undesirable version of myself. “But what if you can’t?”
“Then I’ll take you home.”
That was all I needed to hear. In admitting my irrational fears, the internal Index of Dread, to Karl, I had gotten the worst part of the trip over. And in asking for comfort, because that was what I was really asking for here, I was taking another kind of risk—one of total exposure. It was a relief and a small triumph to lay myself out like this. In doing so, I had clicked another piece of my own puzzle into place.
I didn’t know what pieces were missing from Karl’s puzzle, but sitting there on my couch, I had the calm certainty that the blue piece I had been carrying around for so long, the oddly shaped piece that I always thought was meant for the water, actually fit perfectly in Karl’s sky.
Now I was ready for anything. I threw my Index of Dread notebook in my backpack, along with the carry-on items listed in Glamour’s “Getaway Beauty!”: a giant bottle of water, great sunglasses, hand disinfectant, fragrance, and face spray. I supplemented their suggested inventory with cigar-sized rolls of toilet paper, toilet seat covers ( both purchased in the sporting goods aisle of Wal-Mart), and a recently filled prescription of Ambien.
