The Palliative to Anxiety

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 13, 2014

Palliative: to reduce the violence of a disease; to moderate or reduce the intensity of anxiety.

The evidence is overwhelming that we live in an “Age of Anxiety.”  If one penetrates below the surface of political, economic, business, professional, or domestic crises to discover their psychological causes, or if one seeks to understand modern art, poetry or philosophy or religion, one runs athwart the problem of anxiety at almost every turn.  The ordinary stresses and strains of life in the changing world of today are such that few if any escape the need to confront anxiety and to deal with it in some manner.

Rollo May, American psychoanalyst, The Meaning of Anxiety (1977)

Stress is the spice of life.  Without it you would be a vegetable, or dead.  Stress is not something to avoid.  It is the extreme of stress or distress that causes so many ailments of modern society.

Hans Selye, American born Canadian physician, Stress Without Distress (1974)

Anxiety is a luxury of a self-indulgent culture.  It is a culture which has time on its hands.  Instead of focusing on living to experience the pleasures that cost nothing, the anxious take themselves too seriously and life not seriously enough.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Meet Your New Best Friend (2014)

Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.

Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)

A Child's View of Anxiety

It is no accident this is called an “anxious age.”  As we have moved away from the comfort of faith in God and the cultivation of a spiritual life, we have move towards melancholy and a moral crisis.  We have come to expect the other shoe to fall at any moment, throwing our lives into turmoil.  With this move from trust in God, we have departed from trust in ourselves.  We don’t talk about it.  We don’t have to.  It is revealed in our loneliness, anxiety and sense of abandonment in our increasingly hectic world in which nothing stays the same, not even for an hour. 

Ironically, in the modern world, men are slow to give up their boyhood when they have never had a childhood.  Instead, they find themselves surrounded with toys that blunt their curiosity, while their games are organized and supervised by adults. 

Girls rush their biological clock to prance about as women when they have largely bypassed the insouciance of youth. 

Anxiety has become the poison parent of most sins and miseries that haunt the child man and the child woman.  In a world where doubt is magnified and disappointment avoided, there is a restless stir and commotion of the mind in search of certainty, which doesn’t exist, and thus the dilemma.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) wrote:

I shall tell you a great secret, friend.  Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day.  

The irony is that this statement proved prophetic as Camus, 1957 Nobel Laureate of Literature, was cut down in an auto accident at the height of his fame at age 47. 

All any of us has is this moment, not tomorrow, not even the rest of this day, so it doesn’t make much sense to be too anxious about tomorrow, or about things we can’t do anything about right now!  This insight came to me when my granddaughter, Rachel, was six-years-old and asked me what anxiety was.

“Where did you hear that word?” I asked.

“Mommy’s always saying daddy is full of anxiety.” 

Her father, my son-in-law, an attorney, entrepreneur, and sportsman, sleeps four hours a night, and is always on the go.  Although successful, he continues to put himself in jeopardy by carrying others and allowing them advantages they haven’t earned and don’t deserve, thus the anxiety. 

Obviously, money is not the cure for anxiety.  If anything, money is the instrument of his anxiety masking his sense of identity.

“Anxiety, Rachel, is worrying about something that hasn’t happened, and is not likely to occur.” 

American reformer William Jay (1789-1858) stated it well:

One of the most useless of all things is to take a deal of trouble in providing against dangers that never come.  How many toil to lay up riches which they never enjoy; to provide for exigencies that never happen; to prevent troubles that never come; sacrificing present comfort and enjoyment in guarding against the wants of a period they may never live to see.

 

The word “anxiety,” like “stress,” “success,” “failure,” or “happiness,” means different things to different people. 

Defining it is difficult although it has become part of our daily vocabulary.  Is anxiety merely synonymous with stress?  Obviously, it involves effort, fatigue, pain, fear, and stress or distress.  It is demonstrably apparent with changes in the vital signs of our body.  But is it only these things?  Or is it also experienced when we lose touch with ourselves and become self-estranged?  Think about it!  When are we most anxious?    It is when we no longer trust ourselves, no longer trust our experience, our history, to cope with the situation.

It would seem anxiety is a frantic desire to know outcomes before they are experienced in a stress free life, which is impossible.  As Hans Selye points out, stress is the spice of life, and without it we would be a vegetable.  It is distress that is the culprit to our anxiety, and it is fed by that mania for certainty in an uncertain existence.  Just as it is impossible to have a stress free existence, it is equally impossible to have an anxiety free conscience.

Venturing outside ourselves inevitably produces stress and anxiety, which can lead to distress.  It is a common fear that people will see us as the fraud we believe ourselves to be.  Actor Leonardo DiCaprio puts it poignantly: “I want an authentic life.  Once I achieved fame, I realized I don’t value it at all.” 

The hardest thing to face is that we are forever a contradiction.  There will always be cleavage between our projected self and real self; between our imagined reality and the reality of experience.  Our culture programs us from birth to be inauthentic, to be pretenders, to take on the guise of what others tell us to value or the persona of our idols.

Those most attentive to this idolatry achieve a successful phoniness.  Actors such as DiCaprio know this best.  They epitomize the quintessential counterfeit self, while those infatuated with these personalities on television and film identify with these counterfeit heroes and the perfection projected on the screen.

Yet, none of these conditions alluded to can be singled out as being “it” for anxiety, since the word applies equally to them all.  Psychiatrist Karen Horney in The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937) writes: “Anxiety is the dynamic center of neuroses and thus we shall have to deal with it all the time.”  As we see here, a six-year-old child has been made aware of this fact by observing the psychodrama of her anxious parents.

“That sounds stupid,” she replied.

“Yes,” I answered.  “It is stupid.” 

A child in the womb of the family doesn’t feel her security threatened.  Horney holds that anxiety is derived from compulsive drives that are born of feelings of isolation, helplessness, fear, and hostility.  Anxiety, then, represents a way of coping with the world despite these feelings.  The aim is always safety, never satisfaction.  The compulsive quality of this is due to anxiety lurking behind repressed feelings.  Rachel, up to this point, has had no sense of this.  Innocence never leaves the womb, while her parents seem unaware of the impact of their behavior on her delicate psyche. 

“Then why do people do it?”

“Because sometimes we act stupid.” 

People make the complex simple to cope, and the simple complex to problem solve.  The clarity of vision escapes us once life takes on age and history.  Sociologist Lewis Mumford writes in The Condition of Man (1944):

“People whose course of life has reached a crisis must confront their collective past as fully as a neurotic patient must unbury his personal life; long-forgotten traumas in history may have a disastrous effect upon millions who remain unaware of them.”

“Do you do it?” she asked. 

“Ah yes, many times,” I confessed. 

The truth is I have learned over time that all my history is important because it is forever contemporary.  Nothing is more important than those hidden parts that still survive in me without my being aware of them or their importance.  They drive me, and often from rather than towards my contradictions.  I ride my anxiety like a surfboard in stormy waters.

“Then you must be stupid, too,” she laughed, then paused and studied me a moment.  “But you’re not stupid.  So you must not have to be stupid to have anxiety.” 

How could I convey that stupidity is that neurotic distortion between expectations and reality experienced without confusing her?  Fear of failing a test in school found me studying hard and earning an “A.”  Fear of being discovered a coward found me racing down the field to make the opening tackle on the kickoff in a high school football game.  For this play, I was touted as a hard-nosed player.  Fear of botching an assignment on the job and getting fired resulted in a succession of promotions.  

Confronting my anxiety, and accepting the responsibility and guilt feeling involved resulted in increased self-awareness, freedom, and enlarged my sphere of creativity.  Anxiety is home to the writer, or any person not comfortable in his own skin.  Where would art be without anxiety?

On the other hand, anxiety displaced found me critical of my da when his paycheck never stretched from payday to payday.  My anxiety was also manifested in being accident-prone.  This grew into an aversion for doctors and instant headaches when my parents argued.  Later, migraine headaches would plague me the moment I experienced any pressure.  Driven by my anxieties, it was paramount that I be focused and disciplined to the point that I was no fun at all.  How could I explain this to my granddaughter?  Competitive success was my dominant drive and the pervasive cause of my anxiety.  This would in no way compute with my granddaughter who saw me only as “successful.”  Seeing me as I am for her is yet to come.

“You’re right,” I said, always surprised, when I shouldn’t be.  “Smart people are known to sometimes do things that make no sense.”

She folded her little arms over her chest, and said, “Papa, anxiety doesn’t make any sense to me at all.”

Indeed, when you worry about things you can’t change you experience anxiety.  Someone once said, “Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.”  Yet, it is so easy to worry about what never happens, which of course makes no sense.  The misfortunes hardest to bear are those that never come.  There is much more to anxiety, however, than self-identity and sensible behavior.

Downside of Luck

People think that if they won the lottery all their anxieties would vanish.  A series of lotto winners have complained that it was the worst thing that ever happened to them.  On Christmas Day 2002, Jack Whittaker of Charleston, West Virginia won the largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history, $314.9 million in the Powerball jackpot.

Previously, he was already a wealthy contractor.  He took his winnings in a lump sum of $113 million after taxes, and held an immediate new conference to appear as a jolly saint. 

Without hesitation, he split $7 million among three churches, gave money to improve a Little League park, bought playground equipment for children, and set up a charitable foundation. 

Eight months later, his life and fortune started to unravel.  A briefcase was stolen with $545,000 in cash and cashier checks from his SUV.  It was parked at a strip club.  He not only became a well-known strip club devotee, but also confessed to now being a high-stakes gambler, which is why he was carrying so much cash.  Several thefts to his home, office and other vehicles followed. 

At one of the thefts, in September, 2003, an 18-year-old friend of his granddaughter’s was found dead.  The boy died from overdosing on a combination of oxycodone, methadone, meperidine, and cocaine.

Next, his 17-year-old granddaughter came up missing.  In December, 2004, Whitaker’s granddaughter was found dead on the property of a male friend.  Her body was wrapped in a plastic tarpaulin and dumped behind a junked van.  The death was ruled an overdose.

 In July, 2009, Whitaker’s daughter, the mother of his dead granddaughter was found dead.  Foul play was not ruled out.

He got in a fight at a nightclub, and two men sued him for assault.  Other similar suits followed from related brawls.  A judge fined him and assigned him to attend weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. 

In less than a year, he had gone from saint to sinner in his community.  One person quipped, “This clown is not capable of handling a $10 bill much less all those millions.” His charitable foundation is now closed; his business is in jeopardy; his own health is on the fence.  One of Whittaker’s friends remarked, “I think it’s pretty sad, really.  It just goes to show money can’t always buy happiness.” 

Upside of Pluck

Rachel is an extraordinary little girl as many young people are.  I am convinced that young people like Rachel will redirect our society into a less anxious configuration.  The irony of our times is despite the hyped-up technological explosion there is a drab sameness to everything and nearly everybody. 

The herd mentality has extended to technology with everyone with an iPhone, laptop or some other mobile.  In a way, texting and tweeting have acted like our “worry beads,” providing connection with others if only electronically.  It would seem we dread being alone while being intimidated with silence.   

Anxiety doesn’t happen “out there.”  Anxiety is part of our make-up.  It is the friction of ourselves rubbing against ourselves that produces what we call “art.”  Art brings out our buried demons that wreak havoc with our soul.  Art is talking to ourselves with creative verve and is a palliative to anxiety.  Nothing is as bad as it seems when it is neutralized by the light of day.  Art brings out the sun.

Rachel is already writing stories.  She loves everyone, finds school exciting, and loves to teach her friends the things she learns.  Will society kill that spirit?  Will it put her in its cage?  Will it blow out her flame of curiosity and egoistic joy, and turn it into sorrow and self-contempt?  Will she look to what she doesn’t have and isn’t rather than what she is and has?  Will she balance optimism with doubt and pessimism with reason?  Will she wrap her life in confusion and fill her shoes with fretting anxiety, or will she embrace her fears and soar to new insights?  I don’t know.  I can only hope and pray. 

She asked me the other day, as I was taking her to ice skating practice, “who is more creative, papa, you or me?”

I answered, “If this important to you?”

“Yes, why else would I ask?” 

Refusing to talk down to her, I explained that comparing and competing are the first forms of anxiety.   You cannot be another person or experience what that other person experiences. 

“You see, Rachel, you will always see people whom you might consider more fortunate, more able and even happier than you, but that is what you see not necessarily what is there.  If it is so, feel good about it for them and you will feel better about yourself.  Likewise,” I continued, “you will see many people less fortunate than you, who are obviously not happy and not as comfortable with themselves.  Be kind to them but don’t think you know what is best for them.  They have to find that out for themselves, but don’t ever punish them with your good fortune.  Chances are they are already doing that to themselves.” 

Then I added, “To your question of my creativity compared to yours, I expect you will remember this: your creative powers are now at their highest.  One day when you are as old as your papa is now, you will appreciate your creative powers have greatly faded, and will rely more on your learning, experience and history. 

“You can never take your creativity for granted.  It is a gift from God.  You must feed it and breathe life into it.  Otherwise, it will shrivel up and die. That means you must use it.  You must read, wonder, observe and ask questions like you are doing now, and never be afraid to challenge anything that makes no sense to you.”

“I do all those things now, papa.”

“Yes, you do.”

She left a message on my machine yesterday.  “I scored four goals in soccer, papa.  Just wanted you to know.”  Then a short pause.  “Papa, I don’t think you’re old.  I think you’re handsome.”  Thank God for little girls who are blind as well as gifted. [1]

When Innocence takes on the Role of Therapist

During the Thanksgiving weekend of 2004, when Rachel was eight, her family went on holiday to their Michigan lakefront cottage.  Rachel’s parents made arrangements for a charitable organization to deliver to their Florida home a twelve-foot Christmas tree, fully decorated, in their absence. 

It was the responsibility of the groundskeeper to see that the tree was properly placed in the living room.  Unfortunately, once the family had departed, he was out of sight and out of mind.  Consequently, the volunteers delivering the tree were unable to place it in the home, deciding instead to leave it at the front door.

As fortune would have it, a violent thunderstorm erupted soon after.  Tree limbs and ornaments were spread in a thousand pieces over several acres of manicure lawn, a $1,200 disaster.  So, when the family returned from their holiday, the sight, leastwise for Rachel’s mother, was at first incredulous, then shocking, finally erupting into vociferous despair.  

To put it mildly, Rachel’s mother lost it.  She was reduced to hysterical outbursts and damning epithets.  This greatly upset Rachel.  She had never seen her mother in such a state.  Meanwhile, Rachel’s father, a former police officer who had experience in domestic disputes, took off to avoid his wife’s fury and the object of her rage. 

He would later explain to his daughter that once anger reached the level of rage the person’s appetite for continuing it was impossible to subdue as long as the cause for it was there.  He admitted being that cause, having made arrangements for the tree’s delivery and entrusting his groundskeeper to handle it.  This eight-year-old saw the situation in the most drastic terms, that is, her parents divorcing. 

A sense of being abandoned, security jeopardized, and peace shattered are common conditions for spontaneous anxiety, especially for a child who is likely to retreat into tearful self-pity.  Not Rachel.  She took charge.

She instructed her mother to sit down.  “Mother,” she said, “get hold of yourself!  It’s only a tree!”  Then to put an exclamation point on the situation, she added, “Daddy’s left.  He may never come back!”  She then informed her mother that the tree was something that could be replaced, but not her father.

Her mother listened, whereas earlier she exploded when her husband had said, “It’s only a business expense.  No big deal!”  This response triggered a reminder of his spendthrift ways.  On the other hand, Rachel was appealing to her mother’s self-interests as well as her own. 

When a child fears the breakup of the family, it creates the sense of abandonment, isolation, separation, and helplessness.  Consequently, the expected behavior is weeping, not taking charge.  Rachel had the presence of mind to appeal to her mother’s reason and apprehension.  She created a climate in which her mother calmed down; recognizing it was only a tree, while finally realizing what was actually at stake.  

Within the hour, Rachel’s father returned.  Peace was tacitly restored in an aftermath of emotional catharsis and apologies.  Rachel stepped off stage and allowed her parents to again take bond again, but it had been she who acted like the adult in the situation, not either of her parents, and she was eight-years-old. 

A child became the parent, the interventionist, the therapist, but who will be this child’s parent, the therapist when emotional trauma surfaces at some inopportune time in her future?  This is now part of this little girl’s history.  True, it has put a fissure of vulnerability in her innocence, but at the same time, placed anxiety in perspective.

.

A Father’s Take on Anxiety

My da was an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad, who managed only a seventh grade education.  He was a wise man albeit life’s Job from the Bible.  His mother died in Cook County Hospital in Chicago when he was born; his father took off for points unknown never to be seen again. 

Reared by his Irish relatives in Iowa, he grew up into young manhood during the “Roaring Twenties,” and had difficulty settling down even after he met my mother.  She was patient and would in time be his anchor and lighthouse.  The 1930s were the years of The Great Depression, and then came World War Two, rearing four children on a railroad brakeman’s income. 

He was proud of his work and loved the railroad.  During the war, he carried wounded soldiers from the battlefields of the South Pacific from Boone, Iowa to Clinton, Iowa on his Chicago & North Western Railway trains heading to Schick General Hospital, an US Army hospitals in Clinton, or hospitals due East.  Often, he was so distraught seeing these wounded young men that he could not talk to my mother or anyone after completing his trip.  When war was over, and life slowed down and became more manageable, he contracted multiple myeloma, bone cancer, and a form of leukemia, and died at the age of 50.

It was impossible to miss my da’s physical courage, which was on display to the end.  He never complained although in great pain, and reduced to less than sixty pounds before he expired.  His cage was mental anxiety.  Little as he feared death, he seemed afraid of life, afraid to push the envelope.  He would give others the benefit of the doubt and not himself; cower to authority figures even when he knew they were blatantly wrong.  To him, everyone was more gifted than he was.  I often asked him why.

The incongruity of his humility with my arrogance gave me the courage to venture into the world of work believing no one more talented, then to drop out at the zenith of my career, and reenter the even less certain world of words as a writer.  Here are a few of his boilerplate observations that have become etched on my soul:

A man needs only three square meals a day, the roof over his head, and the clothes on his back.  Everyone, no matter how high they fly, share this in common.  Yet society can take away your table, the roof over your head, and the clothes off your back, but it must kill you to take what you put between your ears. 

You are the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad.  The day you deny that is the day you won’t know who the hell you are.  That’s the only thing you have that is yours.  I see college students boarding my trains leaving their parents at the station pretending they don’t know them.  You cannot run from who you are, but you can lose who that is.

Don’t be too impressed with high flyers.  Chances are they have connections you’ll never know about.  You have no choice but to find your way with hard work.  Don’t envy them; don’t copy them; and by all means, don’t pretend to be like them.

Money is not the root of all evil.  It is what people make of money.  Everyone likes money.  Some will lie to get it; cheat to get it; betray their friends to get it; or steal it.  But most people are content to have little of it.  What separates us from the rich is that we are only capable of venial sins when it comes to money, while the rich have a great talent for committing mortal sins in pursuit of it.  Don’t ever be impressed with the rich.  Most fortunes are built on selling your soul for money.

Your mother expects you to be a big deal.  That will never happen.  What your mother refuses to understand is that our classless society has a caste system even in this dingy little town of ours.  The haves decide who belongs and who doesn’t; and have nots better know where they belong or they won’t belong anywhere.

Whenever you have something to say about someone, imagine that person is standing directly behind you taking in every word.  By the same token, when someone badmouths someone not there, be weary.  Rest assured that when you’re not present you’re fair game.

His good counsel simplified his anxiety instead of giving him reason to venture beyond his self-imposed doubt.  He was an honest man who stayed in his Irish Catholic conclave.  We had an Irish grocer, two Irish doctors, an Irish dentist and Irish insurance man, two Irish pubs in the neighborhood, lived in an Irish parish, had Irish friends, and even an Irish undertaker.  This was something considering the community was more than eighty percent Protestant.

Anxiety & Life Changing Experience

There is a saying when the student is ready the teacher will arrive.  This seems less true today.  Students appear disinclined to seek pedagogic direction.  Likewise, mentors, coaches and counselors in everyday life are less prominent.  We are in the impersonal electronic age glued to a cell phone or a modem. 

With so much information available, curiosity is being fed by solo flying on the Internet.  Active life has been relegated to the back burner.  Most experience is second hand or play station reality.  If humanity is anything, it is a social group, and social dynamics at every level are critical to developing social skills.  The irony is that as we are pushed closer together by the heterogeneity of the population, which continues to grow reducing the distance between us, we become more insular, not less, more secluded, not less so, and more guided by inappropriate stereotypes than enlightening interpersonal relations. 

Self-awareness only occurs when we confront life’s obstacles and move through them to new possibilities.  To confront anxiety, it requires moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from reassuring safety to challenging freedom, from the content of meaning to the context of identity.   Each life is loaded with such possibilities and situations.  This was one of mine.

A Case Study

Only in my thirties, after completing an assignment in South Africa, I resigned, retiring from the world of work and moving to Florida. 

My executive assignment in South Africa had been to facilitate the formation of a new modest conglomerate of an American subsidiary, a British affiliate, and a South African chemical division. 

There were a number of reasons for my early retirement for what, on the surface, might seem a hasty decision.  To wit, there was the cultural shock of British colonialism clashing with modest upbringing in a working class family in Iowa, coupled with the observation of blatant human rights violations of the Bantu people, the black majority population, which essentially had few rights.  Then there was the passivity of my Irish Roman Catholic Church in the midst of these practices.  Added to this was a cavalier disregard of basic ethics by company executives. [2]

This threw my value and belief system into chaos.  It didn’t help that my wife and four preadolescent children didn’t’ take to life in Johannesburg, exacerbated by the fact that I traveled extensively leaving them to deal, alone, with a strange society. 

At every turn, there was the matter of South African apartheid, which reminded me of the Tama Indian Reservation near my home in Iowa.  My work was demanding, but that was not the problem.  The problem was I came to question my own emotional stability. 

My intuition told me the only rational escape from my free-floating anxiety was a full-fledged retreat.  I needed a “time out” to regroup and refocus.  My life made no sense to me anymore.  I resigned and relocated to Florida.

After doing little more than reading and writing for two years, I entered a doctoral program at a local university seeking answers.  I was in the program only a short time when a member of my group approached me after an evening seminar.  He was a decade younger than me, and we had never spoken to each other before.  Straightforwardly, he asked me, “Do you plan to graduate in this program?”  It was 9 p.m. and we would talk to nearly 1 a.m.  The jest of the conversation was my obvious contempt for academics, disdain professors who weren’t better read than I was, and my palpable scorn for their ignorance of the real world was not a formula for success. 

“What is obvious to me,” he continued, “is that with your attitude you are doomed to fail.”  He now had my total attention.  “If failure is in your plans, you are working the strategy to perfection.  But if you plan on earning a Ph.D., you’re doing everything wrong by intimidating and demeaning your professors. 

“As little as you may think of them, they have the power of the grade. As petty as their internal squabbling may offend you, they are masters of this arena.  Believe me, they can be as treacherous as I suspect you were in your previous work, perhaps more so.  They have to grovel for petty raises and petty perks.  Pettiness is their battlefield. 

“If you were to measure their antipathy for you against your contempt for them, it would not be a contest.  It would be like a hot draft from hell compared to a summer breeze.  They don’t like you, and don’t plan on trying. 

“You either step lightly or make humble, or they’ll squash you like a bug.”

“They’ve never known power, real power as you have.  They’ve never had people part the waters for them when they approach; and they’ve never made the kind of money you’ve made.  You’re the enemy on their turf, and you are showing no respect.”

Driving home across the bay, I reflected on his words and my previous career.  He was right.  I was being an ass.  Even though I was quite young in South Africa, I had authority, respect, a generous budget, ample human resources, and total freedom to implement my “intuitive strategy,” as my minders called it.  No one could explain my success. 

It was the major reason I returned to the university: to find answers in psychology and sociology to this conundrum of why I had been so successful yet so unconventional in my approach. [3] 

Unknown to my young counselor in the university parking lot that night, I was surprised and frustrated, even angered, to find the university a factory of reification and regurgitation.  It had no answers for me.  I was like the child looking for the pony in the haystack, only to find I had been duped by false expectations.

Instead of being comforted with my success and affluence, I wondered what my lot in life was meant to be: was it only to make money, provide security for my family, and then retire with a golden parachute?  Or was I supposed to make difference?  

It was on that basis that I resigned, telling my superior, a wise and decent man, that if I weren’t doing my job, the company would fire me; the company was not meeting my needs, so I was firing the company.  All he could say was that he predicted the road ahead of me would be quite rocky, and he, of course, was right.

Education & Palliatives to Anxiety Along the Way

Retiring young was a life wrenching experience, but there were many mentors, coaches and counselors along the way, some of whom were not at first heeded, people who pointed the most reliable direction they saw for me.  In disclosing this now, I would like readers to reflect on their own lives in similar terms and how life has spoken through interested parties to them in their own life’s journey.

My mother was my first coach and I write about her in some detail in my memoir as a novel. [4] You have already been introduced to my da.  Complementing them were the Sisters of St. Francis in grammar school.  They made me aware that I had a terrible temper, and that I must curb it or be in constant trouble.  They taught me discipline and introduced me to my way with words.  To this day, I have a love of books and ideas that they first sponsored. 

At our courthouse playground, older boys introduced me to baseball and taught me the game, while a high school athlete, and former student at the Catholic school taught me the love of basketball.  Were it not for the introduction of sports into my early life, I would imagine I would have been more withdrawn.  The Sisters of St. Francis encouraged sports for me as a calming influence to my temperament. 

In high school, I had an exceptional math teacher in third and fourth year mathematics.  But that is not why he is included here. We took a national test at mid-term of the first semester of my senior year, and I did poorly.  This unbeknown to me had troubled him, as he considered me one of his good student.   The same test was given again in the middle of my final semester.  I was unaware that it was the same test.  I did well on it.  Afterwards, he explained what he had done, and why, reminding me that I was high strung.  “When you become anxious your brain seems to fog up and shut down,” he observed.  His insight has proven useful to me throughout my life.

At university, taking a core course in literature my sophomore year, I contracted infectious mononucleosis and missed the mid-term, which was on James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915).  Everyone in the class was much better read than I was, and so I was mainly quiet.  My professor chose to have me complete the mid-term on the book as an oral examination.  When I concluded it, he asked how I knew the work so well.  I said, matter-of-factly, “I am Joyce,” meaning that my life paralleled much of what was in the book.  He asked me my major.  I told him it was chemistry.  “You belong in literature, not science,” he said.  It would take me thirty-five years to heed his words.

Welcome to Hell, Next Stop Heaven!

There is no time in which anxiety, free floating and otherwise, is at greater intensity than those halcyon days of college.  Rollo May devotes a good deal of his book The Meaning of Anxiety (1977) to academic anxiety and the development of the self.  College, compressed into a short number of years, isolated from the real world, and confined to regurgitating ideas, theories, truths, facts, myths and biases, is a time of much anxiety and agitation. 

Uncertainty, depression, stress, distress, confusion, and anxiety compete for the student’s waking attention.  And if that were not enough, these same demons play havoc with the student’s dreams while asleep.

When I am in an anxiety prone state, I have a variation of two dreams.  One, I am afraid to get my grades for fear I have flunked out.  Mind you, I graduated from university a half century ago.  The second dream, I have forgotten my class schedule – what class I am supposed to be attending, where and what time – and find myself lost on campus.  I encounter students rushing to class, but am too embarrassed to ask them where my class might be meeting.  I wake up in a cold sweat, and go to my study to write, unable to sleep the rest of the night. 

Someone might look at accomplishments, then at my comfortable existence, and say, “How is that possible?”  Soren Kierkegaard had the answer:

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose oneself.  So it is too that in the eyes of the world it is dangerous to venture.  And why?  Because one may lose.  But not to venture is shrewd.  And yet, by not venturing, it is so dreadfully easy to lose that which it would be difficult to lose in even the most venturesome venture, and in any case never so easily, so completely as if it were nothing – one’s self.  For if I have ventured amiss – very well, then life helps me by its punishment.  But if I have not ventured at all – who then helps me?  And, moreover, if by not venturing at all in the highest sense (and to venture in the highest sense is precisely to become conscious of oneself) I have gained all earthly advantages . . . and lose my self!  What of that? [5]

Long before I knew Kierkegaard’s words, I was stumbling and bumbling along, and ineptly but diligently embracing my resistance to my anxiety.  I found it true that the creative imagination is stimulated by accepting anxiety as real with lessons to teach us, that it is important to resist the urge to find safe haven in some cage.   

Each of us has a role in life to play involving the positive aspects of our selfhood.  We develop as individuals as we confront, move through and overcome anxiety-creating experiences.  There have been many people along my long life that have opened the door of my cage, which I have not always heeded.  When I have, the road ahead became easier.

Is Kafka’s Trial Our Own?

How often I have heard variations of Kafka’s lament in his book The Trial (1925):

Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. 

It is a novel of vast symbolism and a psychological study of a system whose leaders are convinced of their own righteousness.  To some the court is a symbol of the Church as an imperfect bridge between the individual and God.  More pertinent to today, it appears more likely a symbolic bridge between corporation and economic security. 

It is a challenge to trust the “system” to produce the leadership necessary to bring about social justice along with comfort and security to individuals collectively in society.  This challenge is crass, of course, because it implies that the burden is the responsibility of a few individuals and not the majority to bridge the gap between the ideal and the real in terms of this agenda.  What happened to Joseph K happens every day because the passive majority expect their wishes to materialize without any effort on their part. 

Plants close, jobs disappear, industries evaporate, communities become lifeless, values change, as well as sacred beliefs, skills become anachronistic, positions become atavistic, neighborhoods change, and it becomes increasingly difficult to put trust in leaders who make promises that they can’t keep and seem as lost as everyone else.  What is a person to do when he has done nothing wrong?  But is this true?

We can’t change the world to fit us but we can change ourselves to fit the world.  Managing anxiety involves the self-development of the self to an ever-changing world.  W. H. Auden captures this in The Age of Anxiety (1947):

. . . . it is silly

To refuse the tasks of time

And, overlooking our lives,

Cry – “Miserable wicked me,

How interesting I am.”

We would rather be ruined than changed,

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.

We remain architects of our destiny no matter how much we would prefer giving that role to someone else.  In the end as in the beginning, all we have is ourselves to blame.

*     *     *

[1] Rachel graduated with honors from a top prep high school.  With advanced courses already completed in high school, she will register as a second semester sophomore as she enters college in the fall of 2014.

[2] This tense experience is given a novelist treatment in A Green Island in a Black Sea: A Novel of South Africa During Apartheid, which is available on Kindle.

[3] See James R. Fisher, Jr.’s unconventional approach in Confident Selling, TATE Publishing, 2014, as well as in A Green Island in a Black Sea.

[4] The memoir is In the Shadow of the Courthouse: A Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel, TATE Publishing, 2014.

[5] Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, Princeton University Press, 1941, p. 52.