In the still of the night...

I stumbled across this passage this morning that I thought would be interesting to post.

A great anxiety has God allotted,
and a heavy yoke, to its sons and daughters,
From the day one leaves her mother's womb
to the day she returns to the mother of all the living,
Her thoughts, the fear in her heart,
and her troubled forebodings till the day she dies--
Whether she sits on a lofty throne
or grovels in dust and ashes,
Whether she bears a splendid crown
or is wrapped in the coarsest of cloaks--
Are of wrath and envy, trouble and dread,
terror of death, fury and strife.
Even when she lies on her bed to rest,
her cares at night disturb her sleep.
So short is her rest it seems like none,
till in her dreams she struggles as she did day by day,
Terrified by what her mind's eye sees
like a fugitive being pursued;
As she reaches safety, she wakes up
astonished that there was nothing to fear.
(Sir 40:1-7)

How often I've lain awake at night trying to fall asleep, with fears and anxieties coursing through my mind, often unrealistic fears and anxieties that I thought I'd long since conquered or buried. Why do these disturbing thoughts come bubbling to the surface when one is most open and undistracted, most vulnerable and eager to fall off to sleep?

It must be that the daily business of life (work, home, telephones, tv, radios, etc.) drowns out our fears during the course of our day and their tiny voices emerge when the world surrounding us has quieted down.

Remember the Anxiety Closet in the Bloom County comic strip, how it was full of the most absurd and humorous fears and anxieties like killer clowns or accountants. It is a relief to put a name and a face to what feels like such a personal experience and realize that even the most self-confident and unreflective narcissist probably has an Anxiety Closet of their own with the door shut and bolted and a chair pushed up against the door handle.

I guess one of the possible messages of the passage is that there exists the possibility that we will "wake up"--from our unthinking ways of acting? from our self-absorption? from our delusions about how the world works? from our prejudices and negative thinking? from our self-destructive habits?--and be astonished that there was nothing to fear.

Becoming a pyromaniac

When I first started this blog last month, I had to limit myself to writing only one entry a day. I had so much I wanted to write down. Now, a month later, I find myself with so little worth saying. The enormous snowfall? So what. My teaching? I don't want to reveal too many details about that. My writing problems? How self-absorbed. My health issues? Everyone is dealing with something going wrong in their lives.Same old, same old.

How could I go from bursting with ideas to being intellectually bankrupt so fast? The muses are indeed fickle. And it has been quite a while since they smiled upon me and showered me with their blessings.

Right now, my ass has been called on the carpet (is that a real expression?) because it's been so damn long since I've turned in any of the work I'm supposed to be doing. It is almost like the pressure has to become unbearable in order for me to work and who wants to put themselves through that kind of stress? It's like being an actor who has stage fright who signs up to do 8 performances a week...almost like I have to force myself to do what terrifies me because I know somewhere in there there is a payoff. And that payoff is a long, long ways away.

The funny thing is is that I'm good at what I do. I think so and I've been told so by others. But I'm not "brilliant" and that apparently is the standard by which my advisers are judging me by. And the prospect of getting yet another rejection of my best efforts is demoralizing.

Ironically, intellectually, I know that this is something every writer goes through. I have books that tell me so! No artistic effort ever matches the ideal in your head (everything that exists is imperfect) and it is impossible to please every critic. All of these books tell me that the writers who are successful just work on despite the rejections that anticipate receiving, writing through the anxiety. But most people who want to generate creative work let themselves be stopped by the frustrations which are real and painful.

So, I guess I need a thicker skin or a bigger ego or a singlemindedness that will keep me working despite knowing that whatever I do will fall short of my advisers' hopes for me (this attitude is not me being a fatalist but what I've experienced over four years of working with them). I guess I need to stop seeking their approval and yet I literally can not move forward in the process without it, I can't take the next step until I get their okay.

So, I think I need to put on my bitch face and channel some of this despair into anger and put that into my work. Not the most positive approach but maybe it will help to light a fire from these burnt coals of my career.

Hey, I guess I did find something to write about...a good size dose of self-absorption but isn't that what blogs are really all about?

What do you cover?

I heard a public radio interview today with Kenji Yoshino, a Yale Law professor who has published a book called Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights. He made some interesting statements about how people in U.S. culture are encouraged to "cover", to hide aspects of themselves that would make them stand out as different from mainstream culture, whether those differences are racial, sexual, ethnic, religious or just ones of personality (a man who hates sports, for example). Diversity is accepted and preached but we receive subtle but strong pressure to silence or not express those parts of us which are different enough to cause others to become uncomfortable (being blind, being gay, being poor, being a sexual victim, male or female, etc.). The one exception he mentioned is the marketplace...if some aspect of, for example, being black (rap) or being gay (Queer Eye) proves to be hip and popular, it is accepted and incorporated into the mainstream while other aspects which are not fashionable are discouraged or put down as strange and unacceptable.

Yoshino had larger issues to make about how this concept of covering influences civil rights legislation (behavior, not identity is regulated). It got me thinking though about how we all actively cover, really manage, what parts of ourselves we are willing to show to different people in different situations (Psych 101, right?).

But it connected with a quote I had read earlier today from an E.B. White essay, "The Second Tree from the Corner" (in a Ralph Keyes book about writing) where a man named Trexler goes to see a psychiatrist because his fears and anxieties are crippling him. The session has mixed success but Trexler feels a bit more free afterwards because he is "unembarrassed at being afraid; and in the jungle of his fear he glimpsed (as he had so often glimpsed them before) the flashy tail feathers of the bird courage." Keyes goes on to say that White was a beloved writer because he was "so willing to sail boldly into the squall of his own fears, commenting on the trip as he went" (1995:5).

Fear is so visceral. You break out into a sweat, you hyperventilate, your eyes dialate, your heart rate shoots through the roof, your muscles tense up, and your stomach does cartwheels. It pulses through your body. Meanwhile, your mind is actively scanning the physical, psychological, and verbal horizons for that one reliable source of relief: an escape!

The idea of not only being unembarrassed by our fears--not "covering" them--but to "sail boldly" into the midst of them, requires a courage that eludes me at the present moment. But it does inspire me to try to take a different approach to writing anxiety than the one that is my typical reflex--busying myself with something completely unimportant in comparison (cleaning, writing letters, playing Sudoku, um, writing in a blog). Something to muse about over the weekend...