#30: Intrusive thoughts

Some people have been saying I seem down.

Nov 01, 2020

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Good morning and welcome to November,

Some people have been saying I seem down, and I would like to clarify that I am okay! Or rather, I am the normal amount of down given the myriad catastrophes gripping humanity and the fact that I’ve spent 90% of this year in my one-bedroom apartment. I am safe and so lucky and approaching moral neutrality vis-a-vis wearing pajamas all day. I’ve even seen some friends! In sum I’m doing just fine and I hope you are too. Anyway here’s an essay about anxiety.

(I love @chunkbardkey)

Intrusive thoughts

Last week, Avi and I walked our cat Bug six blocks to the groomer. Before we left, I unzipped the top of his carrying case so that I could reach in and pet him intermittently, which calms his nerves. The case wasn’t unzipped enough for him to jump out, but as we walked I wondered if—with enough force and momentum behind it—his head could widen the opening and allow him to jump out and into the street. Avi and I walked in silence as I imagined it: Bug suddenly on the sidewalk in front of us, looking out of sorts. Bug running into the street and in front of a car. Bug lying lifelessly on the pavement, like my mom’s dog Bailey had when she was pregnant with me.

I imagined how we’d feel in the moments after. I thought about the expressions and sounds we’d involuntarily make, the things we’d scream and the horror we’d feel. I imagined us picking him up, crying, asking each other what to do. The vision went further: Us later that day, devastated in our empty apartment. Us the next week, having to tell our friends. Us in a month, trying not to think about the way he looked in those final moments. It’s not enough for me to imagine a bad thing, I need to imagine the aftermath. Not just the death, but the processing of the death; in the seconds afterward but also the weeks, months, years. It’s compulsive and masochistic and over in a minute.

“What are you thinking about?” Avi asked me.
“Bug running into the street and dying,” I said.
“Me too,” he said. And we walked on.

I once read that we experience intrusive thoughts to test ourselves. When we stand on a roof and imagine, for a split second, jumping off, it’s not necessarily an expression of desire; we’re testing our impulse control. We’re making sure that we won’t act against our own wishes. An ex of mine had a recurring dream that he’d killed someone. The dream wasn’t about the act itself—which he’d always done in a fit of uncontrollable impulse—but the horrible realization, a moment later, that he would now suffer consequences for the rest of his life, either in prison or on the run. His greatest fear was that his entire life might be governed by a single lapse in judgement. Naturally, his subconscious played it out over and over, asking him what he’d do.

Post-cut

If intrusive thoughts are a self-administered test, I think my compulsive need to imagine not just horrible moments, but the precise emotional and logistical experience of their fallout, is a kind of practice round for my worst fears. As if by visualizing the horror, by experiencing some faint shade of it in my body, it won’t hurt as much when it inevitably happens. Inherent to this is the particular delusion of anxiety, which tends to presume the worst will happen or already has. The other day I read a news story about a British pop star who’d tragically been diagnosed, at 32, with an inoperable brain tumor. “You never think this will happen to you,” he told a reporter. I’ve thought about that quote a lot. I’ve wondered if he was just saying that because it’s what people say, or if he really never thought about a doctor delivering him the worst possible news, which I think about often.

Invisibility

The other day I felt my heart beating in my shoulder blade. I reached back and touched the skin where the pulse felt strongest and waited for it to stop. I’ve experienced this feeling before—the rhythmic thump of my heart in my stomach or my leg, almost visible if I sit completely still and stare. I wondered if this could somehow be related to my heart palpitations, so I Googled: “why can I feel my heart beating in different parts of my body?” I found a Quora thread with an interesting answer from a man named Jiří Kroc, a Czech doctor with a PhD in complex systems (whatever that means).

“Sensory cells and organs filter incoming information substantially,” he wrote. In fact, most of the information our organs receive is discarded, with the remaining bit being sent to the brain, where our receiving centers filter it even further. In the end, we only consciously perceive a fraction of the information our body is receiving. So when we feel our hearts beating in our shoulder blades, we aren’t receiving extra information as much as perceiving more than we typically do, which could be for a variety of benign reasons. In other words, our hearts are beating all over our bodies all the time. We just don’t feel it until we do.

Something about this moment in history is drawing me to the unseeable. The invisible forces shaping our lives, the droplets undetectable to the human eye, the future we desperately want to predict but can’t. Maybe this is a response to the lack of physicality in my life right now; my mind can’t help but fill in the empty space with everything else. Sometimes I imagine what it would look like if covid-19 had a color to it. How we would feel if we could see germs smeared on door handles, stains on masks, or plumes of infected breath suspended in grocery stores. It sounds awful, but I think the alternative is worse. Something you can’t see is always more insidious. This is why the movie Alien is so much creepier than its sequel, Aliens. In the first one you hardly see the monster at all. Its lack of presence—compared to the whole pack of monsters you see in the second one—leaves you on high alert. Ready to jump at any second. This is how it feels to grocery shop in 2020.

Better to stay inside

I think this is why I’m so terrified of my heart. I don’t like that I can’t see it. That I don’t understand how it’s still beating even though I’m not hooked up to an electrical source. I just watched this video explaining it and I’m no less terrified. “A normal heartbeat begins with electrical impulses from a group of cells called the sinoatrial node in the upper part of your heart.” Well, I have questions! And they’ll probably never be answered to my satisfaction. Even doctors seem consistently mystified by our bodies, always saying it might or it’s hard to say exactly. They still don’t even know what headaches are! How am I supposed to go about my day without ever seeing my heart? I’ve never even seen my own face, and never will.

This must be why I’m drawn to writing. Words make invisible things visible. If I can explain a feeling with black markings I can see on a page, maybe it won’t mystify me. Maybe I can give it color so I can see it next time it’s recently touched a door handle. Maybe I can do the same for you. If I can capture something awful or complicated that’s been escaping you, maybe it will be more like the monsters in Aliens, no less present but at least visible and comprehensible. You won’t walk around your spaceship with a sinking feeling that something is there, no words to explain why. Of course, you don’t really need my help. But it helps me to pretend you do. It makes me feel useful.

Fear in long-form

Early in quarantine, I got a freelance gig writing the copy for a mental health workbook. The project was focused on helping consumers self-administer cognitive behavior therapy, and I was to write the introduction along with six essays that would appear between exercises on various anxiety-related topics, like sleep, change, relationships, and distraction. The creators behind the book, which included a team of psychologists, gave me a bunch of scientific data and research that I was to synthesize into text that was simple, helpful, and warm. I suppose I did this in the end, but what I remember most about the project was reading strange studies about the brain for hours—finding myself 23 pages deep into a study about a baby monkey holding onto a mother figure made out of chicken wire.

Many of the details are gone now, but one that stuck was the idea that clinical anxiety is a maladaptive fear response. Fear helps us survive—signaling to us when our lives may be in danger—but we’re only meant to experience it when we perceive a real threat. When this happens, our amygdala goes into overdrive, heightening our senses, while our prefrontal cortex, which regulates our moods and helps us make rational decisions, quiets down. This mental state is not meant to be endured long-term for obvious reasons. But when we become governed by anxiety, irrationality becomes a kind of resting state. This is one of those lessons that feels both obvious and illuminating.

I suppose I should gather that I’ve been anxious lately, with my new habit of counting my heartbeats and imagining my loved ones dead in the street when their errands take a little too long. I’ve written fairly recently about the benefits of death recollection and finding pleasure in the mysterious complexity of our sensory systems, but I think, in a way, I’m just trying to cope with the seemingly inescapable reality that we can’t see what actually governs us: not on door handles, not in campaign speeches, not the algorithms. The combination of the pandemic and the election and all their respective fallout have ratcheted up the stakes of being alive while asking us to remain calm and rational. This is an impossible task. A threat on top of a threat on top of a threat, all invisible, all demanding we change a future we cannot know by following rules set by people we don’t trust or can’t see.

A mysterious photo that came up in the film Avi and I recently developed. Neither of us has any recollection of taking it.

It makes a kind of horrible sense that those in power value capital, the most literal value there is, over people, of far more figurative value, and that the whole of America’s pandemic response has amounted to propping up the economy while millions sink further into poverty. Within that value system, it’s no wonder voters’ needs can’t compete with corporate dollars. If, as Jenny Holzer famously put it, “Abuse of power comes as no surprise,” then it’s those with the least amount of power—the majority—that have to wield their power in numbers. To make invisible problems more visible, like writing for the masses. And I don’t just mean by voting on shitty choices, but by demanding better choices. By holding our elected officials to certain principles and policies the majority of people support, like Medicare for All, rather than settling for beating the other team by any means necessary. The stronger the invisible forces, the stronger the need for collective action to fight it.

It makes me feel a little better to put all this to words, to give it a color, but it doesn’t really make it go away. Just like imagining my cat dying won’t make his death any less painful. The forces guiding us toward ever-increasing states of anxiety, no one person to blame or vote out, are still present and grotesque, motivating us to blame those with the least amount of power because they’re the most accessible and most visible. It’s the perfect storm for collective ineffectiveness. The precise way those most deserving avoid consequences, or justice. I think this is why voting feels unsatisfying as a means to an end (at least it did for me). There will only be more battles to fight on the other side. But regardless of how the US election turns out this week, I’m hopeful that, at least in the scope of history, this crisis will be more revealing than we can currently perceive.

1. This week’s Small Good Thing is the aforementioned CBT workbook that I just realized I’ve never linked to before: It’s called The Anti-Anxiety Notebook. I have no stake in the sales, I just love what the team did with the product (it’s meant to be a therapy tool that people actually want to use because it’s simple and beautiful) and have been using it myself. You can get free shipping with the code HALEYNAHMAN.

2. As previously mentioned, an unforgivable number of rounds of Bomb Chicken, a game I recently downloaded on my Nintendo Switch and love so much despite the popping sound it makes whenever I die, which I find lightly traumatizing.

3. “In Defense of Litmus Tests,” by Briahna Joy Gray for Current Affairs, which was published in July but recently retweeted by Gray. It’s an incisive piece that critiques the “vote blue no matter who” movement—not, at this point, to undermine votes, but to lay the groundwork for how to prioritize policy over partisanship in the coming years.

4. The words “this has vastly improved our lives,” from my mouth to Avi’s ear, in reference to us setting up an extended charging cable so we could plug our computers in from the couch. Dark?

5. This YouTube video by Andrew Huang on why so many catchy pop songs use the same note, the supertonic!

6. Brandy Jensen’s most recent edition of her advice column, Ask a Fuck-Up, about friendship amid the pandemic. I appreciated that she didn’t diagnose friendships that aren’t thriving during the pandemic as unimportant or fake, but rather lacking their proper nutrients.

“Covid has obviously eroded or destroyed countless things in all our lives including, for me and perhaps for your friend as well, the ease with which we maintain a lot of our relationships. That vast array of people you talk to somewhat frequently but not every day, the people you have dinner with every few months, the people you would see but not stay with if you are visiting their city. All of those relationships that add immeasurable texture to a life and are predicated on the simple joy of catching up.”

7. This video of a chinchilla being combed to Randy Newman’s “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”

8. A lot of French composer Claude Debussy.

9. “A for Alone,” a short story in the New Yorker by Curtis Sittenfeld, which I read as greedily as if it were a novel.

10. This tweet thread by @BlackSocialists about how we might start to organize and build systems of community outside of existing capitalist structures. I’ve been pondering what I can do to make media more ethical, inviting, and equitable since I know not everyone has the platform to launch a paid newsletter, so this got my wheels turning.

Black Socialists in America @BlackSocialists

Many people are looking at the totality of this monster of Capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and other social systems of domination, and are overwhelmed, asking members of our organization, “What do I do?” The answer is: Start building dual power where you’re at...

(full thread)

11. “The Difference Between Feeling Safe and Being Safe,” a piece by Amanda Mull for The Atlantic that tackles the psychological run-off of having no competent leadership during the pandemic—specifically the two poles it has created: those who flog the rules and those who won’t budge from the strictest version of them, even when new information proves them overkill.

12. The Talented Mr Ripley, which I’d somehow never seen before. This movie is genuinely beautiful (visually) and I’m not sure if this is a crime but I kind of wish the lead had been played by Leonardo DiCaprio instead of Matt Damon.

13. In today’s round of “thing I want inexplicably but will not actually buy”: this long padded vest by COS. ???

14. “So You’re Still Being Publicly Shamed,” by Ben Burgis for Jacobin, which explores the role of cancel culture in modern online life and the successes and misses of Jon Ronson’s famous book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

“The retreat of various social movements, especially organized labor, which can act as counterweights to the entrenched power of those on top of society, contributes to making all the people on the bottom justifiably feel powerless. Campaigns of online harassment can make their participants feel powerful, especially when the targets end up facing ‘consequences’ like being deplatformed or fired from their jobs.”

15. This tweet about egg storage personalities which made me realize I choose eggs with no rhyme or reason and should be punished for that.