The Anxious Idiot - by Daniel Smith

The Anxious Idiot *

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By DANIEL SMITH

One day last year, I called my brother Scott in a state of agitation, self-hatred and incipient despair. Scott was at work and short on time. I got straight to the point. “I’m in a state of agitation, self-hatred and incipient despair!” I cried.

“Tell me more,” Scott said. “What is it?”

“I’m anxious — again! I’m anxious day and night. I wake up anxious and I go to bed anxious. I’m a total wreck. And I’m not doing anything to help myself! I know what helps and I’m not doing it! What’s wrong with me? Why am I not doing the things I know full well will make me feel better?”

“Oh,” Scott said. “That’s an easy one. It’s because you’re an idiot.” Then he said he’d call me after work.

When Scott called me an idiot, I initially took it as a joke — a bit of sharp-elbowed levity meant to nudge me out of my morbid self-involvement. As a brother, friend and fellow anxiety sufferer, Scott has license to make such jokes. And they help; they truly do. But the more I think about Scott’s comment the more I come to see it as containing real wisdom, as well as the power to explain one of the particular hells of anxiety: its tenacity.

Like many people who have been given a diagnosis of an anxiety disorder (and many who have not), I am always braced for the next recurrence. Anxiety, like the tide, is forever receding and returning, receding and returning. I have been experiencing this pattern for nearly 20 years now, so that my anxiety has come to seem, at times, inevitable and unassailable — a fait accompli. My anxiety, I’d concluded, is what I am. There is no escape. 

Thanks to Scott, I am now coming to understand that this is not true. Thanks to Scott, I am now coming to understand that anyone, even the most neurotic of souls, can lessen and even elude anxiety, so long as he heeds a simple dictum: Don’t be an idiot.

I should define “idiot” for our purposes. I don’t mean someone of low I.Q. or poor academic abilities. Intelligence as commonly conceived has nothing to do with it. By “idiot,” I mean exactly what my brother meant when he tagged me with the epithet: an impractical and unreasonable person, a person who tends to forget all the important lessons, essentially a fool, one who willfully ignores all that he has learned about how to come to his own aid. A person who is so fixated on the fact that he is in a hole that he fails to climb out of the hole. An idiot, in short, is someone who is self-defeatingly lazy.

Laziness: it isn’t a characteristic usually associated with the anxious. Hysteria, yes. Clamminess, yes. A shrill speaking voice, often. But laziness? If anything, people tend to view the anxious as more active and motivated than normal, because they are more haunted by the specter of failure. And yet long experience has taught me that it is laziness — and not enclosed spaces, social situations or any other countless triggers — that is the foremost enemy of the anxiety sufferer, for laziness prevents him from countering the very patterns of thought that make him anxious in the first place.

It’s true that the anxious are rarely slothful in any typical sense. It’s more that we tend to be undisciplined, or somehow otherwise unwilling to see our anxiety for what it is — a habit of mind. To the argument that anxiety is not a habit but an affliction, I’d respond that the two are not mutually exclusive. Anxiety may come on like an affliction, but it persists due to habit. Or, to put this another way, just because you are afflicted with a mental disorder doesn’t mean that you can’t apply your conscious will to mitigating that disorder. Even if you use medication, as I do, to coax your nervous system in a more salutary direction, your will — your determination to act in a way that is counter to your nature — still factors in. Indeed, I am convinced it is essential to recovery.

This isn’t to say that being willful is easy. Anxious thoughts — the what-if’s, the should-have-been’s, the never-will-be’s — are dramatic thoughts. They are compelling thoughts. They are thoughts that have no compunction about seizing you by your lapels and shouting, “Listen to me! Believe me!” So we listen, and believe, without realizing that by doing so we are stepping onto a closed loop, a set of mental tracks that circle endlessly and get us nowhere. This makes the anxious habit very hard to break. Over time those mental tracks deepen and become hardened ruts. Our thoughts slip into grooves of illogic, hypervigilance and catastrophe.

My own mind, I am fairly certain, will always gravitate toward anxiety. And like many, I will often be disinclined to do anything about it. The reasons for this are no doubt complex and myriad. But it is certain that anxiety is exhausting and demoralizing: in many cases, as you listen to your anxious thoughts you get tired and apathetic. You get depressed. And that hopelessness, inaction and despair can become a sort of cocoon, a protective layer between you and the high-pitched terror of it all, and maybe, over time, even a painful and perverse comfort.

But that doesn’t mean — and here is the good news — that there is nothing we can do about anxiety. Indeed, there is plenty a person can do. The promising thing about a habit is that it is not the same thing as a fate. An alcoholic, we are told, is always an alcoholic — but not every alcoholic drinks. Similarly, an anxious person will always be at risk of anxiety, but he needn’t be troubled by it on a daily basis. He can avoid his own tendencies. He can elude his own habit.  

To accomplish this, however, he has to work, and work hard. He has to fight — every day of his life, if he’s got it bad — to build new patterns of thought, so that his mind doesn’t fall into the old set of grooves. He has to dig new tracks and keep digging.  

As for what that digging entails, I have my preferences. Over the course of my anxious life, I have found two reliable methods to keep my anxiety at bay: Zen meditation and cognitive-behavior therapy. Both methods teach, in their own fashion, that one’s thoughts are not to be taken as the gospel truth; both foster mindfulness and mental discipline. But you will likely have your own favored methods. You might find yoga, or exercise, or therapeutic breathing, or prayer are what work best for you. I’m not sure it matters what a person chooses — so long as he chooses and keeps choosing. So long as he remains dogged. Anything else, as my brother might say, is idiocy.

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*The New York Times  / Opinion Pages / Opinionator / Anxiety - August 11, 2012

They care, they do ! - Maureen Dowd

  Cruel Conservatives Throw a Masquerade Ball
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By MAUREEN DOWD / The New York Times / OP-ED
September 1, 2012, TAMPA, Fla.
MESSAGE: They care.

Republicans care deeply. They really do.

They care deeply about making us think that they care deeply.

That’s why they knocked themselves out producing a convention that was a colossal hoax.

They did that for us. Because they care. With exquisite timing, they started caring last Tuesday at 7 p.m., when suddenly the party was chockablock with tender souls in rainbow colors, with strong-minded women and softhearted men, with sentimental rags-to-riches immigrant sagas.

We all know Republicans prefer riches-to-riches sagas and rounding up immigrants, if the parasitic scofflaws aren’t sensitive enough to self-deport.

That’s why my heart swells to think of the herculean effort the G.O.P. put into pretending its heart bleeds.

Even if it’s been bleeding for only five days. Better never than late.

It was remarkable to watch Mitt Romney ignore the empty seats and airless mood and reach deep inside himself to give a speech in which he appeared genuine. It was also remarkable to see that even when he looks genuine, he still seems fake. And despite the soft quiver in his voice, and Ann’s nonstop transfusions of emotion and wrenching testimonials from Mormons forced to publicly relive family tragedies simply to give Mitt a personality, the terribly erect candidate still seemed as remote as Jupiter.

It was truly thrilling to watch the blindingly white older male delegates greet their young, blue-eyed future: Paul Ryan, the 42-year-old Wisconsin congressman who turns out to be more talented than anyone had anticipated — a prodigy of prestidigitation.

In his speech Wednesday night, the altar boy altered reality, conjuring up a world so compassionate, so full of love-thy-neighbor kindness and small-town goodness, that you had to pinch yourself to remember it was a shimmering mirage, a beckoning pool of big, juicy lies. (The fitness freak may have also fibbed about running a sub-three-hour marathon in 1991; Runner’s World reports that his time was 4 hours and 1 minute.)

As the writer Dermot McEvoy notes, Ryan has “the so sincere, so phony air of a gloomy Irish undertaker standing outside the funeral parlor where you’ve come to plant your mother, shaking his head consolingly and giving you that firm two-handed Irish handshake.”

Except with Ryan, it’s the safety net in the coffin.

The convention was an unparalleled triumph of mythmaking, or Mittmaking. Romney was so eager to woo Hispanic votes and join the cascade of speakers sharing immigrant family tales, from Rick Santorum to Ann Romney to Marco Rubio, that he made his father, George Romney, sound Hispanic.

“My dad had been born in Mexico,” he said, “and his family had to leave during the Mexican revolution.”

It was fitting that David Koch was the beaming financial god presiding over this Orwellian makeover of Republicans as generous communitarians who care about grandmas, cherish immigrants and defend Medicare, so movingly described by the vice presidential nominee who tried to turn Medicare into a voucher system as “an obligation we have to our parents and grandparents.”

Koch leads the Orwellian movement of oil billionaires playing grass-roots activists. The industrialist ideologue wants to use his money to shrink government the way those vacuum sealers on infomercials suck the air out of plastic bags stuffed with clothes until they’re a mere sliver — shriveling all the social services, environmental regulations and taxes on the wealthy.

Koch, who infuses gazillions to build up the Tea Party and tear down the president, was a member of the New York delegation. On Tuesday, he was in the hall, sitting in what had to be one of the most expensive single seats that anyone ever bought.

The stage show looked like America, but the convention hall did not. The crowd seemed like the sanctuary of a minority — economically wounded capitalists in shades from eggshell to ecru, cheering the man from Bain and trying to fathom why they’re not running the country anymore. The speakers ranted about an America in decline, but the audience reflected a party in decline.

We may not have learned who Mitt really is; just that he doesn’t like AC/DC and Led Zeppelin and that he does like peanut butter on his pancakes. But it’s clear that he is unlike the vast majority of Americans in every respect. Romney is counting on the fact that he’s a native alien, rather than a non-American alien, as he tried to paint the president with his recent birther crack.

But so far it isn’t working. It’s a strange moment when Americans relate less to the tall, handsome, rich prince of a famous political family than to a skinny black dude of mixed parentage who spent a lot of time in Indonesia.

Given the president’s lackluster performance and the listless economy, Romney should be killing it. But he’s an odd duck running with a dissimulating striver. Ryan’s harsh stances toward women, the old and the poor are on record, so he set a new standard for gall when he intoned, “The truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves.”

The convention rebranding as compassionate conservatives is encouraging in that it shows that Republicans feel they are at a disadvantage with their Ayn Rand disdain for altruism, their Kempian trickle-down economics stripped of the humanity of Jack Kemp, their worship of the wealthy as the engine of economic prosperity.

Expected to draw Catholic votes, Ryan has been forced to renounce the atheist, Russian-born Rand, but he channeled her when he talked about wanting to define his own happiness, adding, “That’s freedom, and I’ll take it any day over the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners.”

Ryan’s lies and Romney’s shape-shifting are so easy to refute that they must have decided a Hail Mary pass of artifice was better than their authentic ruthless worldview.

The Grand Old Party illusion is Romney’s latest attempt to figure out how to pull ahead in a race where the rivals are mired in one tiny little margin.

“A masquerade party,” scoffed David Axelrod, the president’s strategist, “to cover up the final takeover of the Republican Party by the right. It was like Barry Goldwater in ’64.”

As I wandered the hall Tuesday night, past cowboy hats and cheeseheads, I ran into Christopher Shays, a delegate and former congressman. I asked the Connecticut moderate if he felt lonely at the conservative masquerade ball.

He laughed and then said wistfully, “Our biggest crime was trying to impeach the one president who was working with us.”

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Maureen Dowd