It comes upon me late at night, or sometimes late in the afternoon. It’s because it’s been too cloudy, or maybe because the sunshine is growing oppressive. It’s because I ate too much yesterday, or haven’t had anything since breakfast.
It starts somewhere in my middle, and travels up and down my body like tremors in a faultline. I feel it convulsing my lymph nodes, blackening my conscious mind, poisoning my reservoirs of contentment, hope and positive excitement like diesel exhaust in a desert sky.
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me… (Blaise Pascal, Pensée #206)
It’s worse than anxiety, it’s less specific than fear. It’s holistic and horrible. I refer to it as dread.
The only way to escape it is to sleep. Which means I’ve spent a lot of valuable time sleeping.
I know there’s such a thing as clinical anxiety; I don’t think that’s what this is. The reason I don’t think that is because I’ve found a method for overcoming it, that doesn’t involve medication.
It’s a method I learned from a car wreck in Hollywood.
It was last September. I’d just left my hometown for the first stage of my new life as an itinerant writer. I was nervous, but all I had to do that day was drive for two hours, from San Diego to Los Angeles. Easy, right? I’d get to Hollywood, spend the afternoon writing at a coffee shop I knew, and wait for my friend to get out of work. Then I’d meet her at her place in Monterey Park, and things would be just fine.
I left San Diego at 2pm. By 7.30, I was sitting on the curb of Ventura and Whittier, watching a tow truck haul my wrecked car out of the intersection.
Even thinking about it makes me need an Alka Seltzer. Hold on…
I called my other friend, the one who was planning to leave Los Angeles with me in a week’s time, to tell him that depending on what news I got from the body shop, our plans might be canceled. He didn’t sound very disturbed by the news; he offered to pray with me. The first words out of his mouth were “Dear God…thank you.”
My gorge immediately rose.
“Thank you?” shrilled an ugly, bitter voice in my head. “For what? That’s the last thing I’ll agree to saying, until this situation is redressed!”
And then, there came another another voice in my head, more resonant, more authoritative.
“You’d better start saying thank you,” it told me, “every time anything happens. You’d better start saying it before you even know if things are going to work out. Because you have no idea what else could happen. Which is the whole reason you chose to live this way.
“Every day, for the rest of your life, is going to involve not knowing what happens next. So you can either spend each day freaking out, or being grateful. Your choice.”
Those great spiritual efforts, which the soul sometimes essays, are things on which it does not lay hold. It only leaps to them, not as upon a throne, for ever, but merely for an instant.. (Pensée #351)
Four days later, I was driving north on the 101.
Don’t imagine for a moment that those four days were any kind of easy. I’d wake up on my friend’s couch, and the remembrance of what had happened would wash over me like a cold shower. The only way I could get myself moving was to think ahead only an hour at a time. If I thought about what other bad news the day might bring–from the body shop, from the insurance company, from my bank–I’d feel that creeping dread starting to close in.
I didn’t know it was going to work out until, one afternoon, it did. In the meantime, it was a choice whether to spend the day with my head between my knees, or make use of the time somehow.
The good thing about the whole experience is that it gave me a look behind the curtain on something I’d always struggled with. It’s like that moment between childhood and maturity, when you go on a scary theme park ride, and suddenly realize that all the monsters that pop out from the dark are nothing but gears and fake fur. They still startle you, but they mean something very different than they used to.
Here’s something else that surprised me. I’d never wrecked my car before, but the feelings it brought were very, very familiar. And when I cast back in my memory, I realized that they were the exact same feelings I had during auditions for the middle school play.
And they were the same as when my first boyfriend called me and said, “We need to talk.”
And they were the same as when my college applications arrived in the mail.
And they were the same as when I found the ideal dress for my sister’s wedding, hanging on a clearance rack.
(For the record, I got the leading role, my boyfriend broke up with me, I got into three of the four schools I’d applied for, and the dress fit…mostly.)
No matter how perfect my life might be, fear can always find something to attach to.
Whether it’s lack of money or a loss of love, something as immediate and trivial as losing your wallet, or as conceptual and dire as being lost and alone. Which tells me that fear of this calibre is, like a two-year-old child, not something you can really argue with.
It makes for a rotten way of life, though. So here’s what the car wreck, and subsequent events of equal impact, have taught me about how to deal with it.
We’ll do this David Letterman-style, shall we? Starting from the bottom…
3. Be like a squirrel
You know…like that White Stripes song. …Anyone?
Okay, different example.
My first time flying solo to Europe was terrifying to me. I was landing in an airport where I didn’t speak the language, had to get a cab to a town I’d never been to, to meet someone I’d never seen before. Up until the day before I left, I was totally cool about the whole thing; people were like “It’s going to be amazing” and I was like “Yeah, I totally know.” The night before I left, I started to freak out. How was I going to pull this off? How was I not going to wind up in a ditch in a foreign country where no one would identify me for weeks?
My friend JoAnn, who travels all the time for work, gave me her strategy; it’s much the same as the White Stripes song, but tailored to international travel. She said rather than looking at the entire project of getting from the US to the farm outside Nice, look no further than each stage of the process. When you get off the plane, she said, your only job in the whole world is to get through customs. After that, pat yourself on the back. Next, your only job in the whole world is to find baggage claim…not even to locate your suitcase, mind you, just to find the right area of the airport. Once that’s accomplished, find the specific carousel for your flight. And so on, she said. It keeps her sane.
It kept me sane, too.
2. Acknowledge what’s really going on
Tidal waves are caused by something very mundane and inoffensive–the moon’s gravitational pull. I’ve learned that in the same way, an engulfing wave of dread has something very mediocre, at the bottom of it all. Boredom, let’s say, or sexual frustration, or jealousy of someone. Most of the time, it’s nothing an extreme distaste for inconvenience. I don’t like not knowing specifically how my plans will play out.
I think the dread happens because my pride can’t accept that my crummy little problems are so crummy and so little. Something in me demands that they get blown up into epic proportions. Exposing them, even if it’s only to myself, embarrasses me…and my instinct is to protect myself from embarrassment, at any price. Even if it means keeping me up all night.
Once I know what’s really bothering me, the trembling and shaking is just…well, trembling and shaking. It’ll eventually stop. Until it does, it’s highly worth laughing at.
1. Say “thank you” before you know what for
How many friends do you think you’d have if, every time they did something unexpected, you assumed the worst about them?
My car wreck in Hollywood alerted me to this tendency–to assume the worst about God. And it’s seriously fu(dg)ed up…don’t you agree?
This practice may be the most difficult of them all, because it’s 180 contrary to what fear demands. That, however, is exactly what makes it so effective. Learning to do it feels, on an emotional level, like learning to swallow pills without water. It makes you gag the first time, it’s never exactly easy, but you get more and more used to it, and soon you do it without thinking.
Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He is…
What harm will befall you in taking this side? (Pensée #233)
The irony in all of this is that if you’re reading this and thinking “Great! New tools I can use for emotional freedom!”, then you probably don’t really need them.
Conversely, if you are one of those people who suffer from dread like I do, you’re thinking “This will never work.” Because that’s what fear does. It digs in its heels, crosses its arms, and like a two-year-old, says “No.”
I’m not going to argue the point. I’m just telling you what I know.
Maybe these things only work because I want them to work.
That’s good enough for me.
