Anxiety Feels Like This

This was my response to a prompt where you take an emotion you have often felt and personify that feeling or mind state as a character:

Anxiety is a hired assassin lightly gripping a garrotte he’s waiting to squeeze around your neck. It’s a thin sharp piece of wire and he wields it quickly and in silence. But he’s been hired not to kill you, just to incapacitate you, just to make you confess everything.

Anxiety sneaks up behind you when you least expect it and the next thing you know there is a razor edge of pain around your neck and when he twists the cord, a thin line of blood runs into your collar. The odd thing, he’s invisible. No one can see him and no one can see the tight cord around your neck. But you are aware of his presence every second of your day and it’s all you can think about. You can’t breathe. You can’t think. You can’t focus. You try to listen but all you hear is static. All you want to do is flee, but you are held in place by his invisible wire.

Anxiety follows you wherever you go. He is right behind you and he never stops whispering about the disaster that is just around the corner.

Anxiety was the kind of kid that liked pulling the wings off birds. When he did that he felt more powerful and the stuff his dad did to him didn’t seem as scary.

Advice to Writers

I gave my students the assignment to write some advice. I decided to write about what I think it takes to be a writer:

1.     There is no one right way to become a writer.

2.     Don’t pay attention to anyone else’s rules about how to structure your writing life. Find out what works for you.

3.     Trust yourself.

4.     Life is the best preparation for writing. So live fully, be curious, and stay open to new experiences.

5.     Write because you have to. Write because you need to. Write because you want to.

6.     If you don’t have an exceptional memory, take notes or keep a journal. It’s amazing how much you will forget about your life and how much you’ll wish you hadn’t.

7.     Carry a notebook and jot down snippets of other people’s conversations. In other words, eavesdrop. It’s the only way to learn the rhythm of dialogue.

Visiting Joanne

Last week, members of my post-cancer group rendezvoused at the Denny’s parking lot on Ocean Street, piled into Marianne’s car, and drove over the hill to visit a member of our group whose cancer has come back. Joanne had been sick from chemo and radiation and we all wanted to see her.

Joanne was thinner and her face was beautiful, wide open. She sat tall in her chair and told us her story. She let down in way you just can’t do with people who don’t know cancer from the inside out. She cried. We all did.

While we were there, I could feel my own defenses crumble. Next month will be my two-year anniversary of the end of treatment. Two years isn’t that long, but in the past few months, the specter of cancer has faded from my life. While I live with the impact of cancer every day—mostly in the form of a brain filled with vast and gaping holes—being a cancer patient has shifted from being a contemporary identity, the headline in the forefront of my life, to something in the background, just one part of my rich and textured history. I’ve found other more immediate things to fret about. And fret, I do.

Re-entry

Today I got up, wide awake at five and spent the next hours catching up on mail, class registrations, sorting through all the literature we brought home from colleges and buying a big expanding folder to keep it in. I went to the grocery store (always my way to land) and made dinner. Eli has spent the day with Ashley and they been happily ensconced doing a little of this and a little of that all day. They're watching a movie now and I'm waiting for it to be over to give her a ride to our designated meeting point with her parents--the barn at UCSC. These two live very far apart and neither one of them got their driver's licenses when they could. Apparently, they're not unusual. It's a demographic trend--kids putting off getting their driver's licenses. I can't imagine it. I practically slept in the doorway of Motor Vehicle when I turned 17 in New Jersey.