Anxiety

I have been reading Patricia Pearson's excellent and clever book about anxiety. It's illuminating. I'd come to realize in the past few years that much of what I'd thought of as "fear of X" in my life (insert any number of concepts here) was more of a free-floating anxiety. Among other gut-crackling observations, Pearson writes about phobias (like, fear of peas) as objects that can become totems for *all* of our fears. The woman who runs away from peas has found a convenient container for everything she can't handle.

When I was at Ian's funeral the other day, I was reflecting on how the ceremony of farewell to someone -- even sparely Catholic -- has taken on the power to be about all the accumulated loss in the world for me. About the person, yes, but also about generalized, blank, untethering loss. Of people, of potential. The more iconic the rituals, the more wrenching. On Tuesday, I was fairly placid -- until Gillian, after painstakingly pulling flowers out of the arrangement on the casket as directed, briefly fell into disintegrating sorrow. Then, plunged into all the loss and sadness I've had.

I have those moments as I'm packing and finding books or clothes that evoke stories, nodes of intimacy offered or grasped, still at bedtime when there is a gap where there used to be night-time calls with F I for almost the entire time I lived here. It's not the calls themselves, so much -- so often they were scratchy or unsatisfying -- it's the ritual of bidding goodnight to someone who cares about me as I turn my body over to the edgy, unpredictable dark of the night.

During all of my time with B, we had a constant conversation about the things I was afraid of, that she helped me avoid and manage. Unlocked doors, people vomiting, the turkey that harboured killer bacteria, being alone, fire, heights, people out of control, the maniac who would jump out of the bushes at women's only events, driving too fast, that the stranger offering us a ride on his sailboat in new zealand was going to kill us, clients wanting too much from me, thuggish boys who would beat us up, friends and their untold anxieties that played out in social weirdness. All dating back to my nightly prayers as a little girl that the bathtub wouldn't overflow (I thought the house would fill with water and I would drown), that the attic above me wouldn't burst into flame and crash me into a firey death. Pearson describes the spinning, the churn, the playing over and over of the same scripts that trap and paralyse and push your relationship with fear into the centre of any social dynamic.

It was really freeing for me to start recognizing that it wasn't the specifics I was afraid of, but that I always carried an abundance of anxiety that could fix itself to anything. A very small regime of drugs threw a muffling blanket over the constant threat of metaphorical flame. Now I can greet the anxiety as a somewhat reasonable character -- oh, I'm anxious, okay. Interesting. Rather than spin agonize repeat.

In this move, I'm starting to recognize sadness as having the same free-floating properties. Yes, I'm specifically sad about the loss of potential with F, sad about moving away from B, sad about regrets and moments I've had in my life where I haven't lived into my best self, where I've been self-absorbed and uncompromising in ways that freeze possibilities. I lift the sadness off a shelf with a fleece that triggers a memory of climbing on Skye, the drawings of Trixie the goat that B had made for me, a faded polaroid that falls out of a book of J&S&B topless on hanlan's point (where I stayed on the sand reading while they got on a stranger's boat). But I am learning to fondle the sadness a bit, shape it, put it away, recognize it as a reminder to settle into, value, feed the connections with the people and possibilities that actually surround me.