Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
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Category: Anxiety
Acrophobia 2
Posted on September 28, 2009 in Anxiety
If I am to keep acrophobia from overwhelming me, there’s a simple thing I must do: keep my butt firmly planted. I can get on a ski lift with my feet dangling hundreds of feet in the air and feel no fear. It is difficult to stand at the rim of a canyon, but I can sit with my feet hanging over the edge. No panic captures me until the moment when I stand up: evidentally, I do not trust my heels and toes to keep my head from toppling.
Acrophobia
Posted on September 17, 2009 in Anxiety Travel - Conferences
We arrived after midnight, our flight having found the tarmac about fifteen minutes past schedule due to a takeoff line in Houston. The pilot could not find space in all that sky between Texas and Indiana to pick up time in or else he wanted to be sure that the stewards had enough time to pass out the mushed sandwiches that were the snack. It looked like we were the last plane to land in Indianapolis’s all glass airport. We waited for our checked bag, then caught an expensive cab that brought us to the Hyatt downtown.
Two stories of conference space, a mystery floor without an elevator exit, a revolving restaurant, and fourteen floors of rooms loomed over the open lobby. The desk clerk sent us to the seventh floor.
The elevators opened out onto contained space, but my hopes for a room that wasn’t facing the atrium were fractured and spewed like projectile vomit when I saw a sign directing us to the right and again to the right. A low wall separated the “hall” from the atrium — a black bottomless pit ringed by faintly lit balconies. Along most of the length of these terraces, the wall was solid. The sadist who designed these lofts found it fit, however, to install glass walls right next to the elevators (which had glass back walls themselves). As I edged toward our lodging, a large picture window directed at the Indiana State House opened on my left. I scurried past it and, keeping the wall near to my left, I crept towards door 729.
Lynn, wont to help, stepped between me and the outer wall in an attempt to shield me from the yawning maw of the hotel’s central courtyard. The reptilian part of my brain saw no charity in this: a feral impulse suggested that her move would tip the contents of the terrace down where our remains would be gawked at by the last people in the hotel’s bar, so I waved her back, back. We reached the door, stuck the card in the lock slot, and rushed in. With the door closed behind me, I felt safe from the abyss.
Over the course of the weekend, I dreamed of the empty darkness beyond the door. As I opened it, the floor would slant and I would be consumed by the motionless mouth of the hotel. I would wake up just as the wall shattered and my fall commenced.
Daytime wasn’t so bad a time — as long as I could see down into the lobby beneath me, the dread took deep breaths and enjoyed the play of light from slotted windows that the architect had obviously thought to entertain visitors with. At night, the terror returned. Once I went to get ice from the ice machine and returned a broken man. That fear — that fear of the whole structure collapsing beneath me persisted despite the inn’s solid construction and the certainty that there would no earthquakes. I was safe my feet averred, but my head swung in awful ellipses about on my neck and I wouldn’t believe them.
Mystery of the Moved Monitors
Posted on August 7, 2009 in Anxiety
Yesterday morning, the void returned.
Social Anxiety Jeans
Posted on January 15, 2009 in Anxiety Reflections Video
Social Anxiety Jeans on 12seconds.tv
Here’s the article where I picked up the information. I just love the expression on the macaque’s face.
The Twitter Dances
Posted on January 12, 2009 in Anxiety IRC/Chat Micro-blogging
Just as the winner of a sixty nine hour stint complained of the sensation of always having a man’s arm around her, so, too, do I get to feeling that I’m just not up for dealing with every remark that comes my way.
The World Turned Right Side Up
Posted on October 23, 2008 in Anxiety Campaign 2008 Depression Uncertainty
At the British surrender at Yorktown, the band played “The World Turned Upside Down”. Then as now a transfer of power took place. Certainly among the Americans — many of whom had been fighting for years — there must have been a difficult period: how do you go from being a warrior to a citizen? There were issues to be resolved such as the status of those who had supported the British, but nothing was so important and devastating to the morale of those men as the question of how to be in this new world.
The rush of history has my mind put in a blender for reconstitution. For the last several years — dating from before Bush became president — progressives have been staving off hateful attacks from the right. They are at their worst today: we are accused of being unpatriotic, of not loving our country. It’s the whole Bush Adminstration plus the Clinton impeachment concentrated into a bitter slushee that we are forced to swallow.
I have watched as some of the more sensitive of those on the Obama side have devolved into one of three moods: anxiety, depression, and grandiosity. The anxiety is easy to understand: the election is not yet won and the Republicans have been filling our ears and eyes with false information and character assassinations. If they can’t steal the election, they have been engaging in shenanigans designed to narrow the gap so the Democrats can’t claim a mandate for change. We are just not there yet.
Likewise, the grandiosity is easy to understand. We’re about to win, it seems, and win big. Therefore we are the best people in the world, chosen by God or the Universe or common sense. We know everything, can solve everything. So these among us stand on pedestals and lecture our peers on the way it is going to be. Doggoneit, they say, we have the key to convincing the most diehard Republicans to join us. We are unstoppable.
I figure I’ll just have to live with that for a few years. Believe me, it will be as insufferable for a few of we progressives as well as the defeated right, if for different reasons. Reality will click in and these will either come to walk with the rest of us on or fall into the ennui from listening to their own voices without insight.
Which brings us to depression. How can that be afflicting progressives at a time like this? I’ll tell you: first, the anxiety wears us down. Exhaustion claims us. So we lose all pleasure, all sense of accomplishment. There is also, second, the exhaustion of feeling obligated to answer every attack slung out by the McCain/Palin machine.
The third cause of depression stems from uncertainty. Now that we are about to win, what kind of political personality are we going to adopt? Since the late 90s, that has been one that constantly attacks the failed and repulsive premises of the neoconservatives. It’s been fun, but soon, with responsibility, that fun is going to stop. The problem with Republican rule is that it has been so founded on negativism, it failed to create positive institutions or freedoms. The same must not be allowed to happen in a Democratic era — though we may wisely be ready to fend off attacks as we strive to solve the crises that the Bush Administration has left behind. But change in political power is going to mean change in our attitudes. We are going to have to become compromisers, optimists. And some folks are as unready to make that change as Palin is to be vice president.
I am taking the following steps to mind my spiritual transition. First, for the duration of the election, I am keeping my consumption of television news to a minimum, which means I’m not watching it in my home and avoiding it outside. All the bells and whistles of your typical television news screen agitate me. The reporters spout out opinions. Inside their opinions are little assumptions that eat at me like acid.
Second, I am making time to do things that are fun. Walking the dog. Going to the beach. Relaxing with good books. Taking pictures and looking over what I have done previously.
Third, I am sharing every bit of positive news I can find. I am also seeking out news that is not about the election, funny videos, etc.
Fourth, I’ve made myself a promise: when and if Obama wins — yes, I am sticking to the conditional at this moment — I am going out to buy a new American flag and hang it outside to celebrate that I am once again included in this country.
The world will be turned upside down which means right side up for the first time since Ronald Reagan took office in 1980. That is something to cheer for, something to shed the shackles of low moods for. Yet, after the cheering, must come reality. This vote is not about making every man a king, every woman a queen, but about becoming citizens instead of serfs. The notion to come is equality, which is about dignity. That will have to be reforged in the new fires of an unexpected community.
Why I Will Not Watch the Debate
Posted on October 15, 2008 in Anxiety Bipolar Disorder Campaign 2008
I am not going to watch the debate tonight because I don’t know how it will end. Sure I trust Obama to be strong, but I wonder if the American people will see McCain for what he is when he pulls up the garbage truck and dumps his load of calumny about Robert Ayers and ACORN. In other words, I don’t trust myself to be strong. I will be clutching a pillow and screaming into it for much of the show anyways along with most of the bipolars I know — at least the medicated, aware ones. Being sicker is not my idea of a better America for me.
I have no desire to see McCain bring his shit, baked in the heat of the Arizona sun and flipped onto the hot stove of his campaign committee just to make sure that every ounce of compassionate moisture is gone to the podium forming a slough for everyone to walk in. He’s angry, he’s scared, he’s behind. That makes him a mad dog eager to take a piece out of the Hope that Obama has generated.
The polls say that the negative campaigning hurts McCain. But the Republicans are saying “Repeat this mantra: Ayers, ACORN, Ayers, ACORN, Ayers” until the base froths at the mouth and attacks the Democrats standing in the lines at the polls with chants of “Kill Obama”.
McCain and Palin have scared the hell out of me so much that I have sent for my absentee ballot. As far as Election Day goes, I am going to be a cipher. As far as the debate, I am going to be reading or eating out or watching videos with my wife. I can’t take feeling myself rise to my feet and screaming at the top of my voice “You evil fool!” and to the People “Don’t let him mislead you! He’ll take you to hell!” No, I am better off without these passions. My cries will carry only as far as the glass of my television screen and the neighbors will think me strange.
So let me spare me the strain. The nation will go on. I have done my part to set it to a better course.
Yep, I am a wimp, but I vote.
Triggers Pointed at Each Other
Posted on October 13, 2008 in Anxiety Campaign 2008 Weather
All this has left me with a steel cable of tension running up the back side of my neck. These are Xanax moments….
The Costs of Dropping the Ball
Posted on October 20, 2007 in Anxiety
Oh the bad old days, the bad old days, when the emphasis was on the ability to jump rope or put a basketball through a hoop rather than on your intellect. Has anyone ever told you that they didn’t happen or, more likely, that they shouldn’t have affected you? A new study out of Canada has something to say on the matter:
In a study published in The Journal of Sport Behavior, researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton examined the relationships among perceived athletic competence, peer acceptance and loneliness in elementary school children. Their findings will likely confirm the experience of anyone who was picked last for the team in gym class: children seen as athletic by their classmates are also better liked and less likely to feel lonely, while unathletic children experience the opposite.
“For both boys and girls, we found that popular children reported less loneliness and received higher athletic ability ratings from their peers than rejected children,” says lead researcher Janice Causgrove Dunn, from the Faculty of Physical & Recreation at the University of Alberta. “Conversely, the kids who reported higher levels of loneliness tended to receive lower athletic ability ratings and lower social acceptance ratings from their peers.”
Past studies have found that loneliness in childhood and adolescence is associated with many psychosocial and emotional problems, and prolonged loneliness has the potential to seriously undermine an individual’s psychological, emotional and physical well-being. Lonely children are often less physically active and less fit, and more likely to experience tension and anxiety than their non-lonely counterparts. In adolescence and early adulthood, loneliness has been linked to behaviors including cigarette smoking, marijuana use and alcoholism, as well as an increased risk of school drop out and depression.
“Given the proven negative impact of loneliness on a child’s well being, this kind of research is an important endeavor,” says Causgrove Dunn. “It’s important to identify and understand the factors that might increase a child’s likelihood of being accepted by the peer group, because this, in turn, decreases the likelihood of that child experiencing the destructive psychosocial and emotional problems that often come with rejection.”
And what do we expect the reaction from parents and teachers to be? Kids are mean. In other words, no action whatsoever.
Normalness includes a streak of cruelty, we often hear. Give it time before [[Steve Pinker]] or another of his kind comes up with a genetic study showing that this comes out of a natural pack psychosis, the implication being that those who do it cannot help themselves.
I not only caught it from the kids at school (I had asthma in smoggy Southern California), but my darling older brother poured it on, using his new-found vocabulary to call me a “lummox”. When I complained, I was told that I was supposed to “learn to take it”. But the people who put me through this didn’t go through this like I did. If you suffer from any kind of mental illness, I am sure you know the feeling: whatever your experience you receive the whimpy excuse that “you’re not the only one with problems”. Yes, we all know that having a stubbed toe is equivalent to losing a limb. In this case, they are actually watching the bullies sawing the leg off as they tell you to buck up and be brave.
[tags]bullying, bullies, anxiety, rejection, sports[/tags]
Therapy
Posted on September 17, 2007 in Anxiety Uncertainty
Anyone else come out of a therapy session feeling that because something was nobody’s fault it’s all your fault?
Demon in my Bones
Posted on August 15, 2007 in Ancestors Anxiety
Panic was the order of the day. I kept spewing stumbling pieces of words and ideas as I spoke to people about my business, the kind of thing that makes some people suspect stupidity or inability to think or lust for a chainsaw. I screamed in my car (where no one could hear me) and pushed through as well as I could, calling a friend to help me focus and tell me that I could make it through the next few hours. Then I went to prepare to tutor my student. As I entered the log entry in the literacy program register, I saw the date. My father’s birthday.
A man who’s been dead since 1980 kicked at the ridges of my brain and made me feel that I was unfit to be an adult. It’s what psychotherapists call an anniversary reaction.
Damn, this thing hadn’t happened to me in years. Armed with the knowledge, I called the friend back to tell her the news and then sat down to prepare myself for the lesson. I cursed him under my breath as I brought out the materials for the lesson. He had no right to reach out from his niche in the Salt Lake City Catholic cemetery and disrupt my equanimity. This was my life now. Why couldn’t he let me deal with people on my own?
After the tutoring session, I phoned another friend. This was outrageous, I fumed. August 15 sneaks in and I am a jellyfish on an Emery wheel. Moods such as this required something to throw, a rock at the very least and a wide field where I could pitch missile after missile. One after another until the feeling of the demon in my bones and my muscles went away.
Sometimes I Shout
Posted on August 3, 2007 in Anxiety Memory Reflections
Sometimes I shout at memories. Until recently, I thought this was a bad thing — a psychoses that demanded my isolation from the rest of the human race. First, I realized, that it seldom if ever happened when I was with other people. Second, the shouts didn’t draw me deeper into the bad experience, but woke me up to the present. I could see the details of the bedroom ceiling, remember that I was not in the embarassing situation. I saw the strange behavior as an ally. The mind, I now believe, strives for normality. Sometimes I shout at myself to bring myself back.
