Welcome to Anxiety!

The subtle art of calming the Ford down

We have a friend with early-onset Parkinson’s, a lovely guy with a formerly high-powered career who has had to slow way down due to his disease. He has help, and we chip in with dog walks, little favors, fellowship and so forth, but it is sometimes very rough for him. We are crossing our fingers a recent surgery to implant an electrode in his head will successfully regulate his symptoms and get him off the medications. (*UPDATE: Success! 💛)

If you see a Parkinson’s sufferer with involuntary muscle movements—facial, shoulder and neck tics, flailing limbs, unsteady gait—I understand much of that is a side-effect of the meds. (We went to a sporting goods store for a walking pole to help steady him, and me, the dog, and several passersby almost lost an eye in the resulting fray.)

Months ago, he had a round of cortisone injections in his arm because the constant movement—even in his sleep—caused a repetitive stress injury which left him in agony; thankfully it helped, and he was soon flashing his trademark silly grin.

You all know my horror of needles though, and so I flashed back to my mother’s descriptions of a bout with bursitis in her shoulder when she was in her 20s. She described the pain of the condition, and then the horrifying cure: held down on a table by three nurses, a doctor injected her several times directly into her shoulder joint with a needle resembling a javelin as she screamed, helplessly pinned. For a child with trypanophobia (terror of needles) this was a beloved bedtime story, as you can imagine.

ANYWAY. I, too, have been experiencing a certain amount of shoulder pain in the last couple of years, brought on by the new mattress we bought in Spain. Self-diagnosed as (probably) bursitis like my mother had, and requiring (almost certainly) a torturous session of repeated stabbings by some Catalan Impaler and his Brides of Pain, I have entertained myself sometimes in the dead of night with visions of this little party when I can’t get comfortable and life is feeling suspiciously contented. 

(“You must numb my gum first with a topical anesthetic before injecting the novocaine,” I impressed on my new dentist, the hygienist, receptionist, janitor, and the lady in the waiting room before my first serious procedure here in Spain.
“Como un bebé?” they all asked.
“Like a baby,” I said.)

Welcome to Anxiety, kiddo!

Where did it all go wrong?

(Perhaps when I forgot that SUNSHINE is MY COLOR and I should never wear anything else.)

Obviously, chronic anxiety waxes and wanes depending on the vagaries of life, and not limited to a persistent fear of needles, snakes, sharks, quicksand, public humiliation, destitution, homelessness, killer bees, celery, rudeness, blood, spiders, small talk, etc. 

It’s often not a fear of anything specific, but a grinding pattern of thinking which morphs and somersaults around in your noggin to the point you may be distracted when you need to be focused, irritable when you want to be imperturbable, wide awake when you should be sleeping.

When it’s really bad, it can take on a Wonka-esque quality behind your sleepless eyelids—strobing flashes, hoots and horns (not to mention the aforementioned Exploding Head Syndrome, which I’m happy to report has abated somewhat.)

It’s a constant source of stress and can leave you feeling so perpetually off-balance, you will say, do and think things you don’t understand and often regret, poisoning opportunities, careers, creativity and relationships alike. It has been the biggest hurdle in my life by far.

Where does it come from? Hard to say really. 

Where was I, and who was I with, in those weeks between my birth and my adoption? I was carried away immediately from my birth mother, but presumably not just left to stare at the ceiling of the maternity ward in a plastic bassinet with a sock monkey for comfort. Who were these people, these foster carers of baby Mr. Ford? Monsters? Angels? Nobody knows.

For that matter, who were my biological people? The Manson Family? The timing/geography are plausible. What the hell were they up to, in vitro?

(“You were adopted?!” one therapist cried, the first time I mentioned it.
“Is that significant?!” I cried in reply.
“Yes!”
“How?!”
“Well… I guess we’ll $EE…” Still guessing.)

I was quiet as a child, my mother would say to me years later—not a crier, but an observer, uncannily so. Impossible to say if attachment disorder, which can affect adoptees, was in play, though I know my father was reluctant to adopt a second child, that he was contented with a daughter and had to be convinced to acquire a son. Maybe? Maybe not? Add a dash of this uncertain bonding to a vintage 1970s family emotional complex most closely resembling a Jell-O Mold, and you are almost guaranteed some degree of anxiety in guests and dependents alike.

Ford Family Love

What about my adorable lisp? This was a source of consternation to my mother, with frequent proddings to demonstrate how I was mispronouncing “snakes” to various associates—“He smashes his ‘S’s! They’re squashed flat—say it again! Hear it? Again! See? Smashed. AGAIN! Ugh.”

I was sent to speech therapy, but then my mother heard about a child whose lisp was cured by frenuloplasty, which is cutting the lingual frenulum (the fold of membrane beneath the tongue anchoring it in your mouth,) and she frequently speculated on whether she should have it done to me, or maybe do it herself, why not? Quick snip et voilà! This threat apparently cured my lisp from sheer fright.

But speaking of lisps, perhaps these were all just an avalanche of coincidences, because what I believe was the real driving force behind my chronic anxiety: a reaction to and internalization of the homophobia I encountered in my family and in the wider world.

When you are walking down the street minding your own business and random people shout, hiss and scream “FAGGOT!” you start to wonder, and yes worry a little, whether something is amiss. Who or what is this monstrous “FAGGOT” character, and why do they think I resemble it?

(“It” is accurate; it is an object of derision, disgust and disdain, not a person; “not a person” is always easier to degrade than a living, breathing soul.)

You begin to shrink, to hesitate, to wince—this is the opposite of what you should do, what a red-blooded American heterosexual male would do, which is bellow, posture, even attack physically, even with bullets if you happen to have a gun in your Donnie & Marie lunchbox. And this shrinking has the effect of inviting more abuse.

You go red in the face, if you have an acute blush response like me—you only realize years later that your father’s rote advice (for any kind of insult—“ignore them and they’ll stop”) is foiled by your blushing, because they can see you have heard and accepted the wound, and it is always nice to have clearly marked punching bags whenever one feels small, angry or frustrated.

Photo by Mulyadi on Unsplash

You might, like me, begin to wonder HOW to disguise yourself—perhaps you can modify your voice, walking gait, your articulateness (gruff and taciturn rather than florid and rhapsodic—what the fuck have you got to be happy about anyway, lady?)

Perhaps you can counteract your lack of interest in sports with an obsessive bodybuilding regime, and if not be athletic, at least appear so (far fewer strikes are launched against an adversary who appears strong and heroic.)

Perhaps a nice eating disorder? Have you considered a course of drinking and drugs, or did you find that rather than helping, these just lowered your guard and made you less cautious? (Another saga, another time.)

Distressed and alone, absent support or words of encouragement, you might begin to spend a good portion of your time withdrawn from other people and wondering how you could have avoided all these unwelcome intrusions into your self-esteem. This might go on for decades.

Because it’s so much easier to excoriate ourselves in the privacy of our own minds, we may make a habit of endlessly debriefing every incident, every challenge, every “failure” in our behavior until that’s the default mode, and begins to interfere with healthy habits, like creative pursuits, basic exercise, professional office behavior.

Faced with such abuse, anyone might develop a nasty case of writer’s block, gain weight, maybe acquire a nickname around the watercooler. (“Troyzilla” is so delicious, I considered adopting it for this Substack.) And so.

ACCEPT THE THINGS YOU CANNOT CHANGE, BITCH!

Shall we agree now not to get too deeply into the twelve steps that led to a spiritual awakening (THAT fucking word again…) since we are already well over our roughly 1500 word allotment? Maybe we wrap things up asap with a brief few insights which came to me as a result of my meditation practice.

I began meditating during Covid because what the hell else was I going to do, write a novel? (Oh! Well, I did that too.)

I believe meditation allowed me to break through my writer’s block and complete the first draft of my first novel, and I kept at it through two years of writing and rewriting and querying agents.

At some point, it was no longer optional but instead became a mental/spiritual imperative.

Three Gordian knots of perspective gradually came into focus and unraveled while I sat each day for 20 minutes, and with the memory of my mother with her shoulder, I reflected how closely my own personal outlook resembled her bursitis horror story.

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

DREAD

I noticed after meditating for a while that I held in my body—in my head, my neck, shoulders, hands and legs—a tense, anticipatory, fearful feeling that something bad would happen, and I must be prepared for it always.

Imagine believing you are about to go into a medical procedure for which you must be held down by three nurses. Yes, that was it: a constant feeling of dread.

It didn’t have a specific source, it was a kaleidoscope of hurts, disappointments and fears that was there all the time, all day every day, and at night too—when my body had “slept enough” my anxiety woke me up around 3:00 a.m. each night to continue with the work of how to avoid further pain and torment.

STRUGGLING

Examining the bad, and anticipating the worst, had become such a constant enterprise that I was irritable, annoyed and more anxious about anything that took me away from this Sisyphean burden. I might miss some quirk, some insight, some solution to a problem that was years in the solving—the fact that I had had insights into incidents fretted over, sometimes decades later, was proof it was a productive task, any departure an unnecessary distraction.

Imagine being so terrified and pained by an admittedly awful situation that you thrash about violently, making the inevitable treatment worse: that was how deeply entrenched my own self-crucifixion had become.

EXHAUSTION

Identifying the dread, and the grinding struggle, has led to some relief. I have more recently noticed another pervasive sensation: exhaustion.

Imagine how exhausting that dread and struggle in a traumatic situation would be—and that the brain and body often can’t distinguish between a real, remembered or imagined event.

Letting go of the memory of those traumas, and the anticipation of further occurrences—remaining in the present moment where they are rarely actually occurring—has brought to light just how much energy I was spending on fears no longer founded, and imbuing memories with the power of antagonists no longer able to hurt me.

Realizing the cost in energy—physical, mental, emotional and spiritual—has brought a profound shift in my sense of a way forward in life, and a step closer to healing.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

I’m sorry but I will not apologize for running on a bit this week. I think there are far more people suffering than we realize, or who admit it—recovery from trauma can be a lonely path.

I hope that all of you, Esteemed Readers, may also find relief from the hardships of your particular lives. 

If any of this speaks to you in any way you care to share, please know that I am all ears, and you may also do so privately at mrtroyford@substack.com.

I deeply appreciate your presence and support.