I was 13 when those planes took the towers, crumpling them carelessly against a cruel blue sky. It was on that day I learned what fear was, and since then it’s been difficult to discern whether anxiety is physically braided into my DNA or has been cultivated by outside influences. My father is about as neurotic as they come: pale and freckly with thin, tight lips, glasses perched on the tip of his nose, a master of hand wringing and worst case scenarios. Surely his penchant for panic was passed down to me, but at 23, my anxiety now seems to surpass his. As a journalist and avid media watcher, our obsession with apocalypse isn’t just starting to annoy me; it’s starting to make me sick. Would I be as anxious as I am now if fears of apocalyptic meltdown weren’t wed to our national psyche?
“The moon is a good friend,” I said quietly, almost to no one. We were driving in the darkest dark, on the inky part of that well-worn path from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe where the only brightness streams from your own headlights. The moon tagged along the whole time, a steady companion, disappearing only to dip below snow-crested mountains and towering pine trees. Those trees at the California/Nevada border are tall the way fathers and cops and principals are: endlessly, sometimes terrifyingly so. As we tore around those mountain roads, taking note of “Falling rocks!” and “Bear crossing” signs, the moon kept us company, splashing light on the path ahead of us. Our friend Sam fell asleep in the backseat, his forehead pressed against the glass. We listened to The National and Ryan Adams, artists that make us feel heavy with a sleepy sadness, but somehow weightless, too.
As we approached the state line, casinos and 24-hour bars appeared just on the other side of the border, ushering us into Nevada with flashing lights and whirling signs. Later I confided, “Being from the East Coast, it’s so strange to me that we can just take a jaunt to Nevada for the weekend.”
“NevAda,” our host corrected me by flattening the A. “Not Nev-AH-da. That’s how tourists say it.” Oops.
The next day we drove to the beach and the sand was so hot it burned the bottoms of our feet. We got lake dirt in our hair and in the web of our fingers and it felt wonderful to be in a place where the threat of fog ruining the warm temperatures didn’t loom immediate. At night we packed on the layers and went to see Twelfth Night on the beach. You could see the lake shimmering beyond the set and the moon came back for a visit, this time full and glorious, a big friendly face in the billowy sky.
The next day we would return to our lives with a new appreciation for how much we loved them. But by the lake, ankle-deep in sand, it was nice to live a different life, at least for a little while.
Until I was in high school, my grandmother lived in a modest 3-bedroom farmhouse on a road called “Bull Run Crossing” in central Pennsylvania. It was a quaint two-story affair with black shutters and hideous yellow carpeting. As a break from the summer doldrums, my parents would drive my sister and I there for a week each year to keep my grandmother company. I was too young to realize it then, but my grandmother has always been one of the loneliest people I know. She occasionally goes to the movies or has her sorority sisters over for coffee, but aside from her family I don’t think there’s been love in her life for a long time. Back then, before her brain fizzled with a series of mini strokes that would threaten her physical ability, she still had a car and a license. Back then, she could still go anywhere she wanted, but she only ever really went to Church or to the grocery store when she was running out of sherbet.
My grandfather died of a heart attack before I was born, when my dad was just 19 years old, and I don’t think my grandmother ever really got over it. It’s been over 25 years and the only time she takes off her wedding band is to do the dishes. Her fingers have gotten bonier over the years, the various illnesses she’s fought against and won make their permanent mark on her body in the form of her frail, protruding bones. I wonder if she’s ever had to have the ring resized, if she’s ever had to go to the jeweler and field questions about her husband. I’ve wonder if she’s lied just to save herself the shame of admitting that she’s been married to a dead person for 25 years. I wonder if that fact even embarrasses her. Even though I’m her granddaughter, even though we’re family, these are things we won’t ever talk about.
It’s well a documented phenomenon that as people grow older, their left-leaning beliefs start to skew rightward. The ideals they held dear as kids become muddled and seem more like flights of fancy than values to live by. I used to see the world in very black and white terms: actions and beliefs were either right or wrong. I think as kids our worlds are so small that it seems simple to define the things that happen to us, to compartmentalize them into digestible tidbits with vague titles like “good” and “bad.” But the older I get, the harder it becomes to divide and parse things so clearly. Feelings and actions have dimensions that I somehow missed before. Now I see that everything — relationships, motives, desires — is just way more complicated. This grayness, this in-between-ness, makes it much easier to fathom forgiveness, compassion, empathy.
My mother is combing through her life and forgiving the people that hurt her. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I understand why she feels it’s necessary. When we are young, passion is embarrassingly overemployed, but anger grows dull over the years. It becomes a lot easier to go back on statements like, “I would never do that” or “I’m never speaking to her again” because time distorts how you feel. I think that “never” has a shelf date of about 10 years before it starts to eat at you. But, like my mother, I’ve always been weak in that department. Forgiveness flows from me water-easy. I’m incapable of holding a grudge. I’ve only cut a handful of people out of my life, but they still send me e-mails to tell me how they’re doing. I do my best not to answer them back.
A few weeks ago I was talking to my new therapist about how crippling my social anxiety has become. I told him that I feel okay in small groups, but at parties or crowded places I completely lose my ability to conduct a normal conversation. I am always dying to connect with people, aching for a chance to dig around inside their souls, but really I’m much better at doing that from afar, like from across the street as I make note of their gait or from the other side of my Macbook screen.
Basically, I don’t know how to communicate with strangers or how to draw on visual cues for conversation topics. I’m aware this makes me seem autistic, but it’s actually kind of the opposite: I’m too in touch with my surroundings, too observant of my peers. As another therapist once said, I am “hyper-vigilant” and “susceptible to the moods of those around me.” I can’t talk to strangers because I am too busy picking up on the other cues they are subconsciously displaying, like the timbre of their voice or the way their shoulders hang. If they are sad, I am sad; that’s just the way it’s always been.
Out of them all (and there are MANY), sometimes I think my biggest flaw is my inability to make small talk. I suppose it’s less of an inability as a subconscious refusal to master it; I’ve always been terrified of turning into the working stiff discussing the weather in the elevator. If I’m talking, I want it to be about something important. I want my words to mean something. I don’t want to speak just to speak. And that’s what small talk feels like to me.
Last weekend I was enjoying the unremarkable view of abandoned warehouses from my balcony when a seemingly random thought struck. A family friend has been sick with cancer, and it occurred that I should send him an e-mail to tell him that I was thinking about him. I even started composing the e-mail in my head, how I would talk about how much I missed him and how amazing he was and how we were all rooting for him. But then something happened and the thought tumbled away. I never got around to sending it.
I usually regret the e-mails I’ve sent rather than the ones I haven’t sent, so this is a first. Last night, Mr. Taylor, the family friend to whom I considered sending my love this past weekend, lost his battle with cancer.
I suppose this is a crueler, more digital extension of the old adage, “Never go to sleep angry.” I regret going to sleep without sending that e-mail, though who knows if he would’ve received it anyway. Still, it gnaws at me. It is so important to say what you mean and say what you feel to the people you love before it’s too late. I don’t know why we are all so bad at this.
Check out this story I wrote for The Daily, about awesome San Francisco artist Brian Singer.
When I was 20 I left the crowded, incestuous gut of New York and headed due east, across the humbling ink blot of the Atlantic, to Paris, the City of Light.
I had been there once before during the summer following my high school graduation. Freshly separated from my boyfriend, struggling to emotionally adapt to my father’s remarriage and about to embark on my freshman year at NYU, I could not find it in me to muster the touristy spirit necessary for European travel. My attraction to Paris during that trip seemed both strangely visceral and as if I’d experienced it from afar, like I could see through both ends of the telescope. I was too ruined by introspection to appreciate my fondness for the city then, but I’d always known that some day I would study abroad in Paris.
The chance came during the fall of my junior year at NYU. I loved living abroad, but it was also one of the loneliest times in my life. It made me behave in extremely out of character ways. I was brash and brazen like I had never been in New York. I guess I became less shy while I was there, mostly because as an American abroad you are constantly embarrassing yourself and eventually it just stops bothering you. Every time you open your mouth, or make some minor cultural faux pas like bringing a coffee on the Metro, you are embarrassing yourself. After a while you just get used to it, and being shy starts to feel like a luxury.