Anxiety: The American Crisis

ANI Authors Olivia Laskowski and Blake Bouza with novels written by ANI students in 2011.

I’ve been out of commission lately as an educator and a writer.  Life took over with a tough pregnancy and an early baby, and some delayed marketing efforts made my summer teaching load a lot smaller than I had hoped it would be.  And generally, all this upheaval and disarray would lead me to a state of unequivocal anxiety, set to reach a fevered pitch about a week before my July classes begin.  I know this because I know myself, and I know how I operate.

But I’m not anxious.  I’m shockingly calm.  Almost zen about the situation in fact.  Call it new-mama-bliss or the confidence of finally knowing what I’m doing with my life, but I’m not on a path to self-destruction.

This morning, however, I was met with two  major challenges of the anxious type.  The first was an email from a dear and precious student of mine who was struggling with his own self-effacing guilt over being plagued with writer’s block.  He was ashamed of himself, felt boxed in by his lack of ideas, and was generally desperate for relief.  The second was a phone call from a mother whose son, new to ANI, was facing a similar roadblock.  He was so wrapped up in creating the perfect character that he hadn’t written a word.  He was worried that he had let me down, that I would be angry with him, and the paralyzing fear kept him from being able to break free from his anxiety.

When I got to school this morning, neither boy had arrived yet.  And I thought about those anxious years of my life – indeed, most of my life – and what managed to help.  The only thing – besides writing furiously – that ever pushed the anxiety from my body was a complete and total meltdown.  And I sure didn’t want that to happen.

When my anxious alumni showed up, he was already calmed down.  He’d stayed up until 2:30 writing like a maniac and had over 6,000 words to show for it.  He plugged in his computer and got right to work, banging out another 1,200 words before he took a break.

Shortly thereafter, my anxious newbie arrived.  He was literally knotted with anxiety.  His brow furrowed and he was shaking tapping his pen against his leg while he paced outside the classroom door.  He didn’t show any signs of coming in and sitting down next to the others who were happily typing away at tables and in corners of the room.  Lucky for me, Abintra’s campus has acres of gardens and walking trails. I grabbed my water bottle and went for a little walk with him.

I talked and he listened but his body language didn’t change.  I stopped to smell a particularly impressive rose bush, and he paced back and forth waiting for me.  Twenty minutes later he was still wound just as tightly.  Even introducing him to my alumnus didn’t help.

And then, I thought perhaps a task would do the trick.  “Okay, who’s ready for a word-count challenge?” Many hands shot into the air, but he hid  his face in his crossed arms.  “Okay, everybody decide what your character’s favorite color is.  Got it?  Okay, now he or she sees something that color.  Describe it.  Write 350 words in 20 minutes.  Go!”

And I guess that’s what he needed.  Because for twenty precious minutes he let go and he wrote.  He left the apprehension and guilt and self-doubt in the dust and he embraced the excitement of a new story, a new person, a new discovery.  He allowed himself to escape himself, and in the process, he stopped fretting.

But after 20 minutes was up and he’d finished the challenge, I saw the worry start to creep in again.  He sat quietly by himself and ate a turkey sandwich and looked at the clock while he folded his arms and shook his foot.  His character had hit a quiet place.  And he didn’t know what would happen next.

And that’s the crisis I see in my students and in Americans in general.  The biggest problem they face isn’t the writing or the imagining – all children have creativity in spades – it’s being alone with themselves.  They’re so used to being entertained, posting on Facebook, tweeting, texting, studying for tests, checking tasks off their lists, and being graded that they’ve forgotten how to just be.  Be still.  Be alone with their thoughts without reality tv creeping in or feeling the urge to tweet.

I assign all of my students at least two hours of thinking homework each week.  I ask them to just be quiet.  Stare into space.  Think about stuff.  And stay awake to the world around them.  It’s often the hardest homework they have to do, even harder than writing 1,000, 2,000, or 7,000 words a day.

Being quiet and alert is a problem I never worried about as a child.  I spent hours in my tree-house, swinging on a tire swing, or hiding in the forest.  The thinking was the thing – being alone with my own thoughts has been a central and important part of my intellectual development.  And when I haven’t had enough alone time, I can feel my skin starting to crawl.  I feel like a radio antenna receiving too many signals at once and I have to run away, clear the clutter from my head, and find the quiet.  I usually do that by clicking the keys on my computer.  Or having a complete and total meltdown.  Both are physical releases, the purging of thoughts either by writing or by crying.

As I write this, my anxious newbie is outside, writing about the trees in the upper garden.  He’s working on another 20-minute challenge, and I’m hoping for another 20-minute escape from the anxiety for him.  And for the rest of the anxiety-riddled youth in this country, I wish I could find a way to lay a calming hand on their shoulders and say, “it is enough to just be.  Enough to just breathe.”  And maybe, if they have a pen handy, enough just to write.

YA Literature is The Catcher in the Rye

YA Literature: The Catcher in the Rye

“I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.” – J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye.

I’ve been struck lately by the debate that rages in the press about Young Adult Fiction and whether or not it is a detriment to youth, to literature, and to society in its entirety. The commentary has been thorough. But there’s an underlying theme that hasn’t been discussed thoroughly: the literary discourse between adults and young people.

I teach novel-writing classes to teenagers. I’m in a unique position to identify themes in books for young people written by young people themselves. What I find will not be surprising to any of us who consider ourselves avid readers.

Young people want to write about real human emotions. They are themselves in the throws of the most emotionally tumultuous periods of their lives and their writing reflects it. A full 80% of protagonists in my students’ work are orphans, isolated from their childhood homes, or stranded in an inhospitable terrain, searching for meaning. Crunching the numbers another way, nearly half of my students write about a protagonist who has a deformity, disability, or a secret and shameful power that she must guard from a harsh and judgmental world.

The writer in me finds these numbers fascinating. These kids are the audience for an exploding fiction market, and they’re writing the books they would want to read themselves. Regardless of which YA sub-genre they are exploring (sci-fi, fantasy, romance, family saga), they each want to see a kid, fraught with seemingly insurmountable challenges, clamber their way out of their fictional hell to a place that is even marginally better.

And here’s the kicker: almost none of my students write a separate hero character who saves their protagonist.

So what do these statistics mean to the mother and teacher in me? Kids write what they know. And if they know isolation, alienation, fear, and abandonment, then I see a teaching moment.

Lat month, when I read a snippet of a student’s novel that involved a young woman who was engaging in self-harm, I put down the paper, held open my arms, and hugged that girl. Her writing opened a door to a conversation about scary feelings, terrible choices, and the desperation that she herself was feeling in her life. I asked her during our conversation if she ever had these feelings herself, and she said she didn’t, but she knew plenty of people who did. And she herself had often thought about how to escape her own sadness and isolation.

So what’s the difference between my author, who didn’t cut herself, and her friends who did?

Reading. And writing.

She told me that books were a safe haven for her. She said that even in her darkest moments, she could find a character whose fictional life was worse off than hers, then follow that character as she struggled her way out of her problems and found a way to be better, to be stronger, to be braver because of her experiences.

And then she took her interest in books a step further and became a writer herself.

That young writer’s love affair with the written word might not save her life, but the dialogue it opened with responsible adults very well may.

Kids are looking for the instruction manual for their lives. That’s the overarching theme of adolescence and of literature written for young audiences. And while involved parents who have active, and sometimes difficult, conversations with their children might recoil at the thought, most kids do not share their deep, dark fears with anyone.

Technology doesn’t help their feelings of isolation. Too often, parents are plugged into one device or another instead of being plugged into their children. I want to say to parents who are actually considering censoring their kids that it’s not their job to keep the sadness of the world from ever reaching their children. In fact, sheltering them from the harsh realities of their friends, their neighbors, and even their own psyches will cripple them. Instead, I want parents to turn to their kids and actually talk to them.

When you see a kid reading a book that exhibits themes that make you uncomfortable, imagine a doorknob on the book jacket. Turn the handle and see what might be inside that kid’s mind. You’d be surprised at how many of a child’s insecurities can be tamed and even eliminated by turning an uncomfortable worry into a teaching moment.

My young author was worried about how to talk to her friends who were engaging in self-harm, or if she should bring it up at all. I told her that bad behavior is almost always covering up a fear. And if she could talk to her friends about what scares them, she’d be a wonderful confidant to them, and an even stronger person herself. I also told her that if her friends needed help, she should help them decide which adult in their lives to trust with their worries. And I told her how proud I was of her for using her own communication skills to shine some light in the dark places.

Holden Caulfield decides at the end of Catcher in the Rye that he can’t be the savior for all the little children who might point themselves in the direction of a cliff’s edge and run too hard and too fast toward a deadly fall. But by writing about those emotions, J.D. Salinger told millions of readers that they were not alone in their feelings of alienation, and that we are all capable of saving ourselves.