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.

Solution for Generational Warfare: Empathy

I have horrible neighbors.  They’re crabby, they complain loudly about completely irrelevant things – like my friends parking their cars on the street when they come to visit – and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get a smile out of them.  They’re older than my parents, and there’s a soft spot in my heart for older people.  I miss my grandparents, and I’m always searching for positive older influences for my boys.  How I’d love for them to have a sweet elderly neighbor that they could go visit every now and again.  These are not those neighbors.  My husband says, “to hell with those old coots!  What are they going to do to us?  We own the house next door!”

While it’s true that they can’t fire me or call my landlord to complain (I’m the landlord!) or force me to move out, it bothers me tremendously that the people who share a property boundary with me find my family so incredibly distasteful.  They sneer at my children when they run and chase each other in the back yard (their house sits on a hill and overlooks our property), they talk loudly about how our dog is a nuisance (she’s a 3-pound Yorkshire Terrier we rescued after the flood), they leave copies of the Association’s by-laws in our mailbox with sections highlighted and sticky notes that say, “just making sure you have a copy of this.”

I wrote them a very long and passionate letter about how we’re good, honest, hard-working people who happen to have two toddlers and another baby on the way.  I told them I envied their lovely lawn and their retirement time and how one day I hoped my property looked as tidy and well-groomed as theirs does.  Then I reminded them that everyone they know is fighting a hard battle and asked for their kindness and respect.  In the letter, I told him that I feel out of sorts, and I feel oppressed, and I feel so sad that I can’t make them empathize with my situation, however silly they think it might be.

They called an “emergency HOA meeting” in response.  Oh, my neighbor is the VP of the HoA. He’s proposed imposing fines for street-parking, excessive  noise, and pets “not under the control of their owners.”

This left me thinking about something I heard on a political talking-heads show.  “If you’re going to engage in generational warfare,” the pundit said, “you’d better side with the generation that always votes.”

I think my neighbor assumes I won’t come to the meeting.  He assumes I won’t be searching out every single swing set in the neighborhood and making sure every family under 60 shows up.  He assumes that because I’m young and busy that he can push me around simply because he’s older, he has a position on the board, and he shows up.  Well, he’s wrong.  If I’ve learned anything from my students, it’s that when you kick a hive, you get a swarm.  And he’s kicked my hive one too many times.

I’ve been driving around in the boat of a minivan that makes me feel bloated just dreaming up ways to dismantle the HoA by-laws, and I have a pretty good argument put together.  I’ve also been fantasizing about what kind of HoA-approved shenanigans would get the better of that old goat.  I’m really a fan of letting my husband’s Appalachian roots show for a few weeks.

And this morning, while I was sitting in a restaurant having breakfast with my two-year-old, it hit me.  I feel like a teenager all over again.  I feel like that mean old seventh-grade math teacher – Mr. So-and-so, the one with the permanent scowl and impossible temperament – is out to get me once again.  Or I feel like I did when the pack of popular kids decided to throw dog-food at me n the hallway during my freshman year.  I feel trapped, just like I did when I was in middle and high school.  I couldn’t change schools, couldn’t change teachers, had no control over my own daily schedule, and I had to live my day side-by-side with people who I felt hated my guts for no rational reason.

Being the pleaser that I am, I tried all sorts of things to get those hateful people to like me.  I showed up to school with cookies for mean teachers.  I volunteered to do homework for cruel popular kids.  I was even more miserable when my attempts to make peace were ignored, ridiculed, or used against me.  It made me feel hopeless and powerless.  So instead of standing up for myself, I retreated into myself, into my journals, into my writing.

Those terrible experiences made me the reflective, kind, empathetic person I am today.  They also steeled my spine against people who might act in a cruel way toward my own children.  And while I tried the nice way – cookies and friendly gestures, and a well-written letter, now it’s time to get my dukes up.

As I was leaving that restaurant with my little boy this morning, a group of WWII veterans stopped to say hello to him.  He shook their hands and said, “Oh, hi!” to each of them.  They were delighted.  They cooed over him, patted his head, and commented about how he was “cute as a bug.”  One old guy in a US Navy ball cap with the name of his ship embroidered on it pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket and handed my son a dollar bill.

“OH!” he said, “Dink you!”

The old guy patted his head and said, “now don’t you spend that all in one place.”  Then he turned to me and said, “I’ve had a tough morning, but that little fella sure did cheer me up.”

My heart melted.  I missed my own grandparents, of course.  My granddad was a Navy man aboard the USS Fessenden during WWII.  But more than that, I felt so angry that I couldn’t replace my jerk neighbors with these sweet old people.  If empathy is the lubricant that keeps the generations happily coexisting among each other, why is it so difficult for some people to muster?  How can it be so hard for my neighbor to remember back to a time when his life was just beginning, when his children were young and his days were filled with worries and errands and bills.  How is so hard for some people to find kindness for those right next door?

I just hope my kids aren’t missing out.  I’d love for them to have a neighborhood where they’re appreciated for the charming, smart, delightful young men they are.  Generational warfare serves nobody.  But a pat on the head, a dollar in the pocket, and a hug from a little boy can turn a dreary day around.

Quit, Already!

Yesterday, a very concerned parent told me that her daughter was overwhelmed with the project, a common issue for any writer reaching 10,000 words in her manuscript.  She might not have spoken to me at all, except that I saw her lurking a little bit in the corner, and I asked if she was ok.  She said her daughter was overextended, overscheduled, and over-stressed. Her mother told me of a grueling weekend where the family wrestled with the thought of taking the student out of class.

In fact, there were divisions among the family.  Groups of people thought that the pressure of writing a novel quickly could break the girl, and other factions thought that if she wanted to write a novel, then this was her opportunity to do so, and she shouldn’t shy away from a challenge simply because it’s hard.

Anything worth doing is hard.

But what struck me wasn’t the conversation, the dialogue between family members, or even the fear in the young woman.  I was struck that at no point did any of the adults involved call me.  Or another student in class.  Or Beth, my co-teacher, who is incredibly approachable.

And it occurs to me that if a parent or student or invested family member cares enough about their young writer enough to argue about whether or not she should learn to express herself in a healthy way, they should reach out to those who are writers as well.

Writers know fear and anxiety and self-criticism better than any group on the planet.  Ok, so maybe I’m a bit biased on this front, but I believe that the introspection and empathy that fully-invested writing necessitates also results in, more often than not, a type-A personality in the writer.

I told the mother to give me two hours with her daughter in class.  If she wasn’t excited about her work and ready to dive back in, she was welcome to walk away.  But I feared a much more impactful consequence of deciding not to finish the task at hand.  I was afraid that her daughter would believe that she was a failure at being a writer, and that her perception would cloud her self-esteem for years to come.  So I did what any self-respecting (and fearful!) writer would do: I talked to her.

And do you know what I learned?  She’s just a teenager. 

There was no murky muck lurking in her brain.  She had no impossible fears to conquer.  She wasn’t racked with guilt or worry or anxiety.  In fact, she’d expressed a little worry after our last class, which sent her parents, family members, and interested parties into the debate of the century.  Am I surprised?  In a word, no.

So I ventured out on a limb at the beginning of class and told everyone to quit, already.

Their shocked faces stared at me in disbelief.  Mouths hung agape.  Brows furrowed.  Someone shook his head slowly.

I said, “This is too hard for you guys.  You’re just kids.  You shouldn’t be burdened with the pressure of writing a novel.  And you’d probably rather just be running around this summer, spending time at the pool, and relaxing.  So why don’t we all quit already.”

“Are you kidding?” one student asked, outraged.

“You need to talk to your doctor and get on some new medications,” one kid said, pointing his finger at me.

The whole class shook their heads, said “no way!”

When I told them that they’d just proven my point, that this project wasn’t too hard, and that they were doing exactly the right thing for their brains, for their hearts, for their minds, and for their dreams of becoming writers, they all cheered.

One boy sighed his relief and said, “oh my gosh, I’m so glad.  You scared me to death!”

Read that again.  I scared him to death.

Merely telling a young person that he couldn’t achieve a goal he’d held in his heart for himself was enough to raise his fear level, freak him out, and push his internal panic button.

He wasn’t scared or nervous before class.  He wasn’t unsure of himself.  None of them were!  And then I said they couldn’t do it.

As parents, we teach our children, even when we don’t think we’re teaching.  They overhear our conversations, they intuit our emotions, they soak up our fears and dreams for their lives.  And what my student’s very well-meaning and loving mother did was magnify an emotion in her daughter by discussing it, worrying about it, and projecting her own fears onto her daughter.

During class, this student had marvelous things to say.  I worked her into my lesson plan, using her name as an example character, and by the end of the first half-hour lecture, she was grinning, giggling, and ready to write.

I sent her mom an email after class and I took my own advice.  I told her how proud I was of her daughter for taking on the challenge, how proud I was of her for supporting her daughter, and how excited I was to be a part of this journey.

I’m happy to say that my student has gotten back into her novel-writing groove.  But I have learned an incredibly powerful lesson in this exchange.  Kindness is empowering.  Encouragement can conquer incredible fear.  And communication can both wreck and rebuild a writer’s confidence.

I am so thankful for that parent for helping me redouble my efforts to hug students, stick my hand out for high-fives, and tell them, genuinely, that I’m proud of their work.

Positivity breeds optimism, and optimism feeds our dreams.