The Antisocial Socialist

This may come as a surprise to you, but I am a highly anxious person. Which is to say that I am a diagnosed, mentally unwell, clinical depression-and-GAD with a cherry of PTSD on top person. Not just "I feel a little anxious sometimes" but "I'm under supervision by a medical professional about it" kind of thing.

I suffer from it. It's not great. I hate it, in fact. I wake up at 4 am on a regular basis, often from nightmares, heart racing, consumed by intense and specific worries. My heart races. In the past, though thankfully not for awhile, I've had panic attacks that are so bad I thought I was having a heart attack. 0/10, strongly do not recommend.

And hence this post is going to sound a little weird. 

If I had to define what anxiety is for me on a personal level, it's the ability to picture future or potential scenarios that feel as if they are currently happening or are inevitably going to happen. For example, thinking about the potential death of a loved one results in a physical and emotional reaction similar to if that death had actually happened. Extremely vivid nightmares that feel real. The sense—as I've written before—that you are leaning back in a chair and have leaned so far back that righting yourself is impossible, but the full tip over to the hard floor hasn't happened yet.

I can neither, at this point in my life, disentangle this from either my personality or my ability to write fiction, where conjuring the specific emotion resulting from a potential scenario is a slightly useful skill. Trust me, though, I've tried a lot. The best I can do is mute it with meds, which cause other problems, or create workarounds where I redirect the pathway of my future-thinking towards how I might deal with those scenarios. Yes, I've tried yoga. Yes, I've tried mindfulness. The latter is contraindicated for someone like me.

Conversely, I am very often around people who do not suffer from anxiety. They may feel anxious about a given situation—a job interview, an illness, even climate change in general when they think about it—but they're not constantly doing this. These people are generally assured that things will work out as they should, or that worrying won't help. "It is what it is," they'll say, or "it'll be fine." 

I don't really know what causes someone to have one personality type versus the other. Certainly, I have lived experience where things have expressly not worked out for the best. But I've met folks who live on the street who've had much worse lives than I do, for whom things are still not working out at all, and they're more optimistic than I am. It isn't just trauma, or even primarily trauma. I'm sure there's a genetic or familial component too—Jews are neurotic, and all the women in my family are like this, really. 

Anxiety is, in many ways, a motivator for me. I mentioned the depression as well. If anxiety is living too much in the future, depression is dwelling in the past. Depression brain tells you to sleep all day and eat chips; anxiety brain reminds you that if you do that, you'll be out of a job. And if you don't perform at 110% at that job, you'll be out of a job. Your employers have already started planning as to how they're going to fire you, in fact, so get on that now. You shouldn't have made this post public because if they find out you have a mental illness, it's over for you.

A disproportionate number of teachers suffer from anxiety. A disproportionate number of administrators do not. A surprising number of students don't (you hear that they're all anxious these days, but I promise it's not all of them). This makes for a lot of clashes, as you can imagine. It's frustrating for someone who does not have the reassurance that things will work out for the best to have to interact with someone who does. Especially when we're in a global pandemic. I'm a person who reads that there's somewhere between a 1 in 5 and a 1 in 20 chance of getting long covid, and so I assume I'll be that one. But I'm surrounded by people who either don't think it's a possibility at all, or don't think it'll be anyone they know.

But while anxiety is devalued, and sucks, on a personal level, it honestly has its benefits on a broader societal level. A common theory for humans evolving this tendency is that while you need people who are bold and confident to lead a community, said little community gets wiped out pretty quickly without the person who can't sleep because they're watching the grass for tigers. We spend a lot of time talking about wellness and self-care and living in the moment, but we are right now living the consequences of having all lived in the moment, without worrying one bit about the future. It's pretty obvious with the pandemic that we'd all probably do a lot better if we'd heeded the many experts who warned about the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic, or even if we behaved more like the people who think they'll contract long covid if they catch it than the people who don't believe it will happen to them.

Soft climate change denial is another great example of this. It's not outright Fox News MAGA denial of the climate crisis. It's the sense that you might have (that I sometimes even have) that while obviously man-made climate change exists, and is a problem, but...someone will have to work it out, right? Governments will have to cut emissions because this is untenable. And hey, there's probably some genius working on a solution right now. Tech will save us! 900 million people in China and 33 million people in Pakistan probably have very different ideas about how well that will work out. Each successive government kicks the can down the road, waiting for some better future where it'll get fixed.

And of course, I've been thinking about Barbara Ehrenreich, who wasn't a perfect person but in many ways was a brilliant person who changed my life. She died last Thursday, at the age of 81. Her book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, covers the pitfalls of optimism and magical thinking, from her own breast cancer diagnosis to capitalism itself. By subscribing to the belief that if we're just positive enough, everything will be okay, we risk substituting those happy thoughts for tangible action. Cynical cancer patients are have a better prognosis; nations that plan for disaster mitigation do better when extreme weather strikes, and so on.

I recently learned about chronic wasting disease, and hoo-boy my life would have been better if I hadn't. It's a prion disease, similar to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, that affects deer. We caused it by trying to domesticate deer in the 60s, and now it's escaped into the wild. It's transmitted through soil. It hasn't jumped to humans, but there's a good chance that it will. So far, the same eggheads sounding the alarm over coronaviruses are also sounding the alarm over this, but nothing is happening on a policy level. Everyone is just...kinda hoping it works out.

Politics is a career that, alas, tends to attract people who are confident and not anxious. And thus we have leaders who live in the moment, who plan for four years at a time maximum, who don't wake up at 4 am with nightmare scenarios of zombie deer and agricultural workers dying of heatstroke. Our society is structured, in fact, around the present, the eternal now during which we can never learn from the past nor contemplate the future.

And that's why anxiety is a gift that causes me a great deal of misery, but which I dearly wish sometimes that I could pass on to others.

Everything will not be okay. The sooner we wake up to this, the better.

 We all know there are people with very low executive function.

This is most of my students. They're smart as hell, but when it comes to things like remembering to bring a pen and pencil to class, they just can't, and if they're given a form to get signed at home, that form will inevitably end its life, crumpled, shredded, and unsigned, in the pocket dimension at the bottom of their backpack. They know the material but can't write the test. Etc.

There are people with very low executive function, who have developed workarounds.

This is me, and most of my closest friends. I can't make it out of bed in the morning, so I set my alarm two hours early to start waking me up. I can't remember anything so I keep three separate to-do lists. I can't motivate myself through any means beyond raging anxiety, so either I do a task immediately, or I procrastinate forever. I somehow manage to exist, but every day is a struggle.

Presumably, there are people with the normal amount of executive function, and they go around unbothered by life and everything is fine.

But I would posit the existence of a fourth class of people, and these are people with too much executive function to the point where it is detrimental to both their lives and society as a whole. These are people for whom executive functions are an end unto themselves. As long as boxes are generated and checked, and everyone is very busy, work is getting done and progress is being made. These are people for whom rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic seems like a good and feasible plan, because you are taking action and doing things.

I would posit that very early in life, and in many careers, an unhealthy level of executive function is rewarded. This is mostly the key to success in school, far more important than intellectual capability. And in white collar work, looking busy while accomplishing nothing is a useful skill. But I would also say that these are the sorts of people who end up promoted above their level of competence— school boards and governments are full of them. Everyone who has ever suffered through a PowerPoint explaining the new educational jargon through Venn diagrams has encountered this sort of person.

They are the sort who tend to be particularly impressed if you add "smart" or "enhanced" before a word but don't actually change anything.

Right now, they are making decisions that would better fall to people with perhaps lower capacity for navigating institutions and systems, but higher levels of intelligence, wisdom, and empathy. Life and death decisions.

I could be talking out of my ass. It has been known to happen. I'm pretty sure if I were a higher functioning sort, I could brand this into a PowerPoint somehow and make a decent living as an educational consultant, and I wouldn't have to go back into a plague box next week.

 I vacillate wildly between abject terror and—that other thing. It's neither relief nor hope, but rather a belief in a set of steps that need to be taken to reorganize our world in a way that is sustainable and just. 

I woke up with a panic attack. The school closure thing hit me really hard.* I don't know if they're going to let us back in three weeks, to be honest.

Then I saw the picture of Bolsonaro in the hospital and I thought, well, he can't commit genocide against Indigenous peoples or burn down the Amazon right now, which is a good thing for said Indigenous people and those of us who enjoy breathing.**

And then I thought, what if my cats get sick(er)? Can I ensure that I have an adequate supply of Cocoa's kidney food? What if there's an emergency? Will the vets all be closed?

Even if younger, healthy people are mostly safe, there are many people in my life who are neither young nor healthy.

I always fantasize about having unstructured time off where I can just rest. I guess I'm getting it now. But that only works in contrast to the rest of the world proceeding as normal.

When this is over, am I even going to emerge into a world that requires my skillset?

I mean. I have anxiety. It's protected me up until last night, because I was so worried about other things that this whole thing registered as an Over There Problem. But it's finally hit me where I live in a very real way.

* This is the first thing the provincial government has done right and was absolutely the correct call. But I have serious doubts about their motivations for doing it, and their capacity to navigate a real crisis, because they are utter incompetents.
** Apparently the photo is from another time he was in the hospital. But he is being monitored for it. Regardless, he's probably too busy to do a genocide right now.

 Almost right on schedule, my first back-to-school anxiety nightmare of August. It was not as bad as most, probably because I've been in school-anxiety-mode for a year now and my brain hasn't had a stretch of not being stressed out and anxious. Anyway, it was almost interesting so I'll share it.

First day of class. My classes, as per usual nightmares, were huge, and the kids kept drifting in and out and coming in late and wouldn't stay still or give me their names. One girl had recently lost her brother in a shooting, another had lost her mother three weeks earlier. Her mother's grave was located right beside the classroom, and she had brought several large bouquets of purple lilies that clashed with the red and white flowers on the grave. She kept getting up to shift the flowers around, or curling up in a fetal position to cry.

The principal had decided that class would begin with a personal address from her, and so I was supposed to wait until she arrived to start. But she was late, and the kids were already complaining that they were bored, so I did an icebreaker activity. It was called Millennials Are Killing X and you had to go around a circle and say a thing Millennials are killing and why. For example, "Millennials are killing the housing market because they spend on their money on smashed avocado toast and lattes. I thought it was hilarious but the kids didn't get it, and then I remembered that the Millennials had been years ago and the kids didn't know what they were.

This is not my holiday. Why am I doing so much running around? Shouldn't this be the point in the year where I get to kick back and be like, "hey, you guys have the stress in exchange for being the dominant culture?" No?

It's a measure of exactly how catastrophically bad my day was, and by extension what a sheer clusterfuck my life has become, that the Honourable Wife-Beater was finally turfed from office today and this news failed to bring me even the tiniest sliver of hope or happiness, even for a moment.

That's how much things suck, and they will not get better.

This should have been my happy day.

Error: Out of spoons. Please reboot.


Image tangential, but I thought it was neat.

pofflewomp linked me to Depression: Curse of the Strong, which is a good, plain-language discussion of what clinical depression is. (Irritating website alert, though; turn your speakers off.) It cuts right to the heart of the bootstrapping, pull-your-self-together advice that you get all the time if you have any sort of mental illness, and for that alone, I felt that it deserves a signal boost.

When you think about it, it is not surprising. If a weak, cynical or lazy person is put under pressure and suffers a set of stresses, he will immediately give up, so he never gets stressed enough to become ill. On the contrary, if the strong type I have described is put under stress, he will go on and on and on, constantly striving, way beyond the point that the body (or more specifically the limbic system) is designed for. Eventually the wheels begin to fall off and symptoms appear. At this point the averagely strong person with a solid self-esteem will stop and say something like, ~'Hang on, this is silly, I'm making myself ill, others are going to have to pitch in and take some of the strain". So he pulls back a bit and thus avoids illness.
...

That is what this condition is - a blown fuse. In my view, understanding this is crucial.


So, what do you do? Well, the first and most crucial action is to stop fighting it, give in. This of course is anathema to the sort of person who finds himself in this awful state. After all, he has overcome every other difficulty or challenge he has faced in his life by effort and diligence, to give in is unthinkable. In any case, all his friends and even loving family will be offering their homespun wisdom : "Go on, pull yourself together, get more interests, get yourself out more, get more friends, come and have a party."

I can guarantee, if you take this advice, you will get worse.

Anyway, have a read.