College

That is all. Except yes, I understand that we are in a rapidly changing environment genderwise. Let’s just let the changes happen as they happen. We don’t have to be proving ourselves to each other how sensitive we are to cultural shifts constantly. If you are busy felling trees or making advertisements or fighting a war or creating new kinds of facial makeup and don’t have the time or inclination to follow every small shift in gender politics I think that’s probably healthy.

But maybe it’s a youth thing too. Like following the pop charts and who’s in and out. It’s a sharply transitory collection of fast-moving data.

I try to be sensitive to individuals and their complexities. But I like my old, well-used tools, words like “husband” and “wife,” with all their old, cartoonish associations, like “castle” and “horse.”

Forgive me my crankiness. I got woken up too many times during the night by the old dog making his nervous, coughing complaints. Plus this warm, dry weather we’ve having in California in January is just spooky and a little creepy and scary. It’s got us all a little on edge.

So could I please just for heaven’s sake just get on to the letter now?

OK. I could.

Dear Cary,

I feel so frustrated. I’m naturally an introvert, so it’s hard for me to make friends and I feel like I have no one to talk to and no one to hang around with.

My entire life I’ve hated my dad. He’s cruel, treats me like a possession or a pet that he reluctantly finances but doesn’t really care about, and for a long time, when I was younger, we had physical fights as well. My older brother got the worst of that and my younger brother got some of it as well, and as a result, we’re all messed up and can’t hold our tempers. We all can’t stand losing or being “wrong” because our entire lives we’ve been taught we’re less than my dad, we don’t know anything, and that we’re always wrong. We were physically weaker so we always lost. Now this puts a strain on my relationship with my siblings because none of us can back down.

My mom and I are best friends but she lets everything go by. She’s always said we should give in and she’ll talk sense to my dad later, but stupid pride has always kept me from being able to do that. Something inside of me just won’t give in when he’s yelling at me like I’m worthless. She never gives a firm ruling in anything, even when my siblings and I would have arguments, and always wants to “compromise” to avoid confrontation. I understand where she’s coming from, as her dad is exactly like mine and she married young into the cycle. She’s lived in that environment her entire life and now she just wants to pretend it doesn’t exist.

I’m 21 years old and a senior in college, so I get a break by living on campus during the week and only coming home to work and attend church on the weekends. But during holidays and the summer it’s really hard for me to be in close proximity with the rest of my family. Especially now that my best friend, who is Mormon, has gone on a year and a half mission where the only contact she is allowed to have is through written letters, I’ve been feeling even more isolated. I don’t belong anywhere. Nothing I ever do is worth it. Nothing is ever good enough and I feel frustrated and helpless. I know I should just man up and move out, but the thought of supporting myself completely while finishing my degree seems so impossible that I tell myself I’d rather live at home and suffer than move out. It’s weak and pathetic, I know, but I won’t move out.

I just don’t know what to do anymore. I worry I’ll be alone forever because I’m scared to trust anyone for fear they’ll be just like my father and grandfather. I’m tired of being controlled. I’m depressed. I feel like my life has no purpose, like it means nothing.

Lost and confused,

Always Last

Dear Always Last,

So here are some things. So you are going to have a lot of strong feelings from this for a long time and they are going to be with you and so you are going to need to get used to them and not fight them or fear them because they are just feelings and feelings are not facts, even though that is a cliche and even though feelings feel a lot like facts. In fact feelings sometimes feel more like facts than facts do. But the facts are different, and college is actually a great place to begin sorting all that out. The facts are that you have a certain kind of father and a certain kind of relationship that results in certain kinds of feelings. And because the feelings are your feelings you naturally treat them as important. And that’s fine. That’s good. They are important. But they are not the only thing there is.

The idea as you grow into adulthood is to get big enough inside for all your feelings. Take a deep breath. Expand. Expand to take in all your feelings. You can hold them all. Maybe sit and meditate for a while and let all your feelings be. You can’t act on all of them all at once. You can’t do anything about them a lot of the time. So your task is to learn to walk around with them, letting them be there, asking them what they mean, asking them what they’re telling you to do, making friends with them.

Some of these feelings are telling you important things, like that it was wrong for your dad to treat you that way, and like you are not the person your dad treated you as, and like it is unfortunate in the extreme that you had to go through that with him. But these feelings will also tell you things that are just not true, like that nothing you ever do is worth it, or nothing is ever good enough. Those things are just not true. They might feel true but they’re not empirically true, and what you are in college for is to get comfortable with the empirical, because it will save your life. The empirical is outside you. It is bigger than you. Empirically speaking, much of what you go on to do will absolutely be worth it, and much of what you do will absolutely be good enough. For instance, your writing to me was worth it and good enough. It was definitely good enough. Your just walking around today is good enough. Your just being kind to your friends and family and getting through the day is good enough.

There is a lot about your life that is worth it and good enough. So some of what your dad left you with is all these helpless feelings and untrue statements. So your task as you get to be 22 and 23 will be to sort out the phenomenologically true statements about your feelings, like, I feel angry toward my dad and I feel hopeless and sad, from the empirically untrue statements like nothing I do will ever be good enough and I am a failure and I am unloved.

You are loved. You are good enough. You just had a dad who didn’t treat you right. It’s not your fault. It’s his fault. Your job for the next few years is to routinely work toward overcoming the bad and stupid ideas he left you with. “I’m not good enough” is a bad and stupid idea and it needs to be replaced with empirically sensible ideas such as “I can do the things I set out to do” and “Good enough for what?” by the way.

OK?

You have a whole life to live. Your feelings are going to be there and sometimes they are going to be uncomfortable and you are going to want to punch people and that is fine. That is nothing to be afraid of. Eventually things are going to make more sense and you are going to sort things out. So think of it this way. When you were 8 you had feelings and you had to learn to sort them out and you did. You did well. You got through being 8. It wasn’t easy. Eight never is. Eight is tough. It’s a lot of work moving on to 9 but you did it. And then 10. You did 10. No easy one either. Imagine. All those years you got through already. So now you’re 21 and you’re going to get through this one as well. And you are going to be angry at times and it’s scary but you are going to get through it.

And you are going to learn to identify the various feelings you have from growing up with your dad and learn to know what they are and where they come from and make decisions anyway and live your life anyway. Like this trust thing you have. You are going to see this distrust come up and you are going to know what it is and even though you know that your dad is only one man in the universe and every man is not your dad this trust thing is going to come up. So when it comes up you are going to learn to say to yourself and possibly to the man in question, you know, after growing up with my dad and all, I have this trust thing, just so you know.

So that is my letter to you this morning, on this strange and irritability-producing young morning.

Oh, and another thing: It goes by really fast, so pay attention to the good moments. Have as many good moments as you can. You’ll enjoy remembering them later.

You see, like the young lady from last Friday’s column who was good at seeming OK, I went to an expensive, elite college and graduated with mediocre grades and many more acquaintances than actual friends, although I was never quite as miserable as she was. I came from a working-class background and went through my four years there believing that going to an Ivy League school or equivalent on scholarship and becoming a professional was one of the few avenues of social mobility left in America that did not require nearly miraculous amounts of luck or once-in-a-generation-level genius, and that by doing so I could become, if not part of the 1 percent, then the 10 percent. Well, it turned out that I really was not very good at either science or math, only good enough to be better than my classmates in high school (many of whom did not go on to college), and that meant that I would never be a doctor or an investment banker or a strategy consultant like most of my college classmates. And for a while I didn’t know what to do, and spent most of my days sitting around in my room. I was, however, still a competent writer, and ended up majoring in political science and going to law school in large part due to what I felt was a lack of any viable alternative although my mediocre grades meant that my law school was slightly less prestigious than my undergraduate school.

I’ve recently graduated from law school. I did reasonably well there, not at the top of my class but better than I did in undergrad and well enough that students who did about as well could have (and did) expected to get a job at a big corporate law firm. Unfortunately, these corporate firms only really hire entry-level associates after they were first summer associates for the firm during the summer after the second year of law school. Hiring for these positions occurs during the end of the summer before the second year of law school. And for me that summer happened to be the first summer after our economy went up in flames and the great recession started and while I got my share of interviews and callbacks and I think would have gotten an offer in a normal economy, I wasn’t interviewing in a normal economy.

And yes, as sad as it sounds, corporate lawyer is my dream job. And like I said earlier, I think that if I’d actually gotten the job, I’d hate it. I’d hate the 80-hour workweeks, I’d hate the often mindless tasks. I’d hate being chained to a BlackBerry, dreading that I’d be forced to check it to find out on a Saturday that I have work to do. And I’m a progressive and even if I never was an idealist who went into law wanting to be Atticus Finch or to save the environment, I also don’t like the idea of carrying water for big corporations and Wall Street. This isn’t just sour grapes on my part; when I talk to my friends from law school who did get these jobs, they mention these very things and it’s pretty much universally acknowledged even by the ones who do enjoy their corporate big firm jobs that an insane amount of hours is required and that work-life balance is tipped so heavily in favor of work that to call it a “balance” is to make a mockery of that word. And yet, hearing all of this said still makes me envious and I’m not completely sure why.

Part of it may be the social mobility theory I talked about before, but I really don’t think it’s about the money. I only spend about 60 percent of my comparatively much smaller current paycheck right now and apart from eating out a little more often, which frankly I could probably afford right now, I honestly can’t think of what I’d buy if I did have that larger salary, and if I were offered a big firm associate job at the same salary as my current, much lower stress and fewer hours job that I don’t love but am fundamentally satisfied with, I would take it in a heartbeat. Another part of it is probably that I’m frustrated at coming up just short in everything, being good enough to get into an elite college but not thrive there, good enough to do OK in law school and get corporate interviews but not get hired, and personal ego in believing that I am good enough to work there. And part of it might be that I’m just a jerk who’s insecure enough to have gone to the highest ranked college and law school that I got in to, chose a profession where there is a publication that puts out a ranking of the top 100 law firms USNews-style that is taken seriously, whose dream job is to work for one of those firms and who puts too much stock into all those rankings and into prestige. So, my question is, I know all the reasons why I shouldn’t feel this way and should be grateful for my current job, that the world I want to join so much would not make me happy, and that I sound like an entitled whiner – but how do I apply all of this and make myself stop feeling this way?

Confused Corporate Tool Wannabe

Dear Confused Corporate Tool Wannabe,

So complete is the corporate takeover of the American psyche that we find ourselves unable to imagine ourselves outside of it. Such is the evidence of its victory. Rather than imagine ourselves as apostates, the best we can do is imagine ourselves as high priests inside the kingdom.

Yet the corporate takeover of the American psyche has not yet gone quite deep enough to dislodge the ever-present dream of setting out for a better land.

What better land is left? Where are we to go now? Where is there an America for us to flee to? We fled here and now this is turning into what we fled. That is why we are camping out in our own downtowns, for there is no more America for us to flee to. We must flee to our own hearts and find America there. We must sail into the rough seas of our own selves to find the farther shore. There is no other frontier.

And then, that America we must bring out to the downtowns of our cities, to put on display not like a museum display of Native Americans and pilgrims but as a living, breathing town, a living, breathing nation: a dream embodied in the rabble.

You know me. You know how I think. For me, every desire is a symbol of another desire, every symbol a symbol of another symbol. Every longing for a corporate job looks like a longing for citizenship; every request for a raise looks like a request for recognition by the king; every longing for class acceptance looks like a longing for love.

So forgive me if I insist that your desire to be a corporate lawyer is a stand-in for some other desire. I suggest that what you long for is not necessarily a job as a corporate lawyer per se, but a decent place in the American firmament. So you, my friend, have to find within you what is more primal. What is it that you desire? I would guess you desire to be told that you matter, that you count, that you are a full member. But you don’t want to hear it from me. You want to hear it from your own land and your own people, your motherland, your fatherland, your homeland. You long for America to finally say to us, yes, I see you, come sit at the table with the prime rib and the roast duck: You matter; yes, we respect you; yes, you are a part of all this! You want to hear it said loud and clear that you matter and that your natural inclinations and personality matter, that you are not provisional, that you are a full member, that you don’t have to earn your citizenship, you already belong.

Your ambivalence and torment are a part of it. Don’t you see? The savage wounding of history and the bright summer night full of fireworks, these two at war in your skull: That’s American too. That’s as American as Mitt Romney eating a corn dog.

And you know what else is American? The right of a writer like me to say such things and not even know exactly what I’m saying. Progress not perfection, my friend. We walk around with longing in our hearts and we express the longing before we work it all out. That’s the American way, too.

This is who we are.

So you know what the Occupy Wall Street people look like to me? They look like pilgrims. The soul of America in whiteface setting out to sail into themselves, looking for what they lost. Like a baffled bar patron looking for her purse, they are looking for an America that was there a minute ago and somehow vanished.

The world of Brooks Brothers and pedigrees is not the America your soul is looking for. That America is nothing more than a Hollywood England, a backlot stage set of public-school snobbery, repressed sexuality and stiff upper lips. It’s American in fashion but not in spirit; in spirit it is old snobby England.

So how do we find that America that we really are looking for, that America of the dream, warm, embracing, large of heart, free, equal, meritocratic but egalitarian, energetic, kind, not warlike but strong? The America that says you matter not because of your college rank or your company rank but because you are endowed with certain inalienable rights, among them the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

You go look for it, man. And when you find it you write to your friends. End of story. That has been good enough for millions before us and it ought to be good enough for us. You have the right to live the life you actually want to live, and you have the right to be proud of that life, and the corporate takeover that has sucked the marrow out of our bones and left us confused as to our heritage and our progeny and purpose, that corporate takeover is coming to an end, as we finally wake up and see what we have allowed to happen, and begin to assert ourselves once again.

We are indeed not Wall Street. We are more street than Wall Street. We are the proud rabble who would rather eat hard tack and risk scurvy than live under the lash of fat despots. That’s who we are. And we are setting sail. We are sailing into ourselves, looking for America.

So I don’t think a corporate lawyer job is what you really want. I think it’s just a symbol of what you really want. The real search is harder. There is no application process. There are no internships.  Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are broad enough to encompass the dreams of any soul in the world. Somewhere in those few words is your dream. Go find it.

I started struggling with this in university trying to pick a major. I was overwhelmed by the options and in my mind it was an extremely high-stakes decision. I wasn’t just choosing a degree, I saw it as choosing who I was going to be and how happy I would be for the rest of my life. Make the right choice and live a happy life, passionate about my career. Make the wrong choice, and a life of regret, or poverty or banality. Needless to say, I put a tremendous amount of pressure on myself to make the “right” decision. I first hedged my bets and took several degree programs at once and later switched majors a couple of times. I fell behind my friends academically and eventually I became so embarrassed about it that I isolated myself and got depressed. Circumstances eventually forced me to decide and once I did I powered through and got my degree quite quickly, but I largely ruined what could have been a fun and positive university experience.

I mention my university experience because I see parallels to where I am now. After university I took an average job partly related to my degree. Looking back, I never really felt like a real graduate because of the meandering and, to me, embarrassing route I took as well as the fact I still wasn’t sure about the decision. I guess I felt I didn’t deserve a career either. Just like in university I spent close to five years in this job not really going anywhere, then decided to get a graduate level degree and, again, powered through it quite quickly. The degree has opened up new opportunities and an ADD diagnosis and treatment have helped me at least get organized on the outside. I’m now trying to decide what to do next.

That’s where I stand today, Cary. I’ve used my career as an example but I can say the same about every other aspect of my life: friends, relationship, what I do for fun, all up in the air, all undecided. I’ve come to realize I’ve had an unconscious belief that there is one correct path to take in life and it is my job to find it. No wonder it seems so perplexing to me that people are able to make important decisions without constant worry or second-guessing. I feel like I’ve squandered so much time and opportunities in the past that making the right decisions now is more important than ever. I’ve been waiting a long time for that feeling, or an inner voice to tell me what to do with my life, that something is “right.” As ridiculous as it sounds, it’s finally dawned on me that decisions have to come from my own discernment and judgment and that I have to accept some uncertainty in life. I’ve lived under my old belief for a long time, though, and I don’t know where to start from here.

Cary, I don’t want to live my life disappointed with myself and I think I have a lot to offer if I could just get out of my own way. Any thoughts? Thank you for your time and any advice and I’m sorry if this is too long!

Lost

Dear Lost,

Your task is not to find a path, but to study the one you’re on. To discover your path, discover your story. Your story is your path.

Describe the path you have taken thus far. Describe it fully. Tell your story. That doesn’t mean characterizing it but actually telling it, telling the tale. If you do this, if you narrate what has brought you to here, then you will have your path. You will have your path up to this point and then it will be clear what direction the path points. You will know what path you are on.

When seen in this light, many of the decisions you made will make sense. They met your needs. It’s just that the needs they met are unspoken ones. For instance, you may have a need to study many things at once. Such a need may be at odds with what institutions expect. You may also have a need to escape from the roles that the institution is offering you. You may have a need to sort of screw things up in order to gain some operating room. You may feel boxed in. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making terrible decisions. It means you are making decisions to meet your needs, some of which are hidden, perhaps even hidden from you.

If you are not fully conscious of what your needs are and how you are meeting them, then it may indeed appear that you are making crazy, baffling decisions. So it’s necessary to admit that certain shadowy figures are at work. It’s necessary to acknowledge the importance of the irrational in decision-making. We do not always know what we want, but if given the chance to get it, we will make the decisions that get us what we want. What we want may be destructive. That doesn’t mean we don’t want it. It means that we don’t admit that we want it. What we want may not look like success. That doesn’t mean we’re accidentally failing. We may be trying to escape a system that denies our true self. The system of conventional success, for instance, requires that we routinely disguise and suppress our true selves. So when we “fail,” we are sometimes saving ourselves.

Your only path is the one you’ve been on. So turn around and go back down the path and spend some time on it, trying to understand it. Backtrack. What kind of path is your path, this path you’ve been on? What are its features? Where does it diverge? Where does it merge with other paths? What does it connect to? Does it run through the woods or through a meadow or along the sea, or on a highway, or a city street? Where have you taken detours to examine attractive distractions? Those distractions may turn out to be your true loves. Those things that we just cannot stop looking at, those things may be what we are actually seeking without meaning to or admitting it.

Here is something else you said that seems like a clue to how you have been thinking: “Make the right choice and live a happy life, passionate about my career. Make the wrong choice, and a life of regret, or poverty or banality.”

I suggest you consider the nature of choice. Also, ask yourself, “How does one navigate a world of seemingly infinite alternatives?” Finally, consider the dangers of having too many choices.

These Web pages present nice ideas. But what you really need is an experience.

So my wish for you is that you leap into a realm where attention is riveted only on what is present, in which each thing is nothing but itself, in which an intuition bigger than words takes over and you know for an instant that “choice” has no meaning apart from action. The deeper we explore the word “choice,” the more we plumb, the more we see that life is nothing but a series of actions.

We can make decision trees all day long but at some point we must surrender to action and the rich wonder of fate. We must get in the river.

Here is what happens when we get in the river: We become concerned with swimming.

Dear Cary,

I have been wanting to write to you for a while, but I always put it off because I think I can fix it myself or that the feeling will pass. As time wears on, I no longer believe that I can.

I am soon to graduate from a big, expensive university with a middling GPA. As I slog my way through this semester, I find myself feeling ever more hopeless and withdrawn. Upon arriving on campus freshman year, I promptly had a complete nervous breakdown. I was a thousand miles away from home, surrounded by all these golden children of Westchester and Greenwich, and I couldn’t handle it. I begged my parents to withdraw me from school, but they couldn’t comprehend why I would react in such a way. I stuck it out through freshman, sophomore and junior year at the same school. I was miserable each and every single day the entire time.

I have hardly made any friends during my time here (and I imagine that I must be the only person at this entire university with such an accomplishment). I never have any weekend plans and I stay in my dorm room most of the time. I don’t have such great grades, and particularly this semester, I find it increasingly hard to even make it to class or hand in assignments.

Why didn’t I transfer? It’s hard to say. I have this knack for appearing exceptionally functional. I can act peppy and upbeat all day long, but I will absolutely collapse in my bed sobbing every night. I imagine that the only event that can possibly remove me from this blanket of anxiety and fear would be total unconsciousness. A while back, I saw a therapist at my university for a few sessions. I couldn’t articulate any of my feelings to her. All that happened was that she commended me for being a “mature young woman.” That’s what I must seem like on the outside, I guess.

I’m submitting my résumé to various jobs now, and my application often gets denied with nary a first-round interview offer. I imagine how things will be post-graduation. I have no great hopes of being a high-powered executive or a successful writer. I have no dreams about white picket fences, 2.5 children and a loving husband. I desire absolutely nothing, except to live comfortably without anxiety.

While I don’t want to hurt myself, I find it just so difficult to make it through each day. I feel positively alone and exposed. I just don’t know what to do with myself except lie in my bed, browsing the Internet for hours upon hours until I fall asleep. While I know that if I just continue to eat, sleep and breath, this semester will be over and I will finally graduate, I worry that the future will only hold much of the same. I don’t remember ever feeling truly “happy” outside of fleeting moments of fun and laughter. How can I stop being so alone and miserable?

A Pretender

Dear Pretender,

I would say the best way to stop being so alone and miserable is to begin an unflinching and courageous study of yourself. Through this you will learn what is happening to make you feel and behave the way you do and how to change.

It’s as simple, and as difficult, as that. Its results can be instantaneous and also can take a lifetime. It is the true calling of humankind: to know ourselves.

It is unfortunate that universities do not concentrate on this essential task as much as they might; many universities are little more than vocational training grounds for the elite vocations of leisure and power. They are not the sanctuaries for personal growth and learning that they might be in a more enlightened society. It sounds as though you have gone to such a university and it has been pretty much nonstop torture.

It is time for the torture to end. It is time for you to begin your true course of learning.

I can make some guesses, but I am just a guy who set out to be a writer and ended up answering people’s letters for a living. I’m not trained in clinical psychology or philosophy.

Still, I can notice a few things. To me, it sounds like you have a lot of anxiety.

So, the short answer would be, to accelerate your study of yourself, that you begin learning as much as you can about this thing called anxiety: what it comes from, how it is treated, what steps you can take to lessen its impact on your life. Not all therapists are equally skilled. The one you consulted apparently did not identify your problem. No doubt you are skilled in masking your problems, but the job of a good therapist is to gently, skillfully, firmly, with compassion, help us take off the mask. Many therapists  would more or less instantly grasp your situation and guide you through this difficult time.

You can help, of course, by learning about your condition.

This does not have to be a sad and frightening time. It is a time for discovery. You have nothing to fear. Once you begin to grasp your true nature, you will find an abundance of joy and pleasure in life. You are not far from the prize. You are just beginning.

I am not going to try to tell you very much. I am just trying to give you a gentle shove in the right direction. But I can tell you this, which may give you some hope: I have learned some techniques for dealing with anxiety. You can learn those techniques, too. I did get counseling and therapy, and you can get that as well.

One of the most important things I learned about anxiety was something a therapist said to me more-or-less offhandedly. He said, Well, you know, anxiety is often a method of warding off feelings. I thought, wow, that’s odd. I had never thought of anxiety as an active strategy, a creative act. But when I saw myself using anxiety to ward off feelings, I found I could direct my attention to the world, and what was going on, and to what feelings those might be that I was warding off, and I could see that my head would not explode if I just let those feelings come, and that things were basically OK minute to minute in spite of whatever feelings were washing over me.

Here is an interesting page to look at. I was searching for “therapeutic methods for dealing with anxiety” and I found this page. Its heading says, “Coping Skills for Trauma,” but it’s a really rich page full of suggestions for people who may be having anxiety and would like to get back into the present moment. What a wonderful set of suggestions!

In fact, I just did one of the exercises suggested on that website, and it was pretty calming. I looked around the room and saw an abstract expressionist painting by Judith Lindbloom, framed by my sister Melinda in her shop in Lynchburg, Va.; a table lamp bought at Target; a box of thumbtacks used to post fliers on billboards; a pair of reading glasses bought at Walgreen’s; a pass to the Litquake after-party. Those are five things just sitting here within easy view. Looking at them reminded me of my connection to the world, to my sister and my friend Judith, to our enterprise of doing workshops and posting fliers about them; to our shopping trips to Target; to my eyesight; to my participation in Litquake. It quickly grounded me. It brought me back into my life, the life that I’m living — the only life I’m living.

So these techniques can quickly bring us back into the life we are actually living. And when you think about it, it’s amazing how little attention we may be paying to the life we are actually living. And it’s often surprising how rich our lives are, when we stop to inventory what is in our lives. Your life, I feel sure, is very rich, too. Your problem is that you cannot experience it because you are warding it off. But this can change.

So, let’s just be honest. I’m a champion at warding off feelings. It may be because as a kid I was the kid who always was having too many of them — too many feelings about too many things; and feelings that were not simple, either, but required explanation and analysis, or simply needed to be said. That wasn’t working too well in my family, I found at an early age. Being the kid with feelings was not really the way to go. So I don’t know exactly what I did, because I wasn’t there. Or I can’t be there now. I can’t remember exactly what I did, what I decided to do. But I do know I learned to act quite analytical about my feelings, as though they belonged to someone else. And I learned not to say what I was feeling but to say something else — that the president is a numbskull or that certain chemicals are fascinating, that there will be a full moon tonight or Did you know…

You get what I’m saying? And I connect these two things: I connect learning at an early age that direct communication about my feelings was not welcome or appreciated, and also that by side-stepping that, and stating factoids, or stating opinions about politics, or the weather, I could avoid the scorn, derision or sheer incomprehension that would appear on the faces of the people around me.

Meanwhile I was bursting inside! Meanwhile I had all these secret longings and fears! Meanwhile I lived an inner life of strange abundance and richness. Meanwhile I was the kid wandering around wondering about God, about plants, about the sun, about evolution, about raindrops and fusion energy and girls. In a nutshell, I guess … I was full of feelings and that made it hard. So anxiety became a way of of freezing the moment and directing attention away from the flow of feeling.

So now it has become important to find ways to get back in the flow of feeling even when those around me are not receptive. So I have a rich inner life and I am often consumed with my own thoughts and feelings. Anxiety is just one way of responding to the flow of consciousness and feeling.

So that is just a little bit about anxiety. For you, what I can say is that if you begin a study of your own nature and history, and find what characteristics you have, and then find a therapist or psychologist who can become your partner in helping you understand your own nature and your own history, and you continue this study on your own, unflinchingly, courageously, then you are well on your way to becoming a happy and fulfilled person. It isn’t easy or magical, but it is the way to a meaningful and happy human life.