Thank You, Nurse Ratched

A couple of years ago, I found myself with a really bad client. Lots of screaming, lots of demands, and the people I had hired to help me out were screwing up left and right. No matter what solutions I proposed to get the project back to a path of success, it was met with more screaming and more demands that the project still had to magically resolve. For the first time in my life, I found myself having panic attacks. It started reaching a point where the anxiety just fed off of itself and I could watch my anxiety levels — almost as a disinterested third-party — spiral out of control.

I got a referral from a psychiatrist friend and decided to see someone in the hopes of getting some meds to calm the anxiety. At this point, I had become unable to sleep or even think clearly enough to finish the job. I went to see the doctor with an attitude that this occurrence was a total anomaly in an otherwise anxiety-free life. He asked a lot of questions about me, work history, home life, and family history. At the end of the session he recommended some drugs to help me remain calm (honestly, my main concern at this point was just to be able to sleep). He also said that my family is prone to anxiety.

My reaction was initially to think that he got it wrong. My family is completely calm and cool. We are not anxious people. I didn't respond, I just let the thought sit in my head. I tried to understand what I said that gave him the impression that our family is anxiety-prone. Then I realized that he was right. We are anxious, we're just really good at hiding it. We avoid most situations that produce anxiety and when we can't avoid it, we don't necessarily deal in the most logical manner. As we all get older, we get worse at hiding it.

Since that visit, I have been trying to understand the nature of anxiety in my own life. I realize that it does tend to creep up a bit more than I was previously allowing myself to see. The most visible times are during flying. I hate to fly. Do I think the plane is going to crash. Not really. Am I claustrophobic? Nope. It took me a while to realize what bothers me about flying. It's the fear that the flight is going to be non-stop turbulence. The plane can be as turbulent as it wants during the descent and it doesn't bother me at all. However, turbulence at the beginning of the flight freaks me out. I start imagining that the whole flight is going to feel like the pilot episode of LOST and the anxiety slowly starts to get the better of me.

Over the past couple of years of watching when my anxiety levels grow, I've realized that to some extent, I am complicit in it's manifestation. I'm definitely aware of feeding it. I think a big part of it is my Italian background. I see the seed and I want to make it a bigger deal than it is. I add passion and emotion to it in a very subtle way to help it grow. However, I like living life with passion and emotion. It's part of who I am. So for a while, I was pro-anxiety. Why not let things get a bit out of control? Isn't that part of what makes special and exciting?

Living with David is a blessing in many ways. He is walking Xanax. When ER was still on TV, we would occasionally watch the first few minutes. It always involved some major surgery about to happen with a sobbing family, the doctors yelling "STAT" and trying to quell a major freak-out. David would inevitably say "I don't know why they make such a big deal about everything on this show. That's a very routine procedure." I would of course tease him that perhaps the makers of the show have a vested interest in heightening the drama. I started scripting David Reich's ER in which a panicked family comes racing in to the hospital screaming in tears. David is there and tells them not to worry, that the procedure is very routine with a high success rate. The family says "Oh. That's good to hear." They wipe their tears away, have a seat in the waiting room, and the camera watches them quietly read a book for the next 45 minutes.

I've been with David in a true emergency when I sliced my hand open on the day of our wedding. It happened just an hour before the photographer was supposed to show up. The last thing I needed was emotion. There's no one I wanted at my side other than David — and not just because I love him — because he was going to navigate that crisis better than anyone else.

But there's a subtle temptation to heighten the emotion when situations arise that are not clear emergencies. It's fun to add fuel to the fire. I start composing the story I'm going to tell in my head with added drama. We all want to be McMurphy, not Nurse Ratched.

I think when David sees me sauntering down the path of Italian-freak-out mode, he pours on the doctorly placidity to counteract. Now when he begins to stultify my emotions, I don't respond with renewed vigor to artificially add drama, I realize it's my queue to calm down.

Now that I view anxiety as a temptation, I have a lot more control over it. I think most people are concerned they're going to rob life of its flavor if they remove emotion in their life, but life has plenty of drama all on its own. It's good to be satisfied that we're not on the set of ER. Life is often dull and predictable. And that's a thing worth embracing.

For further reading, Chögyam Trungpa also had some interesting things to say on the subject of boredom.

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The first night of the fire, we had to stay at a hotel. Luckily, the W Hotel at Union Square accepted dogs.
Oh, my little princess. You ruled my world for 16.75 years. You lasted longer than anyone in your litter. I can’t remember what life was like without my little Gogo to come home to. Even 3 weeks before you passed away, when I was in India, you would wait on the first floor and stare at the door and wait for me to come home. When I first got you, I had Dorian less than six months before he passed away. Every day of the first year, I prayed I would have you for a nice long life and my prayers came true.