The Anxiety Annuity, Part I

When I was 12 or 13, I convinced myself I had a brain tumor. A classmate had been diagnosed with cancer and his sepulchral appearance haunted me. The second I conjured it, my head filled with ash. A headache spread from my eyes down through my jaw and around the back of my neck. Language disappeared. I felt for lumps and found them. I was convinced the tumor was piercing my skull like weeds through concrete. I couldn't tell anyone. One Friday when I was home from school, my mother asked if I wanted to go with her to pick up my brother from school. Because it was the end of the week, she offered to stop at Roy Rogers. I stared at her, afflicted. Can I get fries? I asked, convinced I was dying. When we got in the car and pulled out of the driveway, the paranoia relented. I'd left its address.

Years later, as I sat with my classmates in the writing workshop room at Ohio State, the professor's voice darkened into double stops on a viola. I called my husband who lived two hours north in Cleveland. His voice sounded like he was in witness protection. Something is wrong with my hearing, I said. An audiologist closed me in a soundproof chamber and played various games through the headphones. I panicked when I couldn't hear anything and rejoiced when I could. A fussy student in my adult life, I worried about getting the right answers and passing the test. The audiogram showed sensorineural hearing loss in my right ear, with a drastic dip on the lower-frequency side.

My case was mild compared to others, said the ENT, a callous, yet respected man. Ruptured membranes, a frayed nerve that may or may not heal. I'm a musician, I said, even though that was a stretch. He said he'd treated members of the Cleveland Orchestra with worse problems. An MRI would rule out a brain tumor or multiple sclerosis. Brain tumor I'd already considered; it was one of the eventualities I'd paid into, like an annuity. But multiple sclerosis was fresh. Without knowing exactly what it was, I felt myself contracting it. How can you tell from an MRI? I asked. White patches, he said. Prednisone would treat the inflammation and intensify psychological disturbances, and a diuretic would shed the fluid in my ear and help me lose weight.

At night, psychosomatic parasthesias prickled my arms and hands. In the damaged space between 500 and 250 Hz, my brain placed a buzz. I clapped my head in pillows, but I was trapped with my mortal enemy, the buzz. I entered crowded rooms left ear first. My husband brought a fan into the bedroom and turned it on high. I'm going to quit school, I said. No you're not, he said.

***

Years later, in a remedial empathy class for doctors, I played the part of a woman in her thirties receiving a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. I rocked in my chair and cried. When the simulation was over, and I'd blown my nose and wiped my eyes, the doctor looked down at me through his wire-rimmed glasses. He spoke with an elegant Austrian accent. Tears are manipulative, he said.

***

I don't think of my anxiety as anxiety. The word itself contains urgency and a whiff of longing, all true to what I feel. Splendid possibility is lost. Dire possibility is found. Right answers are wrong, and wrong answers are right. The imagination swells. But for some reason, the word seems distant to me. It's flat and clinical. It's treatable. 

I am sitting at the piano for my senior recital in the dim sanctuary of a Unitarian church. I set my hands to begin Brahms' Rhapsody Opus 79 No. 2, the piece that contains everything I feel at age 17. I want to be Martha Argerich on the cover of her debut recital album, on which this piece appears. Her brow creased with brilliance, velvety dark hair, full lips I want for myself in every way. But my mind dries up. My mouth is sticky as a glue trap. I can't remember the opening notes that send the piece galloping from the bottom to the keyboard to the top. All I know is I'm setting two marmoreal hands on a new surface, a keyboard. The audience -- a handful of friends, a Catholic priest, my piano teacher, my parents and siblings -- awaits. The food I won't eat later sits on a long table in the back. Later, my father says, what the hell's the matter with you?

It's a disruption. It's of the same quality as the rest of life, but sick instead of full. I don't just check the stove. I check it to the tick of the second hand. Memory vanishes, or becomes a finger probing my mouth. I can taste its powdered latex glove. 

Anxiety feels like my body standing up for itself. Drugs have a paradoxical effect. The night I separated from my first husband, a friend gave me Xanax. I stayed awake all night, impaled by dread and exhilaration. When I lost my hearing, I was prescribed Ambien. I stayed awake all night, carrying on conversations I don't remember. I was prescribed Trazodone, which I was too scared to take. Lexapro made my hands shake so violently I couldn't type. I took a shot of whiskey before an audition and my heart thumped erratically all the way through it, as if my cardiovascular and respiratory systems were skittish dogs meeting each other for the first time. I was too scared to go under general anesthesia, so an oral surgeon gave me Valium. The opposition of my body versus the surgeon's body was more than I could bear. We can't stop now, he said. I haven't listened to Sigur Ros since.

The final time I did marijuana, I ingested pure terror. I receded from my skin and looked into the blank space between my person and my skin, an elevator closed and waiting inside a shaft. My chest turned to concrete, preparing to die. I peered out my eyeholes at what was called the world. I no longer knew its representations and meanings. My ears filled with a humming nothingness. I was a nothingness machine. I am not a person, I remember thinking. I am a thing in a sweatshirt and hat. Music is nothing to me. At the hospital, I was given Ativan to counteract the marijuana. I finally calmed down when warm blankets were heaped on me.

Now, the sun through the attic window feels good on my coiled form.   

***

When I was a kid, I didn't think of my father as afraid. I thought of him as mean and strange. He had a lot of rules and baroque punishments for breaking them. He was afraid. He was afraid of dirt and germs and death. He was afraid of gay people and black people and women. He was afraid of the police. He was afraid of outside clothes inside. He was afraid of shoes. He was afraid we'd choke to death in our sleep. He was afraid we'd suffocate. He checked doors and windows. He watched the street from the front door, one hand gripping the front of his shirt. When I asked for fashionable clothes or listened to pop music, he said, why do you want to grow up to be like everyone else? He was afraid to the point of humiliation, his and ours.