Feeling Disconnected in a Wired World
by Cindy Moy
When I was saving money for graduate school I worked part-time as a receptionist at an apartment building for elderly people. My job was to sit at the main desk in the lobby and answer the telephone or direct guests to the elevator. This was not a difficult job so I spent most of my time chatting with the residents, whom I grew to love as though they were my own grandparents.
There was Bill, whose wife passed away the weekend before they were supposed to move into the apartment. Bill was very lonely, so we would sit in the lobby and play cards and he would tell me about his wife. One day Bill didn’t have time for cards and seemed much happier. I asked him about the change.
He excitedly told me about a telephone number that lonely men could call to talk to women. I didn’t want to be the one to break it to Bill that those calls would show up on his next phone bill at $3 a minute. A few weeks later, Bill was sad again. His children had told him to stop calling those numbers. We went back to cards and stories about his wife.
There was GeriAnne, who was a bride at 20 and a pregnant widow at 21. She told me how she took the small inheritance she received from her husband and bought a house big enough for her and her baby, her parents, and her younger brother. Then she found a job as a secretary and supported all of them financially while her parents helped her raise her child.
“How did you get through it?” I asked. GeriAnne was indefatigably optimistic.
“I was just so happy that I had that wonderful year with my husband. Not everybody gets something that special,” she said.
GeriAnne’s brother, Tom, used to visit her. Tom was a pilot in WW2. He was shot down while flying a mission over Germany and had to eject from his plane. While he was parachuting to earth he somehow ended up in the direct path of his plummeting airplane.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Started to laugh. I figured God must have a sense of humor.” Tom was captured when he landed and spent a year as a POW. "I was one of the lucky ones. I came home.”
Then there were the Hot Toddies, a group of elderly women who used to gather every Saturday night in Louise's condo for their own private cocktail hour. After several rounds of hot toddies, the ladies would gather in the lobby and tell me bawdy stories about stealing kisses from boys after church and tricks they played on mean in-laws, and how they were annoying their children for sport. (They told me other stories, too, but I dare not repeat them.)
“When we get old, let’s all live in the same building and drink hot toddies,” I tell my friends. I don’t know how to make hot toddies but I’ll learn by then.
I learned a lot about life from those wonderful folks and it was the time I spent with them that led me to ask stories of my grandmothers while they were still living.
Everyone has a story to tell and I fear that we’re losing too many real-life stories while distracted by fictional ones on screens small and large. Today I challenge you to share a story about your life with someone or ask someone to share a story about their life with you. Reach out for that connection. That’s how we get to know one another and go from strangers to friends.
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When Anxiety Says No, Say Yes
By Cynthia Cloutier
I wake up every day terrified of something. Whether I’ll meet that day’s work deadline. Whether the last thing I wrote was crap. Hell, I worry about getting the girls to school on time.
You’d think that since I’ve never missed a deadline and never been fired by a client and consistently arrive at school so painfully early that we have to cool our heels in the parking lot so I don’t have to pay extra for before care – you’d think that I’d get over these worries. But history of success is no match for my brain’s ability to envision the worst case scenario.
This is what it’s like to live with anxiety disorder.
I used to crave a day when I would wake up calm and reasonable – what I imagine life is like for people who seem to ease through their days unscathed by worry and fear. But I’ve given up hope of that.
I’ve accepted that anxiety will by my constant companion, my fellow traveler through life. And so I manage it like one might manage diabetes.
With medications, yes, but since the only real “cure” would be to mainline benzos or smoke a ton of weed, I manage my anxiety mostly with thought control.
Over the past two years, since a nervous breakdown left me unable to shower on the regular, what I’ve learned to do is the opposite of what my brain tells me.
Now, if my brain tells me to stay under the covers, to not bathe, to eat Eggos and chips for breakfast instead of real food, here’s what I do instead: I force myself to get up, to make the bed, to wash myself, to fry an egg.
And if my brain tells me to stay timid, to not raise my voice, to give up at freelancing and seek a day job that would be much easier on my nerves than this constant hustle, then I send out more pitches, reach out to more contacts, dive into new projects.
Because to hunker down is to die.
At one point, that death could have been quite literal, as suicidal ideation was my mind’s favorite hobby.
Today, giving in to worry would represent more of a figurative death: Death by letting anxiety keep me from living a bold life.
And in 2017, my goal is to live the boldest life possible.
So I’ve been doing the opposite.
Just this week, fate-like, a friend from twenty years past reached out to me with an offer to fill in for a drop-out on her Grand Canyon rafting trip at the end of March. A trip that will end with me hiking ten miles out of the Canyon with a mile gain in elevation.
I’m not a hiker, not a wilderness camper, and I’ve never rafted. I can’t tie knots, I don’t cook, and I cannot overstate how out of shape I am.
“Irregular yoga” would describe my exercise routine for the past year. As in, sometimes when my back hurts from writing all day at the computer, I’ll do child’s pose on the mat behind my desk for like thirty seconds.
I said yes.
I mean, I have a tattoo on my wrist that tells me to do just that: Say yes. To do things even though they terrify me, even though I absolutely hate doing things I’m not good at, hate the thought of letting people in a group down, cried through a humiliating ski trip years ago with experienced skiers, broke my foot getting out of the bathtub, and passed out at Universal Studios and spent the rest of that vacation in the Disney World hospital recovering from heat stroke.
I said yes. Even though I spend my days anxiety-ridden about the smallest of small stuff, even though I battle imposter syndrome on the daily, even though I don’t particularly like being wet and/or cold, even though I make a thousand decisions every week simply to stay sane.
Because I will not let anxiety defeat me. I will do the things that scare me – the big things and the little things. And I will no doubt wake up the next day still terrified of something, and I will do it all over again.