what do you want to do now?
I was cliff jumping on the coast of France in May when I cut myself in the side of the nose with my thumbnail. I was holding it tightly to keep from inhaling the Mediterranean Sea, and the force of hitting the water made me break my own skin.
I was hurtling my body through the air between sharp rocks, but I hurt myself with my own nail.
It was a metaphor for the weeks leading up to that moment; weeks spent traveling in Europe that were trying to be bohemian. Trying, because I donāt do bohemian. I do train schedules. I do deadlines. I do plans. Before I can fall asleep every night, I schedule out the next day, everything that has to happen and when Iām going to do it. I clench my fists so hard around the parts of my world I can control that sometimes I hurt myself.
The first time we took the train on this trip, I didnāt fill out the eurail pass right. It was confusing and I wasnāt really sure how it worked and I figured as long as I had the piece of paper it was probably fine. The man checking the tickets woke me up from a doze and spent five minutes scolding me for not using it correctly, standing over me while I fumbled a pen out of my bag and scribbled dates and train stations on the ticket, lecturing me about how it was invalid if I didnāt fill it out. He walked away and I leaned my forehead against the window and cried. I planned so hard. I tried to anticipate everything. But all it took was a stranger in a bad mood to make me feel like a lazy idiot. I cared so much about following the rules that learning I had broken one was crushing.
Iāve also been known to walk away from cafes and restaurants if I didnāt know how to read the menu or what to order. The idea of looking stupid, being seen as a stupid tourist, enduring the mild contempt of someone more adept than me, is too much. I feel too exposed. (I donāt know if I will ever be the sort of person who eagerly seeks honest criticism from friends because I canāt seem to take it even from people I will never see again.)
Iām afraid to order food, to blunder through a conversation with a non-English speaker. But when people at the hostels where we stayed asked what I do for a living, I said āI just finished law schoolā and they said āoh, youāre a lawyer?ā and I didnāt feel like explaining what an articling student is so I just said yes. Yes, basically. I am a grown-ass professional whoās scared to order food in case she looks stupid.
My sister asked me when the anxiety got so bad. I told her that the best guess I have is that it got bad when I told myself fear was irrational and it turned out not to be. When the bad things I was scared of came true. I told her it got bad when I lost the ability to tell between healthy fear and pointless paranoia. When the pillars that held up my lifeāfaith, family, friendship, romanceāall shifted or cracked or collapsed in ways Iād told myself they never would. All in the same 12 months, each loss like another punch to the gut as I tried to write papers about the criteria for refugee status or research the number of human rights complaints based on race discrimination. The anxiety got bad when the world warped so that every passing blip of far-fetched, ugly possibility, every remote danger, started to seem likely and probable. It got bad because I lost the conviction that good things are more likely to happen than bad ones. It got bad when I started to worry that every scowl disguised rage, every neutral expression barely concealed contempt, and I had no reason to think I was wrong. After all, I was doubting whether the people whoād said they cared about me the most ever had or now did, so why would I have assumed that strangers harboured goodwill toward me?
During the worst times, moments of unexpected fortune or kindness took me out at the knees. During the worst times, I answered a phone call and it was a dream job offer and I collapsed in tears on the kitchen floor. Once it was so bad that the four walls of a bare new apartment bedroom felt suffocating and I stumbled out the door and clung by my fingernails to a bar counter and ate sweet potato fries and drank beer until my thoughts were just muddled enough that they had fewer sharp edges. Once I sat on the grass outside the law school and heaved, shaking with fear and confusion. During those episodes, the kindness of people who talked me through it made me tear up. Who? Why? What have I ever done that anyone would bother telling me patiently to breathe, would say to me earnestly to call if I ever need to talk? It seemed absurdāwhy would anything be there to catch me if I fell?
We spent our last day in France on the beach in Nice. I waded out into the ocean, cautiously, up to my shoulders, just past where I could touch, then rolled onto my back and floated. Iām not a strong swimmer; usually I would rather dip a toe in and retreat. But my ears were under the surface and the only sound was tiny rocks hitting against each other on the ocean floor as the waves crashed in and rolled out. I paddled a little, and then less, and then let my limbs go limp, cradled in the swell of the Mediterranean and floating, held up by salt water. Held up, surprisingly, instead of falling; a leaf on the surface, not a rock.Ā I wondered, then, if I could still recalibrate myself: if it was still possible to go back to waking up in the morning expecting good things.Ā
I expected to arrive back home and meet the world with fists clenched even tighter. But instead, I watched myself shrug it all off and get lighter. I had turned off notifications on my phone while we were in Europe, ad I kept them off. The lack of homework stress, something I hadnāt felt for three years, was like shedding a fifty-pound backpack. I started a new job, the kind of job that makes you look forward to waking up in the morning. I got to relearn what it was like to have enough time to spend some of it empty--to spend some of it wandering along the river with a coffee, to listen to podcasts and color, to read.Ā
I spend some sunny Sunday mornings doing nothing in particular but drinking tea and eating toast, slowly. I say more nice things to myself. Itās like somewhere in Europe I picked up a kind shadow who lingers a step behind my frantic thoughts and occasionally says oh, honey, you donāt need to worry about that. Itās like somewhere along the line, I leveled up, and my access to reality came back. My ability to know my own mind returned. Now, when Iām frantically putting on and wiping off seven kinds of lipstick, I know itās mostly my desire to be loved freaking out, and I put the makeup down and tell myself no one is going to change their mind about me based on magenta vs pumpkin. Now when I feel my heart rate increase and my breaths get shallow, I know the version of reality thatās swimming in front of me isnāt the right one, and I look for somewhere to sit down instead of speeding up to match the frantic pace of my thoughts.
I learned that the best way to dampen the panic inside my own head is to say, you feel very anxious right now, do you need a minute? so that the rest of me can breathe a long sigh and do the mental version of lie back into the Mediterranean. I know that the world isnāt actually falling apart. Itās just that Iām hungry or thirsty or my feet hurt or something someone said hurt a little or I saw myself in the mirror at the wrong angle or I just need to make a quick list. Lists will save us all.Ā
I remembered how to answer the question what do you want to do now? not by thinking--how can I be most productive, what sector of my own life can I invest in, what needs to be done first, what will I regret not doing later, help itās been an hour and Iām paralyzed--but by reminding myself that there is no wrong answer, and that I am okay.
Last summer I was not okay. Last summer was a rusty, jerky, stomach-turning roller coaster, and I clenched my teeth and my fists the whole time. I got speeding tickets--I got fixated on being skinny--I began to slowly realize that my home didnāt feel like home and that my addiction to anonymity in coffee shops was more a fear of opening my own front door than a love for hot beverages. Last summer I couldnāt read or play the piano or watch Netflix because the seconds ticked by audibly in my head and the neon panic signs were always reminding me I was flawed, I wasnāt enough, I was too far behind. I was bad--a bad friend, a bad student, a bad employee, a bad example. I was always working to fix small problems that I perceived as life-threatening. Always crying that I forgot to buy lemon juice or I lost an earring back. Flinching when someone else glanced my direction.Ā
It was worst when I was briefly couch-surfing in October, between apartments, losing a friendship and a social circle and yet another sad silver-glass vision of what I thought I wanted life to look like. Even the silence was terrible, and I was so afraid that the rest of my life would hurt as much as each passing moment did.Ā
But now there are two IKEA chairs in my living room, and an exposed brick wall, and two big windows. I sit there with coffee in the mornings and marvel that improbably, surprisingly, life slowly got better. It helps to be loved. It helped when my sister wisely walked around in silence with me in a residential Venetian neighborhood for an hour and a half because she knew the anxiety wasnāt about her. It helped when a friend texted me on Christmas to tell me how glad she was to know me. The wordsĀ āIām sorryā andĀ āI love youā andĀ āIām proud of youā helped too.
But the thing Iām most grateful for is that now when my instinct tells meĀ āyouāre a failureā, the nice summer sun shadow, the wiser version of me, wrinkles her nose and saysĀ āwell, probably not.ā













