Last Quarter: Fear as the mind killer

Particularly since the release of the new Dune adaptation in 2021 (with the second installment coming this year), in some cultural spheres it can be hard for some people to resist the urge to reference the story's Litany Against Fear when saying something about anxiety or occasionally mental health challenges in general: fear is the mind killer.

I admit that although I happen to love the new movie(s) despite their commercial blockbuster trappings, and although I find the original David Lynch adaptation more off-kilter than just bad, I'm not enormously fond of Dune the book. More precisely, I find the worldbuilding absolutely incredible and would perhaps read its immediate sequel because of what I've heard about Frank Herbert violently subverting expectations with his savior protagonist — but I really can't abide his storytelling style or raw prose, and I have mixed feelings about what I've glimpsed of his gender politics. Nevertheless, I myself can't resist opening some thoughts about anxiety via the Litany Against Fear. Here is the litany's most complete and traditional rendering (there are variations):

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

I've dwelled on these words ever since I first read them as a teenager. As an adult, I've sometimes recited them to myself, aloud or in silence, as a means of focusing myself through stress, physicalized anxiety, and all-out panic. But I don't necessarily say the words because I think that they perfectly sum up what fear really is or how individuals deal with it. I halfway believe that, but the rest of me is in doubt. I recite the litany almost as a question.

Hello. It's Friday. Today I'm going to try very lengthily to answer that question, and in doing so explain a fair amount of how through personal experience I've come to grasp anxiety as a legitimate defense against preventing worst-case scenarios (from the apocalyptic to the extremely individual) but as a paralytic force against surviving lesser issues. None of my ideas here are much different than what neuropsychology would teach about one severe dilemma of having a brain — that our amygdala is a blessing for survival and a curse when we don't live in survival scenarios — but I'm focused particularly on the power and danger of various natural defense mechanisms that lie beyond the brain, creating parallel problems. As above, so below.

As this is a Last Quarter post, please expect heavy material at points. There will especially be discussion of violence, abuse, and existential terror.

Anxiety in denial

A few years ago I finally received a Generalized Anxiety Disorder diagnosis. This made complete sense by then, but a year or two earlier than that I would have felt staggered by such a concept. I was very insistent that I didn't have anxiety.

For one thing, almost anyone I knew of with an anxiety diagnosis (from a doctor or from themselves) was always explicitly clear that they had social anxiety; so I didn't know what generalized anxiety behaviors necessarily looked like in other people, or at least not with that label tacked onto them. And I didn't have social anxiety; I have rejection sensitivity regarding long-established relationships, but I've rarely gone into casual social situations in fear of how they'll turn out, or worried that random people dislike me. I'm not even afraid of public speaking.

For another thing, until relatively recently in my life, I'd always seen anxiety described (from peers, online writings, and even in Psychology 101 textbooks) as a matter of constantly rehashing past events in one's mind and blaming oneself for how they turned out. I usually don't do this. I'm capable of feeling guilt and shame for past transgressions, but I don't experience these emotions intrusively or disproportionately.

For another thing, I once believed I didn't have anxiety because I could ascribe so many of my symptoms to other causes. Of course I felt so easily stressed and unable to stop worrying about basic situations — but this was because I had reduced psychological resilience, stemming from PTSD from the partner abuse I experienced between 2007 and 2009. Of course I was worried about a lot of things — but I was living in poverty until relatively recently as well, and there was a lot of real trouble in the world, and for a while I had a job overworking me to the point of suicidal ideation, and then I was beset by activism drama and legal drama, and surely all of these things were important to worry over. Of course I had total breakdowns, physicalized behaviors like nervous stimming and occasional chest pain, and feeling dissociated — but these were from atypical (that is, circumstantially affected) depression with seasonal components, and also, as I gradually came to realize through therapy, from autism and autistic burnout.

Lastly, I think I simply didn't want to have anxiety. I grew up in a home where, especially before my parents' divorce, all neurodiversity and mental illnesses were wildly downplayed and I was a "gifted student" whose brain was therefore supposed to be extremely "good." How could I possibly fathom my brain having anything "wrong" with it? Although I was considering varous other diagnoses besides anxiety throughout my early adult life, I had arrived at even those ones reluctantly — wanting to understand why I seemed to experience the world the way that I did, but harboring a lot of embarrassment about the fact that I could have a disabling condition. Anxiety seemed like one of the most embarrassing things to have because it struck me as so silly in a way. That is, I saw it as a real condition, but in my accultured thinking at that time I essentially thought, "Well, at least if you're depressed, bipolar, autistic, traumatized, OCD, some flavor of psychotic, or similar, people will still make award-winning biopics about you and your heroic struggles," and, "If you have a personality disorder, at least everyone will be wary of you with good reason." Obviously this isn't fair to the lived realities of people with any of those conditions, myself included, but back then anxiety just seemed so bland, a poor excuse for not having your shit together, always begging the question, "So... you're just... afraid of things that aren't worth being afraid of?"

Worst of all, my most anxiety-like symptoms were (and are) the most pronounced in the immediate leadup to my period, apart from the 3.5 years I spent taking testosterone and not having periods. It galled me to no end to consider that not only could I be crazy from thinking too hard, but I could be crazy in a socially gendered way. An actual hysteric. Silly little featherbrain, worrying so much about things that have no basis in reality! What a pesky wandering womb. Your prescription is to be endless gaslighting, going on birth control, and consuming yourself with swallowed-back needs and concerns lest anyone call you a crazy bitch.

Nowadays I'm fairly certain that all prior diagnoses and discussion of PTSD[1] and autism are still accurate ways of understanding how I operate, and that I remain capable of atypical depression under the right circumstances, and that sunlight levels affect my mood and energy significantly. But I do have generalized anxiety, and I know this both because of how it is related to the other conditions and because of how it's been the biggest challenge I face on a day-to-day basis since at least 2018 (but affecting me since early childhood). It's been passed down through generations of my mother's family, whether by genetics or by upbringing. It very probably does have some interaction with my reproductive system even though that's not the only cause. Every reason I didn't think I had anxiety was a reason founded on misunderstandings and self-delusion.

I might not be afraid of social situations and various other things that worry lots of people, but there's a substantial array of things that do frighten me, usually not on the level of phobia but enough to provoke racing and obsessive thoughts, crying, interrupted breathing, tachycardia, nausea, the shits, chest pain, the occasional textbook panic attack — and I highlight 2018 as an important year because that was the year I started experiencing routine somatic (i.e. not clinically caused) pain and paresthesias that in some cases derived from living in a mold palace and oversupplementing my vitamins, but in most cases are not explainable apart from the dreaded words, "It's all in your head." I can internalize stress and fear so profoundly that it makes my nervous system go haywire. (Maybe my migraine diagnosis in 2011 should have been a tipoff, with stress being one trigger.)

I might not dwell on things that have gone wrong in the past, but I dwell on everything that could go wrong in the future. I'm a premiere catastrophizer. I worry about body parts, car parts, house parts, that could break and only be fixed through enormous time expenditure (which fries my autism circuits) and/or spending lots of money (which could be addressed if either my owner or I had truly well-paying jobs, but we still don't). I worry about all the circumstances that could lead to such breakage: minor health symptoms, disastrous weather or traffic, insufficient maintenance/upgrade work, doing that work but without professional help and getting hurt or breaking things further in the process. I worry about numerous other bad scenarios becoming the worst they could possibly be. Losing a job means never finding another one; having a disagreement with the cops or the government means they'll find a way to send you to prison; some prankster ringing the doorbell at midnight means there's a serial killer outside waiting to kill you. I specialize in an ironic bent to these concerns: it's important never to say that everything will be okay, because the instant you say that, this is exactly when everything will go cataclysmically wrong.

I have come to see this way of thinking and living as crazy. It is crazy not because anyone ought to treat me like I have no human rights for it, and not even because it's always wrong — the thing that I'll get to momentarily is that it's sometimes right — but rather because it's not sustainable. It's not likely, but vaguely possible, that it could drive me to suicide, and it's likelier to place my nervous system under the kind of strain that enables developing conditions like Alzheimer's or other dementia, as my maternal grandmother experienced and as I worry (ha) my mother soon will. It stresses the rest of my body, creating the somatic issues I mentioned already but also contributing to low-grade IBS, acid reflux, other inflammatory situations, and the long-term effects of that inflammation. It would be an even funnier layer of irony if I worried so much about getting cancer that I technically gave myself cancer.

The medical angle aside, I consider my anxiety essentially crazy because it's a deviation not from what's "normal" but from the kind of person I would like to be, the behaviors I would like to have. There is an entity haunting me that's both intrinsic to myself and external to my concept of myself. I hopefully don't harbor as much internalized bigotry about mental illness as I used to — but ideally I'd like to be someone who has some anxiety and also cannot be reductively described as anxious. I would like to know I'm able to act upon motivations besides anxiety. I would like to feel anxiety less often than I do. And though I know people shouldn't treat me badly just because I have anxiety, my anxiety can sometimes cause me to treat other people in ways that, overall, I know I shouldn't. That's just a fact.

But even when I say that my anxiety is a mode of being crazy, I don't want it to sound like a pejorative. It's a reclaimed term. It's a description. It should, ideally, be read as neutral.

Considering anxiety as a trait rather than a disorder

I started the last section saying that I had a Generalized Anxiety Disorder diagnosis. I spoke in fairly clinical terms about everything. I'm not a psych professional but I have an extra-informed layperson's understanding of the psych field through various aspects of my education and life experience. I find psychological/psychiatric diagnoses can, on good days, be meaningful attempts to categorize different types of thought/behavior patterns for the sake of analyzing them and, if they're causing distress to the person who has them or they're genuinely harming other people, thus trying to change them. You will never hear me argue that a psych diagnosis is something inherently bad or punishing.

But I also don't see a psych diagnosis as inherently liberating, either; all too often, it leads to other people treating the diagnosed person poorly, like this person is an absolute baby, as soon as they know the diagnosis exists. Sometimes the diagnosed person also takes the diagnosis so much to heart that they let this serve as carte blanche to do anything they like even when it causes harm — or in less severe but still troubling cases, they develop (or more deeply ingrain) a sense of fatalism, e.g. that they will never amount to anything or feel happiness or be able to create useful coping mechanisms for what they experience. Of course, if someone outside yourself really is always kicking you when you're down, it can be almost impossible to find the breathing room necessary for doing anything proactive, finding any kind of inner strength. But if you frame a diagnosis negatively, it's hard not to think pessimistically about your prospects — and assume you're about to be punished even if you won't be, which I'll get to in the next section.

I've had many moments of deep suffering where I'm caught up in this problem. Less often these days, but until maybe six months ago I was just as likely to have a meltdown about the fact that something was activating my anxiety as I was to have a meltodwn about the thing actually worrying me. I would deep dive into a spiral of shame and self-loathing. Having learned to recognize that my fears derived from anxiety and weren't always "rational," I would (and sometimes still do) scream at myself internally: how dare I still have this problem? I'm going to ruin my life and all my relationships, especially the most important ones! I'm going to send myself into a fucking institution or an early grave! My family's mental health issues and generational trauma are a literal fucking curse!

I suspect this is a familiar path for many fellow catastrophizers. Even once you know you're catastrophizing, it's just so easy to catastrophize that.

With a lot of reflection and a lot of help from my therapist, my owner, and a few other loved ones, I'm finally reaching a point where I recognize anxiety's fundamental neutrality. I shouldn't feel absolute shame about this trait. It's a tool for my brain to solve situations, many of which do need solving.

Because I think about a lot of potential problems before they happen, I do often safeguard against them when the requisite time/money/resources/people are available, and that's helped me when those problems actually arise. Because I consider negative outcomes to many situations, when those outcomes occur I don't deal with the same emotional crash that I would if I really got my hopes up (and when I get my hopes up, they go very up). Among many people I don't think I actually have a reputation as being an "anxious wreck." I'm seen as reliable and responsible. I'm often tapped for diplomatic roles because I anticipate reasons why someone else might be worried and I have a solution/reassurance already prepared. This comes from the exact same part of my consciousness as the craziness does: I'm a planner, preparer, guardian, defender.

That's just in everyday life. Then there are raw survival scenarios, and I don't necessarily mean the kind under whose direct threat our species evolved; I live somewhere that has bears and a couple other animals that could kill me, but it's still vanishingly unlikely that I'm going to die specifically from being eaten, mauled, or envenomed. But I do mean all the ways in which Western capitalist society is, at its core, quite tenuous. All the civilizational hubris imaginable is no defense against what could and does happen to human infrastructure, health, and safety when a natural disaster descends or a war breaks out. There is especially no way to optimism your way through things that are still hypotheticals but apocalyptically significant ones, such as the eco crisis maybe permanently destroying certain food sources or rendering major population centers uninhabitable, and likewise the recently-flared-up-but-never-really-absent risk of nuclear annihilation or collapse[2]. Realistically speaking, even if neither I nor you nor anyone else ever faces all, or any, of such threats, it's not exaggerating to say that if we did, many of us would go into it without useful emergency supplies, adequate food, or means to help our neighbors and friends in worse situations. Most people would really not benefit from stocking gas masks in their homes (I have no intention to), but despite the fact that it's expensive under capitalism to actually be prepared for collapse, I at least consider it reasonable to want a pantry stocked with several weeks of nonperishables, a means of preparing and eating them, other tools for operating off the grid for entirely unglamorous reasons, and having enough of these things to be able to share them through solidarity networks.

Besides this left-wing prepper logic, anxiety is also a useful survival mechanism for those of us who actually do face routine, individually customized threats even when our society is working the way it's "supposed" to (often because it's working that way). Anxiety about certain things may have, and sometimes definitely has, helped me avoid situations where I might have been assaulted, exploited, scammed, or subjected to a worse version of what I was already experiencing with those things. I wouldn't deserve these things happening to me if I hadn't deliberately avoided them, but in terms of pure cause and effect, I'm glad that sometimes I've followed my gut because, well, now I at least have a few less traumatic experiences under my belt. The types of threats I face are modulated by factors unique to myself, as well as by systemic considerations like how I can be classified as working class, female-perceived, queer, trans/nonbinary/genderfluid, autistic, and other labels I'd exhaust myself by listing (and by how on the flip side I'm white-privileged, a US citizen, and born at least halfway into generational wealth). But I'm sure that anyone with a different personal or demographic profile might feel a similar relief at how many situations where their anxiety has saved them.

In preparing to write this piece, I originally considered differentiating between anxiety vs. risk-awareness. I've decided however that I really do see them as the same thing. If there is any "disorder" in my generalized anxiety, it's not the anxiety part, but the generalized part, and the sheer extremity. It's about the amygdala doing its job too well. It's about letting the anxiety do more than it needs to, and not letting other traits take command for a little while.

From anxiety to hypervigilance

Hypervigilance is what I will differentiate. To me, someone reaches hypervigilance when anxiety has escalated to catastrophizing thoughts and now runs amock — when the body-mind is in a semi-permanent state of tension, not necessarily about everything but certainly about one or more of the things that have already been classified as threats. The longer this tension lasts, the harder it becomes to tell fear from reality. Now there are not only chances that something will go wrong, but rather something seems to be going wrong in real time even when it genuinely isn't.

The fear of falling sick becomes the belief that one is sick. The fear of a gas leak becomes the belief that there is a leak. The fear of a car turning unsafe to drive becomes the belief that it already is unsafe to drive. The fear of someone rejecting you becomes the belief that they're on the verge of doing so. The fear of someone violating your consent becomes the belief that they intend to. The fear of extreme weather becomes the belief that any forecasted precipitation or wind is going to be worse than expected and cause destruction to yourself or your property. The fear of the pandemic getting worse becomes the belief that it will literally never end. The fear of being dogpiled and doxxed online means posting whatever you know your peers will support, and nothing that might bother them. The fear of being sent to concentration camps or getting executed en masse by the state (because of your demographics or your beliefs) becomes the belief that every footstep deeper into fascism means you're already about to be disappeared in a matter of weeks, not years.

I haven't gone through all of these delusions, but in my own phases of hypervigilance I've gone through most of them, and I've known dozens of other people who have gone through the others. From what I can tell, hypervigilance may spring from "natural" anxiety itself; I've grown hypervigilant about certain things for as long as I can remember. In plenty of cases, though, hypervigilance seems inculcated by external stimuli, largely by what people refer to as trauma, whether in a strict clinical sense or as something broader — any experience that felt so bad as it was happening, your reaction now is that you never want to go through that again. You (and I) aren't simply afraid of what you know, amorphously, could go wrong. You can imagine it very concretely. This may include situations that haven't happened to you in person, but that your family has told you about, or that you've witnessed and felt traumatized by proxy.[3] And it may include things that someone threatened to do to you, even if they didn't go through with it. The impact of an abuser can come as much from brandishing a fist as from them actually throwing a punch.

And as for abusers, I can think of few more aggressive examples of how to engender hypervigilance than through abuse. When trauma happens repeatedly from the same person(s), over and over, the survival tactic of anxiety isn't enough. There is no time to breathe through your thought of what might happen and focus on what better alternatives there are. The pain and suffering and misery are all happening, constantly, for what might as well be eternity. The boot stamping on the human face forever, in Orwell's words. There is no alternative, in Thatcher's.

And then the generational, interpersonal, cascading cycle sets in.

Abuse doesn't automatically beget abusers, nor are all abusers forged from abusive circumstances. But when that begetting does happen — and it happens more often than most of us are comfortable addressing — I'm convinced it happens specifically because of people learning hypervigilance through the person(s) who abused them. People being so totally victimized learn fear as a default state instead of trust. Therefore, they can't trust anyone or anything else. They develop a need for control, to the point that they're willing to override other people's agency. In some parts of my life, I have gone through this very same process, or at least perilously close, and even in covert forms it's ugly and repugnant and I despise it. And am working on it. Nobody has ever accused me of abuse, but I don't ever want to give them a reason.

Abuse begetting abuse does not guarantee that the new abuser's behavior will exactly match the way their own abuser acted toward them. The real point is that trust and faith have been eroded in the new abuser. They believe themselves to be all alone.

This leads to a painfully uncomfortable truth, which is that although it's vital to protect our communities from people who exhibit coercive or otherwise dangerous behaviors by keeping those people as far away as possible until they show accountability — unfortunately, in the cases where their behavior stems from feeling like everybody only wants to hurt/deny them and that they must master their own destinies alone, then casting these people out altogether may only confirm their deepest fears. This may happen with people who are tremendously disadvantaged in ways that I and fellow leftists may be accustomed to acknowledging, but it may also happen in many of the ways we see phenomena like patriarchy and white supremacism perpetuating themselves. Lonely, fragile, violently desperate white men hurt each other and maintain the cycle of seizing control over other demographics, with mirrored versions happening among other groups.

I have come to believe that humans cannot and must not turn the other cheek to violations being visited upon them — we must establish our boundaries and maintain them at all costs — but also that we must, must, must learn how to recognize and properly respond when someone is lashing out from hypervigilance.

We must learn this both to end harmful institutions like the prison system and instead adopt restorative justice, but also more pragmatically because failing to do otherwise is how "the left eats itself" as the saying goes, and because we all risk becoming hypervigilant if we insist on perpetuating an endless push-pull of "this person is going to betray me, but not if I take control of them first."

I don't have easy answers yet about exactly how to stop someone from mistreating others out of a hypervigilant behavior pattern. But I know that we must at least start from recognizing that not all capital-A Abusers can be handled identically in the first place. This is not because intent is magic (intent isn't magical! the cry began online well over a decade ago); the consequences of someone's behavior are worth guarding against even if you know they don't mean to hurt you at all. Rather, if someone is abusing others out of a learned tendency that this is necessary for their survival, I think they'll never make themselves accountable if their motives are never acknowledged or treated with compassion.

Maybe you're a particular flavor of male leftist who's burnt out on women (and people of other genders, including other men) hyperbolically but regularly castigating your very existence online; I'd go so far as to agree with you that they shouldn't shove you away at first sight, but I'd also say you won't convince them to treat you more kindly if you react the same way that every man they're complaining about reacts. Punishing someone for their fear will only further them that they're correct to be afraid. Conversely, I often want to urge people exhausted by patriarchy that even for those of us who are most violently victimized by it, and even though "allies" are a misleading and untrustworthy concept, let's please remember that there are gradations to the mistreatment we experience. Microaggressions, for lack of a better term, do add up — but someone whose systemically ingrained misogyny exclusively deals in microaggressions is still not worth reacting to the same way as someone like Andrew Tate who has both vocally advocated for raping women and is now known to be a sex trafficker. Even a man who has a bad habit of subtly controlling behavior in his relationships is not on the same level as Andrew Tate.

Some people do not deserve compassion. They want you to trust them while they do whatever they want to you. Other people do deserve compassion even when you don't personally have the emotional capacity to extend it; someone in the community should. It is very hard to learn how to maintain boundaries when being vulnerable is too risky, and make ourselves vulnerable when maintaining boundaries would just perpetuate damage.

But we must learn. All human connections work in more than one direction and must be sustained by all participants. Along with everything I've just urged, I believe of course that a hypervigilant person who wants to be trusted by others must also extend a baseline trust toward them. Radical love, trust, and faith don't require giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, but they do require consciously deciding that certain mistakes and grievances can be worked out and are worth working out. When we choose to do that work together, instead of retreating to our separate caves, we won't proceed perfectly but we will at least be a little closer to achieving real societal justice, through balance.

Immune systems

On a systemic, emergent scale, what happens when the balance is thrown off — when too many individuals learn to defensively attack?

An analogy I come back to a lot these days is an overactive immune system, with two examples. The first is the cytokine storm. This phenomenon is most likely why so many young and "perfectly healthy"[4] people died in the 1918 flu pandemic, although medical professionals weren't really aware at the time: patients' immune cells known as cytokines, which are normally supposed to be released as part of standard immune response, were being released too effectively, too much, leading patients' bodies to basically destroy themselves, either through furthering sepsis or through sheer inflammation damaging vital bodily systems and straining them to the breaking point. You may already be aware of this aspect of the 1918 flu, and also that cytokine storms are an aspect of why certain "perfectly healthy" covid patients die, as well as why long covid cases develop most often from severe covid infections. I can only imagine cytokine storms also playing a role in the other diseases that commonly lead to ME/CFS and similar.

Speaking of which — the second example for my immune analogy, autoimmune conditions. Autoimmune conditions arise, crudely speaking, when certain pieces of the immune system attack certain parts of the body that they have no real business attacking. As far as I'm aware, some autoimmune conditions are fostered by severe illness, which is why people who develop ME/CFS and long covid often also develop autoimmune comorbidities; and in turn, autoimmune conditions can increase the risk of experiencing illness more severely, as the immune system is already running itself ragged with antibodies perceiving fake problems. However, autoimmune conditions also exist separately from acute illnesses, inherited genetically or developed through external stimuli; autoimmune diagnoses are on the rise these days, possibly from problems like PFAS contamination creating more inflammatory baselines in our bodies, and also definitely from sources like air pollution or more localized environmental failings. Take my owner's own case of Hashimoto's thyroiditis — he inherited it from family, but they probably originally developed it from living downwind of fallout from the US nuclear testing program.

But whatever the cause, just like with cytokine storms, when you're dealing with an autoimmune condition, you're dealing with hypervigilance in your body's actual cells. This is the complete opposite from being immunocompromised, but ironically it can have the same long-term health outcomes, and sometimes treating an autoimmune condition means willingly becoming immunocompromised. In medicine as much as in community-building, the trick lies in people discerning how much vulnerability to encourage without destroying all defenses completely.

Earlier I mentioned living somewhere with a serious mold problem, and its neuropsych effects. My heightened anxiety came directly from my mold allergy: my overactive immune system fueled some autoimmune inflammation that had been initiated by a gastrointestinal illness several months before moving into the building. With the inflammation, despite certain immune cells working hard and me at least successfully treating some of the stomach bug's specific effects, I got sick with respiratory illnesses more often than I can remember in my whole adult life, and my other bodily systems were all dialed up, spiraling my sympathetic nervous response (i.e. agitating me in all respects, including emotional). So I wasn't just extra-anxious because of being sick more often and worrying about being sick — my brain was primed to glom on to all kinds of other things to be afraid of that had nothing to do with sickness at all. I was cytokine-storming not in the sense of real immune response but on a psychological level.

Around the same time that I moved into mold land, the 2018 UN climate report came out that forecasted virtual apocalypse on humanity's current trajectory. I can barely remember being so depressed and paranoid and fucked up in the months that followed. More than a year later, following a multi-week bout with the most intense and frequent panic attacks of my whole life, I finally started to know what environmental situaton I was dealing with in my own residence and recognize how I was going crazier and crazier, I got a new air purifier, a new therapist, and planned to maximize time outside the house, ideally with other humans, to improve my sense of a real social support system. I made progress with this for a few months, and then it was March 2020.

Fearing what fear will do to me, to other people, to the planet

As I've written about here before, so as I'll try not to dwell on too heavily now, when the pandemic hit I think this was a disaster not just for public health but for global social health and for fighting the eco crisis. I'm certainly biased by how I was personally impacted by lockdown measures: knowing exactly what I needed to improve my anxiety, i.e. being anywhere besides "home" and making an effort to deliberately cultivate friendships, I took the lockdowns like a slap in the face, even though I willingly abided by them because I grasped why they were necessary (and I remain at least moderately covid-cautious now). But I also fervently believe, even taking my own experience out of the equation, that the pandemic has had the following seriously concerning effects:

1. Though by necessity, the pandemic has kept people even more online and dependent on communicating through shared outrage instead of shared experience and community-building.
2. Some people's resentment over lockdowns has become a catalyst for right-wing radicalization, which the left is now even less able to counter, due to both the right's growth and the left metaphorically cytokine-storming.
3. Although the pandemic presents its own existential thread to humanity insofar as if the right covid variant were to emerge, it could kill us all, this is still less of a currently guaranteed form of apocalypse than the eco crisis. We can certainly fight both things at once, but largely there's been a discursive gap between how the eco crisis was presented in Western media and social energy right after the 2018 UN climate report, versus how now this is somehow a background problem to the pandemic for many people. The pandemic was created by the eco crisis, quite frankly, as deforestation raises the risk of zoonotic disease. Even if we can defeat the pandemic in another year or two, it will be a hollow victory compared to the bigger picture.
4. The more that the left burns itself out with cytokine-storming, the less energy we have to fight the true threat, and the less things we have left to even fight for.

Those of us caring about matters of human rights, consent, and justice must stop the cytokine storm. If we must be anxious and afraid of something, let it be for what can hurt us most. What can obliterate us.

Choosing trust & faith

So is fear really the mind-killer? Is it really worth treating it as if it brings total obliteration?

Considering everything I've just written, maybe it is. But this would beg the question of why follow the rest of the Litany Against Fear: why face one's fear? Why allow ourselves to experience fear if it's bad for us?

Here is the answer, I think: that if we never acknowledge the fears we harbor, we can't acknowledge the fears in others. We will stay caught fighting our own demons without garnering any strength to feel compassion for anyone else. To reference a different piece of media altogether, you'll never get rid of the Babadook, and if you try to ignore it, that will only make it take hold of you all the harder.

When I feel afraid now, I don't tell myself that fear is just a feeling, I don't diminish it. I take the risk of feeling it for a little while. When I'm done, "only I will remain" insofar as my fear belongs to me, is part of me, but is not the sum total of me. "I" am only how I choose to define it. The void left behind by the fear is a void open to being occupied by other feelings, other behaviors. I am a person who experiences anxiety, and it's fair for me to expect some accommodations and compassion for this, but the choice is always in my hands to remember that in addition to being such a person, I'm a person who can also experience trust and faith.

I want to caution that such a mindset isn't about choosing "the power of positive thinking" or "manifesting." I still can't, and never will, be able to function with the perspective that all things in the universe will turn out well. This is more about the surprising existentialism of the classic Serenity Prayer, which I've adapted into a less Christian format:

May I discover the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. May I discover the courage to change the things I can. May I discover the wisdom to know the difference.

Part of achieving that wisdom comes, I think, from learning how many things I can't change are things that other people can change, and will. Many people are good, and they won't let me down. As already discussed, the deepest blunder on the pipeline from anxiety to hypervigilance is to imagine being alone when one is not alone. I am increasingly trying to remind myself I'm not alone — beyond other people also experiencing anxiety, I quite literally have other people beside me in my life. I have people who love me. They will help if something goes wrong. I have to believe in that.

Believing in that, it's even more right to face my fear and let it pass over me because as it passes, I will become immune to its control.

I will learn to recognize it as distinct from clear thoughts and intuitions that arise from bringing all my emotions and all my support systems together.

I will remain, and if more of us do this in tandem, we will remain.

And we will survive.

[1] Strictly speaking, with all the time that's past and the revelations of multiple trauma incidents in my life besides my partner abuse, my therapist and I are in agreement that I don't have PTSD so much as C-PTSD, the Complex variety.

[2] I don't think nuclear war is absolutely around the corner with the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. I do think, however, it's gradually forcing more people to reckon with the fact that nuclear weapons give their possessors free rein to steamroll over non-nuclear opponents, as the United States has been doing for close to 80 years — and that this free rein stems directly from how categorically world-destroying enough nuclear warheads not only "can" be, but are. For that matter, with the Russian attacks on Ukrainian nuclear power plants like Chernobyl (offline of course but still containing massively dangerous amounts of radiation) and Zaporizhzhia (active), there's a hard lesson to be learned about the dream of environmentally friendly nuclear power: even if you can address how to ethically and sustainably dispose of radioactive waste, perhaps with the latest fusion technology that's about to be developed over the next several decades, nuclear power is only safe for its immediate environment in proportion to its sociopolitical context. Anyway, after the first week of Russia's 2022 escalation, though I felt like it was 1962 I ordered my household some iodine tablets. I'm not letting my anxiety assume nuclear war will happen, but I'm letting it make an appropriate, low-cost, bare-minimum preparation for if it did.

[3] Almost ten years ago I watched a political comrade beaten up and arrested by several cops. He was white. I don't think he received any life-threatening injuries, but in the moment it was a primal struggle for him and it was clear that the entire trajectory of the rest of his life was being altered in those precious minutes. I guarantee you that even if you haven't grown up with the constant threat of police brutality extended toward you in particular, your relation to cops will not feel the same once you've seen them hurt someone you care about. I already hated them by then but now I dread them in whatever instance that the traits offering protection against them go ignored.

[4] All health is relative so I feel like I should use quotes here.

This was my longest post yet, I think, so I will keep this closing tag very brief: thank you for reading. Here I've established another core principle of Salt for the Eclipse, and although there will be at least several more weeks of principles, I can't emphasize enough how important this one is. Next week: the subject of ordeal. The week after: a post for paid subscribers only, on the subject of the holiday often called Imbolc.