The Geology of Happiness and Anxiety

I love Melissa Broder’s writing, and I’m reading her new novel, Death Valley. Her narrator thinks, “Maybe because I feel good, I give myself a doom check, and of course the moment I do this, I don’t feel good anymore. A surge of fear moves through me, and I feel my chest tighten up, heavy and tight at once, like I’m wearing a bra of lead.” (11) There’s another quote I can’t find that says something like, “I’m basically afraid all the time.”

And I related to that, because anxiety. And the specific anxiety is not so much that a bad thing might happen, but that I will cause the bad thing that will leave other people angry at me, displeased with me. If I meet you for the first time, I am afraid. I am afraid of you being angry. If I hear from you, maybe it’s because you’re secretly upset at me, which also I worry about if I don’t hear from you. It’s so irrational, but that’s my interior landscape.

This, as far as I understand it, is the itch of anxious attachment. It’s not great, but it’s here. (I know, I should do yoga. I do yoga! I meditate! I pray! Meds, therapy, all the things). Really, the best thing for me is to not worry about the anxiety, to just do something else to distract myself, or to catch myself and say, Really? But basically not to get lost in it. I think I might write so much because it’s one of the only times I get relief from that nattering.

That nattering isn’t a character flaw. It just is.

In situations I now understand to have been abusive, my moments of joy and accomplishments flared a temper, irritated and provoked a fight or more insidiously, a personal attack. In one case, an opportunity that I took led to a fight in which a then-boyfriend, while driving across Canada with me in the passenger seat, punched and shattered the windshield, because he wanted it to be him that got that opportunity.

I didn’t stay with that person, but for a long time I was in a more troubling situation where my then-partner told me repeatedly that I was lucky, ungrateful, that I didn’t deserve what I had. Weirdly, my then-partner was on a tear the very night that I got a voicemail from University of Nebraska Press telling me they wanted my first book. I listened to the voicemail at a pause, and what I did with that astounding joy was to immediately put it in a silo where it descended down to an underground bunker. Strangely, or not, this moment was paired with another: the day, years later, when the box filled with copies of my first book arrived at our home. I wanted to go out to dinner to celebrate, but instead what happened was an awful and ruinous fight. In both cases, the thing that was clear was that my joy was dangerous.

 I will say, sometimes, as shorthand, that it’s hard for me to feel happiness. Or I say, “I’m codependent.” But those labels are also taking a lot onto myself, with the grammar adding up to my owning these traits as if I chose them or have decided to cling to them. Geology, internal or external, comes from somewhere. I didn’t just sign up for Fear of the Week Club.

And I love geology like I love facts about the present and past natural world in general. I was delving deeply into geologic maps and explanations of plate tectonics to trace the way the landscape where I live in Connecticut is striped with a series of old collisions. There was a proto-continent, the Canadian shelf, that was eventually over millions of years splatted with a collapsed ocean, another mini-continent made of a string of volcanoes, more Ioptus Ocean bed, and then a chunk of stuff that came later. The smashing ribboned this place, forming Pangea, and then later Pangea pulled apart and there was lava and quite a mess, then another continent later and all the glaciers and all the draining and silt, which made four terranes, or chunks of earth, in rough stripes:

That middle yellow bit is where PANGEA OPENED UP and a bunch of lava and silt and dirt and debris rushed into the literal continental hole.

Here’s another one, with all kinds of rocks:

I am in awe of geologists who figured this shit out. It’s if a refrigerator exploded and you were trying to trace where the mayonnaise had landed and why. It’s all over the place. What’s clear is that there was mayonnaise and food involved, along with bits of refrigerator and whatever else was in the kitchen. The map is so detailed and has so many layers that it just sits and blinks for five minutes while all the sections are loading in the PDF.

So in looking at evidence of these old collisions, I thought about how I am: also composed of the collisions that formed me. My land is formed with an accumulation of fear. It’s the ground beneath my feet. So of course it informs the terrain of my days. The fear is not a fault; it’s history and time.

My therapist and I are always talking about happiness and feeling happy, and I often get down on myself for not being able to go into a unified block of happiness and just feel it. I will instead approach it tentatively, taking a nugget or too, squirreling them away in my pockets to go into my hole and nibble on them, knowing that the full stash of happiness is somewhere else, a treasure lode that makes me afraid because of its challenge, and also because with the happiness comes that danger: that in eating my happiness out in the open, I might let my guard down and in the process and become lifted by the talons of a hawk, becoming someone else’s meal. So I always skitter away, and as I do, I feel badly that I’m so squirrely, so flittery and scared. And why I, as Broder does above, do “doom checks” and then find doom. I have to always keep an eye on it.

So then I started to think, recently when I was happy about something, about what the hell “happiness” is anyway. Maybe I shouldn’t even be telling myself to feel happy the way other people seem to feel happy. How do you experience it? I think I might just have to experience it in bits.

I have long been transfixed by the magic of accretion in making things, the way a string of beads makes a whole, the way minutes of thoughts and hours of making sentences makes something bigger than the sum of its parts, allows for a conversation among multiple selves. But I’d never thought about, until today, that it’s okay to accumulate happiness, too, over a series of crumbs and rocks. Rather than seeing myself as “unable to experience a wave of happiness,” or broken, or scared, or other things that tell myself I’m doing it wrong.

I also know that I am able to have and maximize small and un-intimidating bits of joy. I make jewelry and wear bright colors. I find ridiculousness and delight everywhere, in small pockets. It had never struck me before today, with a visual, how these small bits can make a happy landscape, about how tiny rocks of happiness are being churned and fused into a body of earth on which I can stand and say that I am happy.

So then I decided to put on two things I got recently from an amazing thrift/discount store in Naugatuck called Retail 101, and the combined outfit was a little bold, and it made me happy all day, reliably, in between flashes of anxiety.

I am SO EXCITED about these Converse, which I haven’t been able to wear for years because my feet are extra-messed up. These are comfortable and they cost $22!! And that sweater: a little over the top, but great, right?

So that’s my latest theory for attempting to live with the geology inside my head: there’s no use in bashing on myself for not being able to rewrite my bedrock. What matters is what I build and do on the surface.