I understand that The Invite is a movie that is making fun of a dull bourgeois couple who have access to many nice things, including each other, but have lost the ability to feel pleasure. We’re supposed to laugh at them. Still, the entire time I thought, “What a great apartment! What a gorgeous cheese plate! These guys have an awesome life!”

Directed by Olivia Wilde and co-written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, The Invite is a four-hander dinner party dramedy that feels more like a night of live theater than an evening at an AMC. I laughed loudly and saw it twice. I was particularly struck by Wilde’s hammy performance as an anxious woman.

When I was younger and watched funny, anxious characters on screen, I sometimes found myself experiencing their behavior as a series of instructions, rather than an entertaining send-up. That’s not a criticism of those scripts or performances—I don’t think movies and TV shows should be PSAs that gently educate viewers about mental health. I have found, though, that when you are suffering from anxiety, a funny anxious character can serve as a model—they demonstrate a way that you might transform your anxiety into something that is palatable to other people.

Angela (Wilde) and Joe (Seth Rogan) have recently completed a major renovation on their San Francisco apartment. Angela invites their upstairs neighbors Piña (Penelope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton) over for dinner, supposedly an act of penitence after months of construction noise. But both Angela and Joe have other motives.

Joe resents their neighbors for their noise pollution. He wants to confront them about their audacity to have sex that is so obviously pleasurable that it feels ostentatious compared to Joe and Angela’s mutual indifference.

Angela wants the neighbors to like her. She wants them to think she’s hot, generous, and a good person. Much of the movie’s comedy comes from Angela’s anxiousness to host a perfect dinner party, thwarted by Joe’s coarse attempts to bring up the neighbors’ sex lives.

I think a normal viewer can see that Angela is not aspirational. We may relate to her or empathize with her, but we shouldn’t want to be her. Her anxiousness makes her breathless, frantic, and at times incomprehensible. Joe jokes that he has to check on Angela, or she’ll “forget how to breathe.” Wilde plays Angela as bug-eyed and clownish in her attempts to seem easygoing. She jerks and quivers. You can almost see her thoughts pinballing between observing other people’s minute behaviors, and obsessing over how she herself is being perceived. The movie takes place over one night; I counted five separate episodes of Angela crying silently.

Angela is acting like a freak. But to the anxious viewer, there’s something appealing there, just as to the San Francisco renter, Joe and Angela’s life looks kind of fun. Angela reminds me of characters like Zooey Deschanel’s Jess Day in New Girl, and Rob Lowe’s Chris Traeger in Parks and Recreation. These characters are beloved. They are played by hot, famous people. Watching them, it is easy to subconsciously absorb the idea that they offer a way to conceal or reframe anxious behavior as something funny and admirable.

I don’t have any proof that other anxious people take inspiration from fictional anxious characters to try to pass off their anxiety as adorkable instead of what it is, which is painful and unsettling. But if you watch an anxious person try to socialize, chances are you’ll see them mimic Jess Day’s zaniness, issue a Chris Traeger-style hyper-verbal monologue, or exhibit Angela’s over zealousness.

The problem is, if you repackage your anxiety as quirky, hilarious, and maybe a little sexy, you make it harder to quit your anxious behaviors, and you force everyone around you to experience an even more ornate performance of your anxiety.

For example, if we could talk to Angela she would probably describe herself as a “people pleaser,” an amazingly successful work of branding by annoying people to pass their poor behavior off as a virtue. Angela wouldn’t acknowledge that she is hugely anxious and that this makes her hard to be around and requires some kind of intervention. She would say that she is just worried about everyone having a good time, and she can get a little bit crazy about it, but she’s really an empath!

Angela, crucially, is not actually concerned with pleasing people, she is concerned with people liking her. Angela doesn’t want to confront the neighbors about their noise—not because she wants them to be happy, but because she wants to be perceived as chill. Angela is desperate to feed her guests, not because she wants her guests to be comfortable, but because she wants to be called a good host. Angela defers to her partner’s sexual preferences, but it’s not because she cares about his pleasure, it’s because she doesn’t want to be seen wanting anything.

Angela’s anxiety doesn’t make her appealing to the people around her, it just makes her a funny character for us, the audience. Again, I think this is very obvious to most viewers. But it’s not always obvious to anxious people. I remember putting on a weird little schtick, ahahahahahha I’m so quirkily deranged but also please find me likable but still kooky and certainly deeply good at heart! Then I got a lot of help for my anxiety disorder, which curbed a lot of this.

Now when I watch other people do this, I feel exhausted. But I understand: `If you cannot find ways to diminish your anxiety disorder, you may feel like you have to repackage it and sell it back to people as a product they can enjoy.

My psychiatry appointment was at 4pm. The automated appointment reminder voicemail urged me to come by 3:45. In an act of lateness that I tried to mentally rebrand as an act of resistance against bureaucracy, I arrived at 3:59.

My psychiatrist is Gen-Z. She wears the kind of oversized knit cardigans that slide past the wrists and establish the wearer as small and dainty. She always seems to be just on the brink of punctuating her sentences with a mirthless “lol,” but she holds herself back. When I use the phrase “sex drive” she cringes visibly. I feel maternal towards her. Her generational idiosyncrasies do not prevent her from being able to prescribe 10mg of Lexapro.

When I got to the office, the two women at the front desk were engaged in hilarity which I tried to tactfully disrupt. The woman with the longer fingernails handed me a pen and two pieces of paper: a GAD-7, which is a routine self-assessment for anxiety disorders, and a PHQ-9, a depression self-assessment.

As usual, the moment my eyes fell on the GAD-7 I lost all sense of reality and all trust in my own estimation of things. I felt like I had tucked my arms in, laid down on my side, and was rolling down the steep hills in my own mind

“Over the last two weeks, how often have you been bothered by worrying too much about different things?” the sheet asked.

The words “too much” seemed to contain everything that had ever happened and could ever happen in the future. Worrying too much? Over the last two weeks I had worried about being late to dinner, worried about getting enough sleep, worried about wildfires, worried about emails, worried about my credit card bill, worried about my hair, worried about whether my soul was rotting inside of me, and worried still more about my hair. I marked “several days.”

Next I was asked to gauge how often I had “not been able to stop or control worrying.” It wasn’t clear to me that I had ever controlled worrying—leashed it, brought it to heel, crated it neatly away. I marked “several days” again. I felt, as always, like I was lying to the doctor for sport.

The final question on the form, a form I have filled out dozens of times before, always strikes me as puzzling and beguiling, like reading a familiar line of poetry.

“Over the last two weeks, how often have you been bothered by feeling afraid as if something awful might happen?”

Feeling afraid as if something awful might happen. Feeling afraid as if something awful might happen! Feeling afraid as if something awful might happen.

I like that this form, which was developed in the 2000s by a team of psychiatrists and a social worker, puts into language a thought pattern that seems so natural I don’t always register it: I feel afraid as if something awful might happen. It’s reasonable to feel afraid that something awful might happen, because if you wait long enough something awful will certainly happen. I think what vaults this into the disorder category is feeling this way often and with no antecedent, just blundering around like a novice psychic who can’t quite tune into signals but is definitely catching a bad vibe.

I often find myself feeling dread, and then realizing with a mixture of comedy and horror that I cannot remember what it is that I am dreading. I can feel that I just had a thought or saw something on my phone that is making me feel chest tightness and what I can only describe as an internal score like in The Fellowship of the Ring when they are trying to escape the mines of Moria, but I cannot even recall what inspired this feeling.

“I am forgetting something bad,” I think. “I am in a lot of trouble professionally, or my friendships have been compromised, or there is always the slim chance that I am upset about suffering that is being endured by other people. I will remember soon, and then I will have to face what it is. I will have to face the awful thing that might happen.”

The other day I was feeling this way, feeling upset like something awful might happen, and I was trying to remember what had even set off this feeling of unease. I suddenly remembered: I had received a text from a friend and the text wasn’t that warm. I had been thinking, vaguely, that things weren’t what they seemed, that it’s not good to feel too comfortable because that is when unfortunate events will find you and surprise you, that friendships are like puddles of water that will inevitably evaporate in the sun.

The moment I pinned my anxiety to the text, I felt better. I did not think friendships were like puddles in the sun. I did not even think the text message was significant. My feelings were so obviously disproportionate to the text I had received, it felt like I had been intimidated by an elongated shadow and then looked up to see that the shadow was cast by a child.

I felt better, but I also felt puzzled—why did information slip into my subconscious and expand so dramatically? Why was I always participating in this mental goofiness, this oversubscription to the fear that something awful might happen?

I tried to consult Kierkegaard’s classic text on anxiety called, “The Concept of Anxiety,” for wisdom on this topic. It is safe to say I do not understand “The Concept of Anxiety.” I am part of a big community here—searches for “Kierkegaard concept of anxiety” reveal a lot of people complaining that they too cannot understand “The Concept of Anxiety.”

Here is Kierkegaard offering just a simple, straightforward definition of anxiety: “I must point out that it is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.” Okay.

I think Kierkegaard is saying that the vastness of freedom inspires a vague, huge, general anxiety. Later, he calls anxiety “the dizziness of freedom.” You might get anxious, he writes, the way “he whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy.” There’s too much possibility—too many awful things might happen, and of course, too many wonderful things might not happen.

I try to read Kierkegaard by breaking off and interpreting pieces of the text that are so small I may be radically misunderstanding them. Down the page he writes, “He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.” So true! “Anxiety is of all things the most selfish,” he writes. Fair enough. But then he adds, “Anxiety is a feminine weakness,” words I plan to ignore.

Dizzied by Kierkegaard, I turned to a 1987 self-help book called “FEEL THE FEAR…AND DO IT ANYWAY.” This is a book I once took out of the library, read the first 20 pages, felt completely changed by it, and then slid the book into the return slot without cracking the spine again. It is a blockbuster bestseller, written by a psychologist Susan Jeffers. She opens by telling the reader, in that forceful, hand-on-hip tone endemic to self-help writers:

“You may be surprised and encouraged to learn that while inability to deal with fear may look and feel like a psychological problem, in most cases it isn’t. I believe it is primarily an educational problem, and that by reeducating the mind, you can accept fear as simply a fact of life rather than a barrier to success. (This should be a relief to all of you out there who have been wondering, ‘What’s wrong with me?’)”

Jeffers is A Real Hoot in a very different way than Kierkegaard. Her point is also a lot more direct. This is her thesis, as far as I understand it:

“At the bottom of every one of your fears is simply the fear that you can’t handle whatever life may bring you.”

“All you have to do to diminish your fear is to develop more trust in your ability to handle whatever comes your way!” Jeffers crows. She suggests that you start telling yourself, “Whatever happens to me, given any situation, I can handle it!”

Unfortunately, I do think this bold-type, exclamation point-peppered text holds a vital truth that addresses some of my greatest problems. That just happens sometimes.

Life’s great promise is that something awful will happen. Anxiety’s response is, “and when it happens, it will be so bad, so devastating, that you must start preparing for it now, even though there is no way to prepare for it except to feel a generic, eternal dread.” I think Jeffers is right that one powerful antidote is to think, “I am projecting into a future where I can only imagine suffering in response to bad things. In reality I will probably be able to draw on some internal reserves to ultimately survive anything and even have joie de vivre.”

“Anxiety is an alien power that seizes the individual,” writes Kierkegaard, “and yet he cannot tear himself free of it, nor does he want to, for he fears it, but what he fears is what he desires.” I think he is getting at something like—you can’t stop thinking about feeling afraid like something awful will happen, which becomes its own warped, obsessive, almost loving relationship. Or he may be saying something else.

I saw my psychiatrist for about ten minutes, which is normal in my experience. We agreed that my SSRIs might or might not be causing side effects and that there was really no good way to find out.

I walked home through the park, feeling excited, like something excellent might happen.

Thanks for reading Uneasy Going! If you prefer a human-made podcast version of this essay, I recorded one above.

This month has been exciting for people who like to imagine that our love of pop culture is a little different from other people’s—more elevated! Academic, even! In the London Review of Books, classics professor and translator Emily Wilson gutted Christopher Nolan’s movie adaptation of The Odyssey like it was one of Polyphemus’ goats.

In interviews, Nolan has referenced taking inspiration from the first sentence of Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey: “Tell me about a complicated man.” In her review, Wilson does not return this affection. She notes Nolan’s preference for empty spectacle, his feeble direction of non-white actors, the lustlessness of the characters, a distinct lack of lyre, and the movie’s literal godlessness. She argues that his writing of women characters is more retrograde than that of the nearly 3,000 year old text, while at the same time he sloppily imposes contemporary liberal values on mythical BCE characters.

Is Wilson right? I have no idea. I am suffering, like so many of my fellow Americans, from not being able to get tickets to a 70mm Imax showing of The Odyssey. I go through the daily humiliation of refreshing the little AMC page and considering whether it would be a form of self-harm to sit in the front row of a 10am weekday screening.

One of Wilson’s accusations struck me: “Damon’s Odysseus is motivated mostly by anxiety and guilt,” she writes.

In a few places in the essay, Wilson indicates that contemporary therapy culture has seeped into Nolan’s storytelling. The island goddess Calypso, she writes, is depicted as, “an unpaid therapist, soothing the soul of the bedraggled, PTSD-ridden Odysseus with drugs, and graciously listening to his disjointed tale of woe.”

Beyond her barn burner review, Wilson has continued to inveigh against Nolan’s rendering of Odysseus as man with neuroses. Speaking about Nolan’s spin on Odysseus on NPR’s Fresh Air, she said, “he’s just constantly troubled by anxiety about his role in the Trojan horse and the Trojan War.” In another interview, she noted, “We have this tech hero, but we don’t see him building his tech. We see him agonizing about the results of the tech.”

I wonder how many people read Wilson’s review and thought: Yeah! It’s so stupid to think that anyone in ancient Greece had anxiety! Nolan might as well have handed Odysseus a vape!

But that is not Wilson’s point. Wilson’s point is that it is stupid to imply that Odysseus, specifically, was anxious. I am eager to point out, as someone who is always looking for opportunities to cite Anxiety: A Short History, a book from the John Hopkins Biographies of Disease series—that what we would now call anxiety did exist among the ancient Greeks. It is not anachronistic to think that a character in The Odyssey could have anxiety. It’s just that Odysseus could not have had anxiety because ancient Greeks thought that people who had anxiety were freaks and losers.

Classical Greek sources are some of our best evidence that anxiety—not just fear, but prolonged, troubling, and irrational fear that dominated a person’s life—existed and was remarked upon in the ancient world.

Hippocrates, who lived a few hundred years after The Odyssey attained tell-it-round-the-ancient-Greek-campfire status, famously writes about the case of Nicanor:

Nicanor’s affection, when he went to a drinking party, was fear of the flute girl. Whenever he heard the voice of the flute begin to play at a symposium, masses of terrors rose up. He said that he could hardly bear it when it was night, but if he heard it in the daytime he was not affected. Such symptoms persisted over a long period of time.

Next, Hippocrates describes a more familiar phobia:

Democles, who was with him, seemed blind and powerless of body, and could not go along a cliff, nor on to a bridge to cross a ditch of the least depth, but he could go through the ditch itself. This affected him for some time.

Like composite characters created to teach psychiatrists to give out DSM diagnoses, Nicanor and Democles are textbook sufferers of phobias—they fear specific situations, and their fear is immediate and out of proportion. It inspires them to avoid certain situations, it causes significant stress, and it persists.

To the ancient Greeks, people who suffered in this way were worthy of shame. “The man who exceeds in fear is a coward; for he fears both what he ought and as he ought not,” wrote Aristotle.

The highest values in ancient Greek culture “included demonstrating courage through willingness to fight, bravery in battle, and steadfastness through confrontations with enemies,” writes medical historian Allan V. Horwitz, the writer of Anxiety: A Short History. “Conversely, cowardice–seen as the inability to remain resolute in threatening situations–was a stigma to be avoided at all costs.”

Horwitz even cites lines from The Iliad where we see a soldier:

“his heart racing, pounding inside the fellow’s ribs

His teeth chattering–he dreads some grisly death.”

The soldier was facing battle, an actual threat to his life. His feeling of fear is distinct from what we would call an anxiety disorder today, because it is a reasonable response to his situation. Horwitz points out, though, that to the ancient Greeks, ruminating in advance about a threat, showing physical manifestations of fear, sitting in dread—all fell within the definition of anxiety, and all of it was considered loser behavior.

To Wilson’s point, being anxious is incompatible with being Odysseus, one of the greatest and wisest heroes of myth. The idea that strategist and warrior Odysseus is haunted by a vague thought “Is anyone mad at me?” regarding anyone except the Gods, is counter to everything we know about him.

For me, this raises a question—where does it mean for today’s anxious person, if the archetypal hero cannot be anxious?

Most of our classic heroes follow ancient Greek ideas of heroism — your Harry Potters and Hans Solos, super heroes and Bonds, Katnisses and Jean Valjeans. They do not obsess over how they are perceived. They do not take days or months to overthink their plans, constantly second guessing and hesitating. They take action, and face the consequences later. Their teeth do not chatter, their bodies do not shake with fear, they do not “dread some grisly death.”

The iconic hero runs towards danger, gets excited about deadly situations, loves risk, and is willing to die painfully. We understand that the hero’s love for humanity overrides their sense of self-preservation. In heroic tales the anxious person is often a sidekick—Neville Longbottom, C3PO. In The Odyssey we have Eurylochus, Odysseus’ lieutenant, who doesn’t want to go back to Circe’s house to rescue the men who have been turned into pigs. His fear, pessimism, and overthinking exists to showcase Odysseus’ brave willingness to save his men.

There is such a thing as an anxious hero of course — but they exist in a range from Marlin in Finding Nemo to Hamlet —less than the epic world-savers. Is it possible, then, for an anxious person to ever see herself as heroic—a person who might sail the wine-dark sea, anger the gods, find herself driven far out of her course, and make her way home?

The Greeks gave us wisdom for this, too. Heroes weren’t actually supposed to be fearless—in fact, fearlessness was a liability, one that The Iliad mocks. A true hero felt fear, but worked through it. Horwitz explains:

“The appropriate response to danger was bravery.”

Thanks for reading Uneasy Going! If you’d like to listen to this in audio format, I made a recording of it above.

“Stop Pathologizing Ordinary Life,” an opinion piece in The New York Times commanded this week.

“In some ways, encouraging people to think and talk more about their mental health is a good thing,” acknowledged the author, Dr. Clay Routledge. “But there is also reason to believe that efforts to bring attention to mental health struggles are inadvertently making us more vulnerable to psychological distress.”

Is that true? Are we making ourselves sick? Could your panic attacks or unbearable depression be the result of your own obsessive scrolling and earnest conversations with friends about mental health?

To support his point, the author builds on the idea that “the more fixated we are on mental health, the more sensitive we become to anything that might qualify as a symptom” and cites a handful of studies—“Research has found that when people view social media posts that normalize anxiety disorders, they become more inclined to think they have one”—plus some generic truths, like, “start viewing anxiety as a disorder and you can become hypervigilant about avoiding anxiety-provoking situations.”

A better approach, he says, would focus on three things: exercising, volunteering, and finding meaning.

This argument is wildly seductive. It is, on a surface level, true: people are incredibly annoying. They do inaccurately self-diagnose and over-pathologize. Social media is terrible for us and it makes us more likely to identify with disorders we don’t have. And of course, exercise, volunteering, and meaning-making are unequivocally good activities that are likely to lead to a better life.

These are such obvious and non-controversial conclusions. Who would fund an entire organization to come up with such recommendations?

Routledge is a psychologist whose Times bio tells us that he works for a mental health initiative called “Head Out.” If you go to the initiative’s website you see that it is an arm of the Archbridge Institute, a non-partisan think tank. The “Head Out” website features a friendly, brightly-colored design, peppered with cartoon hearts and stars. It looks like a cross between a children’s arithmetic workbook and a handmade zine.

“Get out of your head and into the world!” it instructs.

“The more we fixate on mental health, the worse it gets,” the site proclaims. There are “more therapists and meds,” than ever. The way out, the site urges, is to “move, work, create, connect, and transcend!” Examples include hiking, pursuing a career, and finding a faith.

“This is science!” the site copy insists. But who paid to get the word out about all of this science?

The Kochs.

The right-leaning Sarah Scaife Foundation, which funds organizations that have been linked to dozens of members of Trump’s cabinet and inner circle.

The right-leaning Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has spent decades focusing on school choice and reducing access to welfare programs.

The right-leaning group Donors Trust, which funds anti-immigration groups and The Federalist Society.

Why do craven billionaires care whether you and I go to therapy? What is it to them if we accidentally misdiagnose ourselves with autism, or alienate the people around us by diluting the true meaning of the word trauma?

They care because anxiety, depression, and other mental health conditions are economic disasters. “Mental illness costs the U.S. economy $282 billion annually, which is equivalent to the average economic recession,” a 2024 study from Yale found. Mental health problems are linked to lower productivity. Missed days of work from anxiety and depression cost the US an estimated $1 trillion per year in lost productivity.

In addition, treating mental health disorders is hugely expensive. Between 2000 and 2021, annual spending on mental health and substance use treatment ballooned from around $41 billion to around $140 billion. Medicaid covers a third of adults who have mental health issues. And since 2014, federal law requires insurance companies to cover mental health conditions equally or better than other health conditions.

The Yale study added to these long established truths, pointing out that people who have mental health problems buy less, invest less, and pursue careers that are less laborious.

The painful thing is that I agree with Routledge and his ilk on some points—I absolutely think that therapy can be exploitative, unhelpful, and wasteful. I certainly think it’s worthwhile to promote holistic approaches like exercise. I deeply resonate with the idea that volunteering and relationships and meaning-making can help rescue people from dark holes of fear and despair.

My very general, lay-person’s solution would be to balance access to rigorous and high-quality professional care with public health education that helps people implement holistic approaches, and a cultural and policy overhaul that makes it all possible.

But that is not what “Head Out” is promoting. Their suggestion is to suck it up and live with it. Do not miss work. Quit yapping online. Do not indulge the feeling that you would benefit from professional help. Ignore your curiosity about the reportedly life-changing effects of talking with a mental health counselor. Go for a run, find God, and get a job.

In the op-ed, Routledge notes that “Nearly a third of American adults and half of Gen Z adults have given themselves a diagnosis of a mental illness based on information from social media.” I wonder how many of those people had access to a therapist or psychiatrist in addition to the free information on their phones. In a major mental health survey from 2022, about half of all respondents under the age of 30 said that there was a time in the past year when they felt they needed mental health services but could not access them. If social media is a person’s doctor we might consider that it’s not because they’re stupid, it’s because they can’t see a doctor.

The most common reason that Americans cannot access mental health care is because they cannot afford it. Another reason Americans cannot access mental health care is because—regardless of the scuttlebutt among the Think Tankers at PTA meetings—stigma continues to stop people from seeking help. It is pure mythology that stigma has been done away with by Gen-Z and Millennial proclivities to toss around DSM diagnoses. One study that Routledge cites even names this. In it, researchers note that viewing a lot of mental health chatter on social media “influenced self-diagnosis primarily through increasing identification with another person with anxiety, rather than decreasing stigma.”

On the Head Out website a guide titled, “How to Know It is Time For Therapy” encourages readers to weigh the “risk-to-reward” factors of seeking therapy, and consider “self-management.” The therapist who wrote it warns that therapy “can be expensive and takes a lot of time and effort in exchange for (on average) moderate improvements.”

“Did you know that journaling has potentially a much better ratio?” he adds. “It’s free, takes 10 minutes a day, and many studies show a small to moderate expected improvement in mental health functioning.”

That guide is written by Camilo Ortiz, a New York-based psychologist whose rate is $275-725 per 45-minute session. His services far surpass the scope addressed in the “Head Out” guide, which names hallucinations and suicidality as reasonable causes for pursuing therapy. Ortiz, though, advertises therapy that includes “skills-based approaches for making relationships much more fulfilling and less frustrating.”

Who should get to pay $725 a session for mental health relief? Not you. The Archbridge Institute claims to exist to conduct research and put forward policy proposals that “lift barriers to human flourishing.” In attempts to “lift barriers to human flourishing” reports from the Archbridge Foundation have explained that discussions about raising the minimum wage are misguided and that the issue is complicated and policymakers should focus on other things. The foundation also dedicates its time to pushing for fewer regulations on AI companies, and promoting the concept of the American Dream. The Archbridge Institute has pushed for welfare reform to expand coverage for couples who have higher joint incomes, but that is to promote the marriage of single mothers.

In the Times article, Routledge puts forward statements that are blandly reasonable—social media bad, team sports good!—things you could say to anybody at a barbecue and they would probably say “Sure, I agree.”

In other places, he has made it clear that ideology directly informs his beliefs about mental health. In a 2023 Substack post he bemoaned reduced enthusiasm for capitalism among people under 30, writing, “I believe these trends are connected—The rise in anxiety (and related psychological and social health problems) is undermining support for freedom in all its forms, from free speech to free markets.” In another amazing take a year earlier, he explained that addressing climate change and housing affordability are not clear paths to raising birth rates, and that, “efforts to promote a more pro-natal society will need to be more cultural in nature.”

In the future planned by these people the government has increased incentives for marriage, but neglected to raise the minimum wage. You are experiencing strong cultural pressure to have children, but public schools have been defunded. You are journaling wildly!

I have to admit that what I find so insidious, so enraging and despiriting, about this all is speculative. When the Kochs and the Federalists and their mouthpieces make apparently anodyne, factually correct statements like “a growing body of research indicates that exercise does as good a job of reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression as psychotherapy or medication” what I hear is this:

“My children and I will always have the best treatment that money can offer. We will flourish by every means available. You will flourish by going for a jog or reading the bible. My family and I are intelligent, and so we know best when we need professional intervention. Working class and middle class people don’t have that instinct, so you had better not bother experts with your little problems. Your needs are a drag on the economy. My needs are reasonable, and addressing them helps to promote the flow of the free market.”

Therapy for me but not for thee. Medication for me but not for thee. Access for me but not for thee. Hundreds of millions of dollars are funneled into “non-partisan charities” to promote these messages and undermine access to mental health care.

I feel so crazy about this. I feel shrill and mentally slow and absent of power. I would love a diagnosis to explain this feeling! But here I am, journaling about it.

If you’d like to listen to a non-AI audio recording of this essay, I made one here. I hope it is not overstimulating.

The feeling of a hair stuck in your sunscreen. Losing touch with reality due to the persistent roar of a leaf blower. Walking on a hot day in direct sunlight and tripping over a break in the pavement. Spending any amount of time with a toddler. These things, and more, may leave you feeling overstimulated.

Moms are overstimulated. Children are overstimulated. Gen-Z-ers are overstimulated. The New York Times reported that couples are factoring in time in their wedding itineraries to sneak away from their guests to rest, journal, or play on their phones to “prevent any anxiety and overstimulation that could mar an otherwise happy occasion.”

Overstimulation is what it sounds like: too much stimulation. Here is a more elegant explanation, from researchers in the journal Nature in 2015:

“When sensory input (e.g., sounds) surpasses one’s capacity to process it, whether due to volume, intensity or diversity of stimuli, stimuli become aversive and can result in overstimulation.”

If you have PTSD, ADHD, or autism, overstimulation can feel “intolerable,” Naomi Torres-Mackie, a psychologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, told Time Magazine. “You might feel the need to escape or flee; you might feel restless, like you just cannot calm down; you might have feelings of anxiety. You might experience a panic attack, or feel agitated or angry or rageful, and become highly emotionally reactive.”

And what about the rest of us, walking with tote bags full of canned goods slamming into our hips, or trying to eat a taco and listen to a voicemail from our doctors’ office while a siren goes by? The use of the word “overstimulated” to describe these experiences has proliferated far beyond the population represented by those acronyms. “I think people mean that there’s too many things going on at once, and they feel overloaded by it—like task paralysis for your senses,” Dr. Jessi Gold, a psychiatrist at the University of Tennessee, told Time. “It resonates, and it sticks. It becomes almost like a slang word.”

I get overstimulated with freakish ease. I feel overstimulated when I am in a car with someone who thinks we can both listen to music and have a conversation. I feel overstimulated, disheveled, and murderous when I cook for too long with the stove fan on. During grad school I went to a single college football game where I felt so overstimulated I seemed to have been separated briefly from my ability to produce speech. I was not up to saying a word, or even eye contact. I could either sit in silence staring down at the field, or I could leave and have a conversation.

We often see a knee-jerk, sometimes malicious concern about over-pathologizing normal human behavior. If you don’t have a disorder associated with overstimulation, over-identifying with that feeling can get you accused of throwing around “therapyspeak.” Some of this cynicism is helpful—it is troubling for people to start thinking of their innocuous behavior as a sign of a medical problem. It is irritating when people try to make claims on our attention or respect by citing a personal quality that is no more rare or incredible than, say, loving the color orange.

I think the irate dismissal of people who use language like “overstimulated” underestimates the particular satisfaction of finding a word that describes your experience, and with it, an invisible but huge community of people who share that experience. We reach for these labels because we want very badly to feel understood, to connect, to feel recognized. We want to feel—counterintuitively—incredibly special and spectacularly normal at the same time.

I am hesitant to judge perceived therapyspeak. Having a label for your behavior feels so valuable because our cultural bar for what we promise to accept and forgive in each other is so high that it basically only encompasses medical problems.

@madihart_soccerit happens so FAST #sketch #friends #joke

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I think, “I am someone who gets easily overstimulated” belongs to the same category as “I am a middle child,” and “I am from Seattle.” These are facts that help you understand who I am. They do not make me a part of a protected class.

The sense that overstimulation is a widespread and urgent problem has led to, of course, a range of products and services that claim to address this problem.

The wealthy are building wellness rooms. “People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” interior designer Laura Lubin told The Wall Street Journal in January. In response, homeowners request specially built meditation spaces, tech-free basements, and rooms dedicated to massage and reflection.

To keep workers productive despite the overstimulation caused by Slack notifications and loud-chewing desk mates, monied workplaces have instituted quiet pods, craft rooms, and meditation rooms.

There are quiet pods everywhere for those with eyes to see. On a recent podcast, comedian Naomi Ekperigin laughed, “I realized when I’m in the MRI machine? Closest I come to bliss. I am quiet. I have to stay still. I can’t be on my phone. I love it in the machine.” Less expensive options abound. You can “quiet [your] overstimulated brain with Android games.” This spring, Yoga With Adriene offered her 13.6 million YouTube followers a sequence of “Yoga for when you’re overstimulated.”

Why not respond proactively to an overstimulating world with a sleek tech wearable? The makers of Oura ring have invested in a Finnish tech company that is making, as far as I understand, a specialized audio soundtrack that works “to guide the brain into states of calm, recovery, or focus.” It is “designed to run in the background of real life, helping regulate that load in the moment, not just after the fact.” (They sell a sleep headband, so that you can prepare for future overstimulation, even when unconscious.)

When I’m trying to parse theories for why in general people seem to have more anxiety today, I hesitate to accept the “It’s the phones, stupid” explanation. With the apparent general rise in overstimulation, though, I think the explanation probably is the phones.

My reasoning for this is very, very, scientific: I have observed that I have felt more overstimulated since I got a little device that offers me constant stimulation. That also seems true for the people around me. I would still hesitate to make “put down your phone and you’ll feel the normal and perfect amount of stimulation” an edict. My experience of being overstimulated is so different from that of, say, a breastfeeding mom, or a person who works in food service, that it is pretty much irrelevant to them.

I also don’t know what it means to tell people, even myself, to reduce phone use or screen use. It feels like if you had a cocaine habit, and your job required you to do coke, and the world’s most popular hobby was doing coke, and there was coke everywhere you went. Imagine all of that was happening, and then you started receiving constant messaging that was like, “Every day you should try not doing coke for a few minutes! See how it feels to leave your coke at home. We weren’t meant, as humans, to do this much coke!” (If this comparison isn’t apt, it is because my entire experience with cocaine has been limited to watching the SNL digital short “Great Day.”)

I do feel confident that the answer to “tech devices are ruining my life” is not “buy more devices.” The Finnish anti-over-stimulation tool feels like an insidious, dystopian scam to me. So many of us are clearly stuck in a loop of getting so overstimulated that the only balm is more of the technology that contributed in the first place.

At the same time, I’m tired of pretending that “try meditating!” and “you should journal!” are real ideas that have meaning for almost anyone. It is a tremendous leap to ask people to go from “constant stream of algorithmically bespoke micro-entertainment delivered to your personal device” to “sitting still in total silence.”

The only option I feel positive about is the one that Ekperigan raised—the pre-existing, found, non-stimulating experiences that happen by accident. Wandering the grocery store. Going through a car wash. Lying in bed. When you are on a walk and your Airpods die and you lose access to all recorded music in history.

I can only hope that someone will offer me an MRI soon.

If you’d like to listen to a non-AI audio recording of my essay, I made one here!

Katrina came over and we sat on opposite sides of my tiny bedroom in my shared New York City apartment, diligently screwing together pieces of particleboard to make a bed frame.

I was hot and tearful and 23. I did not believe in my capacity to construct Ikea furniture. It seemed as hopeless to me as trying to levitate.

Katrina never doubted her competence. She was graceful, she was capable, she had put herself through college by driving the campus van. I plied her with Thai food, but she would have done it willingly.

“This is fun for me!” she kept saying, cranking an Allen wrench with evident satisfaction.

Within a few minutes of industrious scampering and impressive fidelity to the instruction booklet, Katrina had constructed a bed frame. She stood up and tried to close my bedroom door. It swung, smacking the corner of the structure we had just built. The door would not close. My tiny bedroom could not accommodate a full-size bed frame. We laid on the floor and laughed until we were in pain.

I left the pieces of the bed frame in a heap in the living room and slept on my mattress on the ground. For years, it’s been popular to joke about the sloppy, tasteless straight men in their 20s who sleep on mattresses with no bed frames. I feel disloyal laughing at these jokes, as I know that these are actually my people. I have had to restrict myself to laughing at jokes about straight men who have navy sheets, or a single, calcified towel. (I am not the only woman who could not figure out how to live glamorously in New York City. A girl in my building at the time told me that she didn’t even sleep on a mattress. She slept on a fitted sheet stuffed with her own clothing, folded and arranged to create a sort of platform.)

A few days after the disastrous Ikea-building episode, my long-distance boyfriend came to stay with me in my shared apartment. We slept on the mattress on the floor, sweating despite the wheezing window AC unit. We cooked in the galley kitchen, which had what I thought of as “a bug problem,” because even acknowledging the names of the iconic insects that populate New York apartments made me feel faint with horror. A few days into my boyfriend’s visit, I broke up with him.

As the initial breakup conversation wound down for the night we retired back to the floor mattress, since there was nowhere else for either of us to go.

“You didn’t even cry,” he said, in an accusatory tone.

“I did cry!” I said, indignant.

“One tear!” he shot back.

I found the breakup so wretched it felt physically painful. For days after he left I lay on my floor mattress, compulsively eating Talenti dark chocolate sorbetto. But I was also relieved. I could verbalize reasonable justifications for our breakup. I could not quite account, though, for my own sense of relief at ridding myself of someone who I cared about so much.

I tried out a mental framing of the breakup as a feminist issue. My boyfriend had been needy and emotionally stifling, I told myself, and now I would be free! I was a gender-bent Tom Petty, I was Free Falling, and my ex-boyfriend was just off somewhere pathetically liking horses and Elvis, or their 2010s analogues.

It was true that I felt very free. But free from what? I felt free from the burden of considering another person’s needs or preferences. I felt free of the expectation to care and be cared for. I was free from feeling watched, from being asked to reveal my thoughts, from engaging in the endless necessary negotiations that comprise a relationship.

My life could not fit a partner, any more than my bedroom could fit a bed frame.

Even as I tried to recast the breakup in my mind as an exciting new beginning, I could admit that my boyfriend had not been emotionally stifling. He had wanted something that was equally as generous as it was self-interested: to combine our lives into one spectacular adventure. He wanted to know each other deeply, for each of us to add meaning to the other person’s life through the quality of our attention.

I felt, for reasons I could not articulate, allergic to this.

There were good reasons for our relationship to end. But the reason that felt most urgent was that it seemed like there was a kind of centrifugal force exerted on me by life, and I was fully occupied by trying to resist this force. I had no additional will to help maintain another person, and was even less interested in accepting another person’s tender attempts to maintain me. Today I would call that force anxiety.

Shortly after that breakup, I started seeing a wonderfully inattentive man who I wrote about in an essay for Modern Love. It was unbelievably relaxing.

Years later, when I met a man who I really liked, I was distressed to find that I couldn’t envision a future for our relationship, and didn’t understand why. My therapist laid out the problem: of course you don’t want to be in a relationship, she said. You can’t stand being present, romantically, around anyone long enough to like them. It’s exhausting for you.

She said this in a sort of cackle.

I hadn’t been able to put this together before I met her. With her help, I made a plan to keep going out with the guy I liked, trying to stave off prohibitive levels of anxiety. Her weekly presence in my life acted like a gasket for my built up anxiousness, and each week she tried to help me construct a tolerance for discomfort. Essentially, she coached me to try to not act like a little freak and ruin my own happiness.

It’s becoming fashionable to say that Americans are going to too much therapy, that it’s a sign of the times when so many people need a personal coach to keep them functional. “Every adult, regardless of diagnosis, should have a licensed fairy godparent to walk them through life’s milestones” is not a reasonable plan. It’s not sustainable; it doesn’t work economically. Insurance companies won’t cover it, and a shortage of mental health workers makes it impossible.

Theoretically, I agree. I nod knowingly when people say that rich Americans outsource too much to the therapist-client relationship, and that this speaks to some brokenness in our society which must be addressed through a return to community and an overthrowing of smartphones and I guess some huge number of potlucks.

But actually, long-term individual therapy did help me. It also failed me a lot of the time, but I can say, at least, that I owe the success of my relationship to my time in therapy. Even though “I’m too awkward to be in a relationship” isn’t a condition described in the DSM, it did have roots in anxiety and I would not have gotten sufficient help for it even from a caring friend or family member.

Because of this, I don’t think I can turn around and say, “A personal therapist was good for me, but other people should make do with an app or a chatbot or going on a walk with a friend.” I think when we allude to the idea of therapy being uncomfortably omnipresent, what we are often actually saying is, “One-on-one, open-ended personal therapy is a service that is so bespoke and luxurious that it can only belong to very few people.” This is currently close to reality—roughly 6.5-8.5% of Americans are in talk therapy. Therapy really won’t go that far, as long as it’s so difficult to access.

There is so much to critique about therapy and therapists—so much ineffective treatment, so many bad actors, little accountability, and lack of access. And still I know I benefitted hugely from having weekly meetings with someone who said, essentially, “Don’t you see how you get in the way of your own life? Do you want me to draw you a chart to show you how stupid you’re being? Stop that at once!”

If anything, it didn’t go far enough.

[NOTE: Uneasy Going is primarily about anxiety disorders, but I am giving myself a special dispensation this week to write about a not-yet-codified mental health problem, Taylor Swift Rage Disorder.]

In case you’d like to listen to a non-AI audio version of this Substack, I recorded it below:

The most popular girl from every single person in the world’s high school got married over the weekend. Together, we shared the pleasure of screenshotting Instagram stories and sending them to friends to express shock, horror, and delight over the abysmal taste of a person who still holds a certain power over you.

It’s curious that Taylor Swift got married in Madison Square Garden, a place that offers the elegance of a Chuck-E-Cheese. Madison Square Garden is in Manhattan’s most clogged and generic neighborhood, one dominated by chain stores and by a well-fed and fearless (sorry) cadre of rats. The building itself is a windowless box encrusted with decades of sweat, both prestigious and plebeian. I have spent one evening there: when my sister and I sat in the nosebleeds at a Paul Simon concert, where furious Boomers yelled at us for dancing too much. There is not one compelling reason to get married there. Notably, Taylor Swift made her wedding personal for New Yorkers, inconveniencing millions, and draining taxpayer dollars through a massive police presence.

I enjoyed exchanging takes on the profoundly bad taste and poor instincts that led to this wedding (or this wedding-adjacent event.) I like at least half of most Taylor Swift albums. In generous moments I feel fond of her for creating soundtracks that have accompanied, at this point, the majority of my life. Still, gleefully criticizing other people’s weddings can be very pleasurable, and a nice way to connect with each other.

I also witnessed a vitriol towards Taylor Swift and her wedding that was arresting and a little scary—not because it hurts a famous billionaire, but because of the way it exposes the fury and hurt of the speaker.

In various takes, tweets, and talks, I saw people express pleasure in the hopes that Taylor Swift has no real friends, that she is not really loved, that she is marrying an idiot, that her behavior is an embarrassment to her family, that she has the mentality of a child, that her legacy as a profligate elite will eclipse her legacy as a songwriter and performer, and that there is something at the core of her that is rotten and for which she will be punished.

I am not worried that this will harm Taylor Swift. I think it is harming you to hold on to these ideas. Taylor Swift has been alarmingly, forcefully relevant for the past 20 years. If you do not want Taylor Swift to set the emotional weather for the next 20 years of your life, it is time to develop a more distant relationship with her.

I come to you not as a righteous Swiftie but as a fellow hater, now reformed. I cannot express how much nicer and easier my life got when I stopped feeling the need to rage against Taylor Swift’s decisions. I stopped constructing ornate arguments about her tackiness or shamelessness or relative talents or puny, limited feminism. I was tired of feeling consigned to analyze Taylor Swift’s personal and business decisions, to live in her gigantic and crimp-haired shadow, even to engage in pointless debates about whether she is a good songwriter. (She’s a good songwriter.)

Taylor Swift is worthy of critique. I am not suggesting that you “be nice” to her or pretend she has no effect on your life. I am suggesting that if you feel a molten fury when you think of Taylor Swift and her various goings on, if you cannot stop talking about how awful she is even if you are making really good points, you are worshipping her like a god.

I say this having travelled from “teenager who would like to see some kind of physical harm come to Taylor Swift” to “young adult ping-ponging between feeling that Taylor Swift is an avatar of white supremacy, and gratitude to her for doing a Get Out The Vote campaign,” and finally to “adult who enjoys a lot of the songs and thinks of Taylor Swift as a talented writer and a shrewd capitalist whose actions are worthy of critique.” My own eras.

When I heard the song “You Belong With Me” on my bedroom boombox-slash-FM radio player in 2009, I felt a prickle of discontent. “She wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts,” Swift sang. “Hey watcha doin’ with a girl like that?” Later, when I went to school and watched the music video on a desktop in the library computer lab, I exploded into sheer rage. Here was a person posing as an awkward boy-less girl who lives in her imagination and eats cafeteria lunch with equally charmless girls who are oddly passive aggressive, when in fact she is a hot, popular blond with a naturally cruel face! Don’t piss on me and tell me “there’s something about the way the street looks when it’s just rained,” Taylor!

Around this time, my parents were taking me to marches to announce our support for marriage equality. I was passionate about marriage equality and angry at the abridging of civil rights but much, much more angry at Taylor Swift. I genuinely felt that the hypocrisy I perceived in Taylor Swift was a crime that needed to be brought to justice.

In 2013, after the Golden Globes when Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joked about her dating life, Swift invoked the quote, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women.” I wanted to call the fire department. I wanted the president to make a speech. I wanted a warrant for her arrest. “Don’t you get it,” I sputtered at anyone who accidentally made eye contact with me, “that actually she is the one escalating things here, she is saying that other women should go to hell? Which means actually she deserves to go to hell! Just by her own logic!!!!”

Over the years, I felt alive with disgust over various Swiftian news cycles and album drops. I ignored the music as best I could, though I found the song “Love Story” strangely moving. Then when I was in college “Blank Space” dropped, and I thought, “Okay, this one’s really good.” Still, I found that I liked watching her be punished and publicly humiliated. I enjoyed her failures, the feeling of the world turning against her. It cheered me when people made fun of her face and body, when she looked awkward on magazine covers, when youthful nazis praised her, when people accused her of grooming a Kennedy.

I don’t think you can hold all of these opinions without it degrading your soul. Most of the time when I tried to prove that Taylor Swift was bad, what I was really proving was that I was unhappy, and spending my unhappiness obsessing over a stranger. (Other times, certainly, I was just correctly pointing out something about her that was bad.)

It helped to realize that Taylor Swift is an important cultural figure who can tell us a lot about how we live and what we value, but she does not actually have to dictate the way I live and the things I value. She is a billionaire, and she is influential. But she cannot swing presidential elections. She does not set public policy. Criticizing her can be a useful activity, but it is not activism.

I look forward to the rest of the details of Taylor Swift’s wedding filtering out, slowly, probably between now and the day I die. The few details that have emerged have already befuddled me.

After puzzling through it as best I could, applying logic and thinking creatively, eventually I had to go to my friend in sweet humility and say, “Why do the signs outside Taylor Swift’s wedding say Just and T Married? Is Travis Kelce’s real name Justin?”

Such are the rewards of creating some distance from Taylor Swift’s whole thing.

“You cannot take a tranquilizer to recover from making your wedding invitations,” I told myself. I tried to be firm, like a young parent setting boundaries with a wayward child. “You cannot do that. You cannot take a beta blocker to deal with Zola.”

I will say, defensively, that I did not feel anxious about my wedding invitations. It is true that creating them demanded a surgeon’s finesse and a graphic designer’s knowledge of typesetting. They were not anxiety-provoking, though—instead, the experience made me feel physically tense. After three hours of experimenting with serifs and sans them, with line height and letter spacing, I was in minor pain. My neck hurt from straining to put ampersands in the right place. My muscles felt tight, as if I had been parallel parking a cruise ship, instead of moving the words “We can’t wait to celebrate with you!” millimeters up and down a digital interface.

Since I was not willing to face the idea of medicating myself over wedding stationary, I tried to administer manual relaxation by violently rolling my neck and doing that kind of cross-body arm stretch that people do on TV shows before they play recreational baseball. Observing this, my partner bounded to the closet, and returned with a piece of gleaming white plastic with a tennis ball-sized foam attachment on the end: a Theragun.

I turned on the Theragun and ran it along my shoulders and my neck. It was forceful in a way that is uncommon in an at-home gadget. It made me feel unusually aware of every one of my teeth. I reached over and let it drill my shoulder muscles. It was much more effective at reducing the feeling of tightness than my usual method, which is to give myself a hard pinch in the muscles between my neck and my shoulders. I tried running it along the base of my skull, which felt like getting lightly punched. The motor seemed strong enough to cause injury.

A Theragun is a sleek, expensive, and high-powered vibrating massage gun. Theraguns seem like sex toys but they are not, unless your kink is going to the hospital with a genital injury. They are made by a company called Therabody, created by a chiropractor named Jason Wersland. According to his telling, he developed the Theragun while recovering from a painful motorcycle injury. It was frustrating, he said, that opportunities for relief were limited by his access to other chiropractors’ services.

“It hit me: I’m dependent on someone else’s time to treat me,” Werslund said in an interview earlier this year. “I knew exactly what I needed—warmth, a massage, something to soothe the muscle. But I’d have to wait for someone else to give it to me, and that didn’t make sense.”

This thought process is relatable to anyone with anxiety, or any other chronic condition—you might get great relief from costly services like going to a spa, or hiring a masseuse, or somatic therapist. But it’s frustrating to feel tethered to another person’s skillset, calendar, and billing system. The promise of a device, which costs less than a single session with a clinician and can deliver years of relief with the click of a button, is appealing. The downside is that this promise too often leads to having one more piece of useless plastic in your home.

The Theragun chipped away at my muscle tension. I zoomed it around my body like I was pretending to be a race track for a Hot Wheel to entertain a child. After using it, I felt better. The catch was that I felt only a little better. I still felt tense. But it was nice to have done something that clearly diminished the symptoms of my anxiety disorder, even just a little.

“Anxiety causes muscle pain” feels a little made up to me, even as I experience it. “When the body is stressed, muscles tense up,” the American Psychological Association explains. “Chronic stress causes the muscles in the body to be in a more or less constant state of guardedness.” Muscle tension is listed in the DSM-V as an anxiety disorder symptom (it must be “present for more days than not for the past 6 months” and appear in coordination with other symptoms.)

Unlike the vibrating, warming, massage vest that I once bought from Amazon (discarded after a year,) or my headache block (trusted, used regularly,) or my vibrating face washing tool (discarded after a few uses, possibly damaging,) my possession of the Theragun is not the result of brimming with hope and belief while holding a credit card. My partner received the Theragun as a work perk several years ago from his then employer. It was an oddly intimate gift. I imagine it was intended to convey something like: “We like you more than a hundred dollars worth, and we hope you will find a way to relax on your own time and return to your keyboards with loose muscles and a renewed zeal for work.”

I remember Theraguns being extremely popular, but I thought their time had come and gone. I thought that a Theragun was like a Peloton—a piece of premium wellness technology that enjoyed a craze around 2020 and then petered out after exhausting its entire customer base. Once you have one you don’t need another one, and you might even use the one you have.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, Therabody—the Theragun company—expanded. They made mini, pro, and heated versions of the Theragun. They made Therabody cupping devices, and a number of fitness wearable products, including a pair of vibrating, crotch-high boots that are $1,100 and are aimed at athletes. In 2021 a cadre of celebrities that included Rihanna and Justin Timberlake invested in the company. Therabody expanded into skincare, making a line of gadgets that includes red light masks and anti-puffing wands. WireCutter devoted an entire feature to Therabody just last month.

Theraguns are pounding away at as many demographics as they can manage. You can buy a Therabody product on Revolve, a website known mostly for selling dresses that are a little too expensive for what they are, and you can also pick one up at a Target or Sam’s Club. Whenever I walk into The Shops at Columbus Circle, a huge, glassed-in mall on the corner of Central Park, I fantasize that I am going to have a profoundly glamorous shopping experience. But that’s not what happens. What happens is that I come upon a Theragun kiosk.

The night after my punishing attempts at making my wedding invitations, I tried the Theragun again. I was no longer particularly tense. I was just anxious in my usual way, an anxiousness that has no meaning and cannot be traced to any specific event or thought. I sat on the couch, rolling the Theragun to and fro, feeling it finagle my muscles into partial relaxation.

On the third night, the Theragun sat on the couch. I was not moved to use it. Certainly, no more than I have been moved to read my anxiety workbook, to write in my anxiety diary, to pull at my tension-reducing resistance bands, or to dissolve and drink the packet of Moon Juice Magnesi-Om Blue Lemon Calm + L-Theanine that I bought six months ago, even though when I added it to my grocery cart I felt that I was doing something practically noble.

However, after enjoying the sort-of benefits of the Theragun I did want to try the Therabody SmartGoggles, which are $220 and promise to use “compression massage, heat and vibration therapies to help reduce stress, relieve headaches and improve sleep quality.”

This is a familiar tension—buying more stuff in the hopes that it might help reduce anxiety, abandoning stuff because it didn’t help sufficiently or immediately, overthinking and feeling bad about it all because buying things that are sleek and well-marketed feels like submitting to capitalism, even though trying out a tool that might reduce your suffering would make sense under any economic system.

I was charmed by the Theragun, even though it didn’t fully deliver on its promise. I like its directness—how it attacks one of the physical manifestations of anxiety. I like its simplicity: it doesn’t try to dig into the childhood roots of your problem, or expose finely-hewn patterns in your cognition or behavior. It tries to extract your anxiety by brute force.

The reality of the Theragun is pleasant—it slightly reduces muscle tension. The Theragun as a metaphor is delightful—for a few minutes, don’t worry about your habits, your mindset, or your brain chemistry, it says. Just use this device for a tangible, immediate impact.

Coda: After I wrote and revised this essay, I asked my partner to read it and give me feedback. The first thing he said was, “That isn’t a Theragun.” It turns out his employer gave him an off-brand Theragun dupe. Needless to say, I would now like to try a Theragun.

Thanks for reading Uneasy Going! If you’d like a non-AI audio version of this essay, I recorded one here. It’s a good listen as white noise when you’re anxiously awaiting an important email:

Recently I received the kind of email I would like to receive daily. It was an email that said, basically: congratulations, you got that professional thing you wanted. (I am also happy to receive emails that say: congratulations, I have always been attracted to you. Or, congratulations, it is the month of your birthday. Come to Sephora and get a very small free mascara.)

I was overwhelmed. I had imagined getting this exact email many times. I stepped out of my uncomfortable seat at the minimalist Scandinavian coffee shop where I was working at my laptop, tripped over multiple low-slung dogs, and called my mother with shaking hands.

As I exited the cafe, the ringing phone pressed to my ear, I delivered an enormous, open-mouth smile to each remote worker who crossed my path. They smiled at me, seeming slightly taken aback. The world was so beautiful, now that I was getting the thing I wanted. I had wanted it for a long time, I reflected with deepening satisfaction. Not since childhood exactly, but probably since I was a tween!

Before I could get anyone on the phone, a terrible thought occurred: it was possible that I would not get the thing, if legal complications were to arise. I hadn’t broken any law. But I could conceive of a way that I would be accused of wrongdoing. There would be no way to prove that I hadn’t, and I would not get my thing.

I tried my sister. When she picked up, I told her that I got the thing.

“Wow!” she said, “Amazing! That’s so—” I interrupted her. “But I might not get it,” I said. “If legal complications arise.” I explained how that might play out.

“That doesn’t seem likely,” she said.

“It may or may not be likely,” I said. “But it definitely could happen, so let’s keep that in mind before we get too excited.”

Next, I got my brother on the phone. “I got this thing!” I said.

“You’ve wanted that since you were a tween!” he said, movingly.

“It might not happen, though,” I said. I explained my theory about how I might get accused of breaking the law. “I don’t want to get too excited.”

By the time I got my mom on the phone I had generated a new concern. “Even if I am not accused of any wrongdoing, getting this thing will affect my partner,” I said. I began to fantasize about how this would cause long term damage to my relationship, creating almost imperceptible cracks that would spread and eventually challenge its integrity. My mom listened sympathetically and said she was confident that this was something we would be able to work through.

When my fiancé got home, I broke the news about the thing. “That’s amazing,” he said. He wasn’t upset, which was a relief. This way I could focus on the potential lawsuit.

A few days passed. I got another email about the thing. The email said something like: “This is just to confirm that you got the thing.” I was with my parents and sister. “This is great!” they said. But as they spoke, I realized something: I had never really been eligible for the thing. I had accidentally done something in my application that broke the rules.

A feeling of horror spread through me, like a rush of sugar after eating chocolate cake on an empty stomach. I explained what I had done.

“Hmm,” said my sister. “I could be wrong, but I don’t think that breaks the rules.”

“I don’t know!” I said.

I felt that a veil of panic had fallen over me, obscuring me from other people. Nothing anyone was saying was applicable to me. Nobody could help me. What I had hoped for was not going to happen, and I had brought it on myself.

My mom started to make an unrelated phone call. I begged her to hang up so that silence could reign and I could focus on my growing feelings of panic.

I decided to call an older, successful former colleague to ask for advice. Also, I asked him if he could help me with my problem by doing something that basically amounted to committing a crime.

“No,” he said. “I will definitely not do that.”

He asked me a few questions about my problem.

“I’m honestly not sure if you broke the rules or not,” he said. We went back and forth on it for a while. Eventually, he said:

“I know you don’t want to lose out on this thing. But I have to tell you: getting this thing will not make or break your career. There is no single thing that will make or break your career.”

I was struck by the wisdom of this. No individual win or loss would assure my success, or derail it. I would not have a career defined by emails. I was going to live a long life with a lot of good things and a lot of bad things, many of them determined by me.

But I was still very interested in getting a professional thing that would just help my career immediately, even a little bit.

I decided that I would write to the person who told me I got the thing and explain: here is what I did that makes me think I may have broken the rules, and here is a potential solution.

“And if I don’t get the thing that is OKAY! And this will have been a LESSON, and I will be FINE!” I kept repeating, past the point where it was time for the phone call to end.

I passed the evening in dread. I could feel my anxiety in my forehead, my intestines, and my spine. The air felt thick and hard to swallow. I drafted my email. I redrafted it. I asked my fiancé to read my email. I asked my sister to read my email. I asked my mom and brother to read my email. (I knew my dad was asleep.)

I got in bed and imagined scenarios. I got out of bed and put on a comedy podcast. The podcast ended and I put on a recording of a woman reading The Secret Garden out loud in a whisper.

I woke up. I had not received a response to my email. I moved through my morning, achieving a phone-checking rate of once per minute. I left my friend a cryptic voice note. “I am very stressed and upset about a professional issue but I DON’T want to describe it,” I said. “But it’s really bad.” Then, in an attempt to make the voice note more worth her while, I added, “I’ve also been thinking lately that iced lattes have too much milk. But I don’t like iced Americanos!!!”

My friend responded, “Try ordering two shots of espresso over ice and adding milk.”

I had a work Zoom. The Zoom was professionally significant, and I had been looking forward to it. Everything the other person said sounded slightly muted, much quieter than the crashing waves of my fear. My eyes kept wandering away from the important Zoom to my other tab, where my email was open.

In the course of the meeting, I received an email. It was from the person who had given me the thing. It said something to the effect of, “Thanks for letting me know, but you didn’t break a rule, so it doesn’t matter.”

I told my mom. She was so happy for me.

“It seems like this process is like running a hurdle race,” she said. “Every few steps you come across a new obstacle you have to get around.”

I agreed. It had felt that way. But, I realized, it hadn’t been that way. There hadn’t been any hurdles, except the ones that I had conjured via anxiety. Everything that had happened that had felt terrible and torturous was a product of my own mind, my own enthusiasm for imagining catastrophe. The experience had been depleting, and time intensive.

And that, I thought, with some amazement, was what happened when I received good news.

Thanks for reading Uneasy Going! Please <3 it. I am willing to risk any ensuing anxiety.

Thanks for reading Uneasy Going! If you like this essay, please heart it! If you find it annoying you can also heart it, as a way to challenge yourself to be more accepting of things that annoy you.

The monk was going through a breakup.

She said so, right as I entered the room. The meditation session was already underway. I walked in and encountered 150 people sitting on the floor with their eyes closed.

“Maybe you feel tired,” the monk intoned. “Maybe you feel anxious. Maybe you feel brokenhearted. Like me—I’m going through a breakup.”

The room was so quiet that I felt, easing myself into a seated position, like I might as well have kicked a crystal chandelier. I put my tote bag on the ground, where it made a sound like I had dropped a bundle of cinderblocks. I could only hope that for the meditators these disruptions were whetstones against which they could sharpen their skills of non-judgmental focus.

I was relieved to have arrived just in time to hear this allusion to the monk’s love life. (It turned out I did not need to worry. She referred to it a few more times that evening.) She gave some more instruction and then trailed off, and we sat in silence. Through the glass doors came the sound of a trickle of water falling into the stone basin of a fountain.

Almost everyone was seated facing the monk, but I had found an empty chair that sat perpendicular to the group, pushed up against the side of the room. It gave me a good view of rows of blank faces, fluttering eyelashes, the way people squirmed and sighed, the one guy who had placed his phone face up next to his thigh and kept stroking its screen.

In the quiet of the room my thoughts sounded like they were being projected through a megaphone, my internal narrator pleased to have the floor to herself to boom out an endless stream of observations. I tried to focus my attention on the sound of the fountain. I imagined my thoughts merging with the flowing water, each idea tumbling down into the endless stream. I did that for a few seconds at a time, and then mentally drafted several texts, which I later forgot to send. I went back to the stream. I opened my eyes and watched everyone else, which was fascinating but came with a Peeping Tom feeling. I focused on the fountain again. I congratulated myself several times for being there.

The gong rang out and the monk began to speak. Her topic that evening was mindfulness and breath. When she used to work in the corporate world, the monk said, she went through mindfulness training to become a more optimized worker. You might have heard of breath-work and mindfulness as tools promote productivity and reduce stress.

“I think in all of those things it’s actually quite helpful,” she said. “But I think when the Buddha taught about mindfulness that probably wasn’t his idea—becoming more efficient, or anything like that.” People laughed, because it was funny and because we wanted to express that we were like her, that we understood that corporate mindfulness was a cruel contradiction and we were in search of something richer.

I had met this monk previously and had been so attracted to her language and her affect that it caused me to reconsider my previous dismissal of meditation. She had a habit of saying profound things in the blasé tone of a disaffected teenager. She referred often to her anxiety and her overthinking. She did not seem like someone who had transcended—she seemed like someone who had a lot of complaints. The monk was, to me, as a surfing, bearded youth pastor is to a semi-skeptical youth grouper. She was the reason I was in the room. She had been bestowed with one of the rarest qualities present in a person who engages in mindfulness: she was not annoying.

Breath practice, she told the group, “is about being awake and being intimate with what’s happening with myself, in this moment, in this body, right now. It’s not about what I wish was happening, it’s not about what I’m worried might happen.” Interesting, interesting, I thought—how often mindfulness teachers said things that apply to me directly, and how I can only hear them if the person first wins my respect by demonstrating unlikely and spectacular qualities.

“My thoughts, they can lie to me, you know? My fears, they can exaggerate what might be happening around me. My fantasies about things carry me away from this moment,” she said. Breath, though, is constant and immediate. “We are all experiencing a certain reality together in this moment, in this room,” she went on, sounding, amazingly, not high. “How often do we get distracted by the thing, by the noise, by our phone, by the email, all the myriad things that are happening in this city? In this practice, when we’re returning again and again back to this moment, back to the breath, back to this present reality.”

Mindfulness offers an invitation, she said: “When we’re looking within, and finding that space, finding that clarity, finding this one, this precious one, is where freedom actually starts to begin.”

[You can listen to the monk’s full talk here.]

The monk asked everyone to form small discussion groups. I smiled tentatively at two women sitting near me to indicate that I would like to be in their group. A man came over and joined us, crouching on the nearest empty cushion.

The first discussion question was: “What are some times when you feel really in your body?” Even though I was raised in 90s Seattle, where we were constantly passing talking sticks and giving full-bodied hugs to strangers at interminable potlucks, I considered standing up and leaving to avoid answering. The second question was: what is something that really takes you out of your body?”

Everyone in my group was a little younger than me. Instead of exuding superior faux-spirituality they all modeled a disarming openness and curiosity. I instantly desired their approval. We went in a circle, taking turns to monologue.

When it was my turn, I said I guess actually I felt most in my body when I was lying in bed about to fall asleep, that this was the time of day when I felt unburdened by stress, all thoughts of the day replaced by a cheerful knowledge that nothing was expected of me except to lie there and rest. As I spoke I realized with horror that this was true, and also that my monologue had been longer than the other people in the group. I apologized. They smiled.

“Don’t worry,” one of them said, and patted my knee.

The guy to my right said that sometimes during runs, after a certain point, he found himself enjoying a feeling of total embodiment, free from thoughts, fully present, a similar effect to the one brought on by meditating. We were all impressed. The woman next to me asked how long he typically ran before he arrived at that state.

“Maybe five or six miles,” he said. The rest of us cringed.

I said that his method to achieve a meditative state seemed especially challenging—not only was he running six miles, but he probably didn’t listen to anything, right? No music, or podcasts?

“Well,” he said. He tilted his head, thinking. “You listen to the wind.”

Every time I go to the meditation group I leave the moment it ends. I shove my feet into my shoes without tying them properly, talk to no one, and peer deeply into my cellphone. I would love to say that this is because everyone at the meditation group is unbearably earnest. But actually every time I meet intriguing, even fun people.

The problem is that when I go to the meditation group I meet a version of myself who is unfamiliar. My personality doesn’t quite work in the context of Zen. I think that this is because the social contract in the group calls for each person to restrict herself to total honesty. That is why the monk told us several times that she was going through a breakup. That is why the guy in my group said that when he runs he listens to the wind and then didn’t add, “lol.”

They had adopted a non-judgmental attitude towards the truths of their lives. They were not, like me, horrified when confronted by them. They were “intimate with what’s happening with [themselves,] in this moment, in this body, right now.”

And most amazingly of all, they had done it without being annoying.

I read this story out loud and recorded it in case you want to play it at a 35th birthday party.

The birthday boy ran his hands through his hair.

“I’ve got a lot of grey!” he exclaimed. “Let’s face it! I’m old!” Everybody didn’t know what to say. It was his birthday. His hair looked good. He was turning 35, the same age everyone at the party was, or planned to be in the future.

“Let me pitch you this,” I said. I was the least relevant person there, an extra on the birthday party set. I had previously restricted myself to comments like, “That’s hilarious,” and, “Did anyone watch the most recent season of Survivor?”

“You’re actually pretty young now,” I said. “And you will definitely be older, like, in the future.”

This comment did not lead to social success. I would also be annoyed if someone said this to me, at my birthday party.

Feeling—or pretending to feel—horrified by aging out of your 20s is a cultural pastime. In an essay in Cazzie David’s recent book Delusions, written when she was 29, David imagines that being 30 “must feel something like knowing you are about to get hit by a bus on a beautiful day.” In Bo Burnham’s Netflix special Inside, the comedian wails about the horror of turning 30, and sketches out tepid plans to kill himself at 40. On social media, creators prove their relatability by complaining about being “ancient” and “elderly” in their late 20s and 30s.

I would like to announce that I am formally ending my engagement with this sort of thing. I will no longer be gently placating, validating, or contorting my face and saying, “Noooooo!” I don’t feel like cosigning this delusion anymore.

It’s like when thin people finish a meal and then say, “I feel so fat!” It doesn’t matter whether the speaker is being dysmorphic or just casually deriding fat people to make themselves feel better. Either way, it’s more of an inside thought. This behavior doesn’t have to be indulged.

This is a hard line for me to draw, because I love complaining and listening to other people complain. Of course it is reasonable to feel bad about getting older in a culture that rewards youth and punishes aging and disability. I am always happy to hear anyone reflect on how, as they approach their birthday, they are depressed about their lack of accomplishments, they feel rejected, they are entertaining the idea that they are a failure, they suspect that life has many punishments in store for them in the coming years, and so on. These are, to me, like little pieces of candy that we can give each other.

But I am committed to stigmatizing the thing where people suggest, out loud, that being a certain age is repulsive. I think this behavior is, in a small but significant way, making life harder to enjoy.

I started to get frustrated with this phenomenon during a period when I spent a lot of time around 20-somethings. (Okay I’ll tell you—it was grad school! The period was grad school.) My younger colleagues, specifically those who were under 25, were in what I would describe as an auto-erotic relationship with their own ages. They were enchanted by their birth years, and could not help themselves from marveling out loud about how little time they had spent on the planet. Once a week, a 20-something would find a way in conversation to make the coy reveal that this might be hard for some of us to believe, but they didn’t “even remember 9/11.” It was like watching a baby discover their own toes.

Towards people who were older, they expressed polite condolence. They could not imagine turning 28. I was surprised to learn that I was supposed to be mourning my upcoming 30th birthday.

It’s embarrassing to watch a smug 20-something revel in their relative youth because it reflects a deep and obvious insecurity. What else could compel a person to over-emphasize such a fleeting non-achievement? Getting mad about this, though, only makes me seem more ancient and crone-like, lost in my antique memories of the 1990s. It also seems to reveal my own insecurity—if I’m so happy about being in my 30s, why am I so defensive?

I think this hand-wringing about aging irritates me so much because it is a display of anticipatory anxiety. These comments exhibit dread of a future situation. That dread has commandeered these people enough that they cannot stop talking about it, even though talking about it robs them of the present and accelerates them into the future, when the thing they fear is actually happening.

“Don’t you see?!” I want to shout. “You’re actually wasting the time you have now! By insisting that you are old you’re making yourself older than you are! You’re bringing about your fear!”

And they could say the same thing to me—my litanies about things that could go wrong, recited out loud in the subconscious belief that making predictions casts a preventative power over the future, and repeated for certainty. It’s so easy to spot other people’s patterns, to point out the way their own behavior is causing their unhappiness. I am inpatient to rewrite their scripts even though I haven’t succeeded in rewriting my own.

One more reason “ew, I’m old”-type comments should be given no quarter is because they are unfunny. We should be more embarrassed by borrowing bland cliches from the public consciousness than by aging. When I hear these jokes I think, “Not only am I going to die, I also have to spend my brief life listening to people recite generic memes!” Let’s challenge ourselves to go beyond the stock phrase, “One year closer to death.” Overuse has wrung the meaning out of that one.

Here is my suggested edit: “One year closer to the time when I am so old that on the day of my best friend’s funeral I will think, ‘No—I’m just too tired to go out.’” That would go well with a slice of cake.

Thanks for reading Uneasy Going! In a slight departure, today I also published an article in the New York Times books section, highlighting some of the best novels that feature weddings!You can read the piece here.

In addition, I recorded an audio version of this post, in case you want to listen to it while overheated in a Roman piazza.

We woke up at 6am and walked to the Trevi Fountain. It was overwhelmingly beautiful. White marble rose up around us, sweeping us into a more majestic century. Unfortunately, I continued to be felled by my childhood curse (the more spectacular and culturally distinct a setting is, the more it reminds me of Disneyland. Every world wonder recalls the mocked up plaster versions I first saw as a child—the French quarter in New Orleans, rural Thailand, Davenport, Iowa, I think, “This is just like Disneyland!”)

All around the rim of the fountain people posed for pictures, positioning their bodies as if to blend with the tritons behind them. A couple with symmetrical facial features entwined against the iron banister. One long, thin arm shot out from their jumble of limbs to take a picture. Everyone smiled a photo-specific smile, determinedly making memories.

We walked to the Spanish Steps, the streets still quiet. I stared up at the Keats and Shelley house, where both poets lived. It was closed, so I listened to a podcast in which a supremely enthusiastic academic delivered a close reading on the epitaph on Keats’ grave (“HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER.”’) The theme of the Trevi Fountain is “the taming of the waters.” Keats’ name was writ in water. Was there something there? Or was I just very hot and addled after a night in the hotel where the receptionist had, once summoned to check the non-functioning air conditioning unit, performed a kind of theater to indicate that she was being absolutely blasted by cold air even though it wasn’t working, and then ran from us?

The podcast about Keats’ grave was so delightful, and I was so impressed with myself for enjoying it, that I cued up another episode as we walked a mile from the Spanish Steps to a bakery. This next episode was jauntily titled, “Giovanni Keats: The Story of John Keats in Italy.” It chronicled Keats’ final year of life, which he spent in Rome when he was 25 and dying of consumption, or tuberculosis. The narrator explained how Keats suffered obscenely, struggling to breathe as the disease ravaged his lungs. He spent his time in Rome slowly dying in a stuffy room above the Spanish Steps, subsisting for months in the throes of total agony, skirting the brink of death. He shocked his doctor every morning by not becoming a corpse. The narrator chirped that this way of dying had been Keats’ greatest fear since watching the same brutal disease overtake his mother when he was a little child.

The story, and the morbid telling of it by the podcast host was so devastating that I felt actually nauseous after listening. I ate my breakfast pizza, despondent. To cheer myself I listened to “Cemetry Gates,” the song by The Smiths that begins:

A dreaded sunny day

So I meet you at the cemetery gates

Keats and Yeats are on your side

That cemetery, which I had always imagined was in London, was just a mile or so away from us in Rome. We could go there, though it would involve an exhausting, even dangerous number of buses (two.) Why did the singer dread a sunny day and seek the quiet grief of a graveyard? Why did I obsess over Keats’ labored dying breaths on a sunny vacation day in Rome?

My anxiety does not take a break on vacation. It reduces, morphs, reconstitutes, looks for ways to latch on to frictionless days without deadlines, inviting me to tug at my partner’s sleeve under the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica and mouth, “Are you mad at me?” After a day of lying out on the beach, I can wake up in a non-specific but undeniable panic, heart pounding.

Tuberculosis was called “the romantic disease.” The whole gang had it: Keats, Shelley, Kafka, Chekhov, Poe, Bronte, Orwell, Dostoevsky, the list unfurls like an overly ambitious syllabus.

“Suffering from the disease’s effects was seen not only as a beautiful and dramatic way to die, but also an aspirational way to live,” write Alicea Hibbard and Annette Lopez Rosa in an article for the American Society for Microbiology. Consumption made people thin, white, and weak, embodiments of the European beauty standard at the time. Hibbard and Rosa quote Byron, Keats’ bitchier poet peer, who said, “I should like, I think, to die of consumption… because then the women would all say, ‘see that poor Byron—how interesting he looks in dying!’” There was also a sense that tuberculosis made a person’s mortality more obvious, and that this was romantic. The consumptive person flaunted the preciousness of life.

A version of what we might now call anxiety—nervousness—also once earned the nickname “the fashionable disease.” Like tuberculosis, there was a period from the mid-19th to the early 20th century when nervousness was seen as a disease of the upper class, one that came with some glamour and suggested sensitivity.

A version of this pride in anxiety continued into the 20th century. Historian Andrea Tone writes, “In 1950s American culture, anxiety was viewed less as a serious psychiatric disorder than as a badge of achievement: an emblem of struggle, but also of success.” The popular imagination may associate tranquilizers with the American housewife, writes Tone, but so many men popped tension-taming pills in public that they were referred to as “executive Excedrin.”

And the newest iteration of that defiant pride in having an anxiety disorder lives on, though today it looks more like a sense of identification with a diagnosis, a comforting label, an opportunity for membership to a vague but gigantic community.

In every other way, anxiety and tuberculosis are not overlapping conditions. Tuberculosis is curable, and it kills nearly one and a quarter million people every year. But in their day, anxiety and tuberculosis gained status—and ignored huge swaths of sufferers—by attaching themselves to lofty connotations. Attempts to recast suffering from anxiety as glamorous, laudable, or endearing are interesting to me because they seem to benefit the sufferers very little except by raising up an invisible wall between a few wealthy, aestheticized anxious people and everyone else. I am thinking of the people who live in communities where anxiety disorders are not spoken about or treated, where the mainstreaming and destigmatization of anxiety disorders simply means that Billie Eilish has said she has it, and relief is as distant as all the other facets of Billie Eilish’s life.

Even a fresh cappuccino in a sunlit piazza full of toddler speaking Italian could not bring me back from the gloom of a podcast visit to Keats’ death bed. The only thing that helped was that the speaker noted that even though Keats is celebrated for his genius, he often actually wrote quite bad poems.

This cheered me, a lot.

Welcome to Uneasy Going! If you’re new, thank you for being here! If you’ve been with me for a while, thank you for not unsubscribing! If you liked this post, press the heart button so it can reach more people. If you don’t like it I encourage you to heart it anyway, out of pity.

I recorded an audio version above, in case you want to listen to this in the waiting room of a doctor’s office.

I went to a new primary care doctor last week. I found her online by searching for available doctors at the large San Francisco hospital where I see my psychiatrist. She had a handful of admirable Google reviews. She possessed all of the qualities I look for in a doctor: a woman who accepts my insurance and has immediate availability.

My partner has a passion for medical appointments that I have only before seen in people who are parents. The night before, he sat me down and together we made a list of everything I should ask during my 16 or so minutes with the doctor. I am—to use a phrase I learned in a college seminar about gender and sexuality and do find helpfully perception-shifting—a temporarily able-bodied person. As a result this list was very short, and sure to bore anyone who has lasted long enough in medicine to become a working doctor. It went like this:

• Check iron levels?

• Headaches sometimes

• Acid reflux still: why?? Ask for prescription?

Lately I have been thinking about going off the SSRIs I take for anxiety. I thought about asking the doctor her opinion, though I thought she would probably just say, “That’s something to talk about with your psychiatrist.”

When I arrived in the office I was greeted by a man sitting behind the desk. He smiled and fixed me with the kind of eye contact that would prompt an introvert to excuse themselves for the purpose of standing alone in a bathroom, staring at the wall.

“Welcome,” he said. “I’m so glad you’re here. You have picked the best practice.”

He had an intentional way of speaking—slow, each word deliberate. And then there was that eye contact, which was less suggestive of a receptionist and more of the leader of a wilderness rescue team making first contact with a child who has been trapped for three days.

A woman sat behind the desk, next to the man. She was on the phone, but she still looked over and grinned in welcome.

The man explained that I was there for a physical, and that I was entitled to one physical annually. I agreed that this was the case. He said, in his measured, friendly way, that during a physical, the patient may ask certain questions pertaining to their vitals and their medical history. If the patient asks other questions, they may face additional charges. The patient may be charged for asking questions about any part of their body that is in pain. They may be charged for asking about new symptoms, or existing symptoms. They may be charged for asking about chronic conditions.

I have been to many primary care appointments, but I could not remember any other one that was so à la carte. He handed me a piece of paper that explained everything he was saying and required me to sign, acknowledging that I understood that I would be billed for asking questions about these issues, plus a few others.

“Say you hurt your elbow,” the man behind the desk said, pleasantly. “And you tell the doctor, ‘My elbow hurts.’ That is something you would be charged for.”

“So,” I said. “You are telling me that I can’t ask the doctor about…physical pain?” I made sure to say this as meanly as possible. The man smiled a world-weary smile.

“We have people come in for physicals, and then they get bills in the mail and they call us and say, ‘WHAT IS THIS BILL FOR?’ And we have to tell them: ‘Well, you asked about your elbow.’ The thing is, they are getting billed because the doctor has to code their question differently, because it’s not covered by the physical.”

“Okaaaaay,” I said, regressing with ease to my former self (a cruel teenager.) “If I tell you what I want to ask the doctor about, will you tell me how it will be ‘coded’?”

He said that the medical assistant who would check me in would probably be able to tell me. He leaned in and said, more quietly, “If you have really bad insurance, like if your copays are really high, I do recommend just asking about other issues now, to avoid coming back and getting charged for more appointments.”

“I just feel like this has never come up at any previous physical appointment,” I said. The man continued to smile.

“This has been true at every physical appointment you have ever had,” he said, gently. “We’re just telling you about it.”

The woman next to him hung up the phone and leaned towards us.

“A weeping rash!” she exclaimed. “I was on the phone before so I didn’t get to say this, but my example of something you can’t ask about in a physical is a weeping rash!”

“Okaaaay,” I said, summoning the bitchiness of a thousand covert bullies who are regarded by teachers and parents as having untapped leadership qualities. “I won’t ask about a ‘weeping rash’ at this doctor’s appointment.”

“It’s because of insurance companies,” the man said.

I had known the whole time that it was because of insurance, but I guess I had been pretending to myself that it was the office worker making these decisions, instead of my insurance company, which took in, at last count, $863 million a year in revenue.

I sat down in a flurry of self-dislike and began to fill out a sheaf of papers. The papers included a list of diagnostic questions about anxiety disorder. It is a form I have filled out dozens of times. I noticed with surprise that my anxiety level, at least on paper, was very low.

The woman behind the desk continued to make phone calls. Like the conversation we had just had, these were unlike my previous experiences in doctors offices, and so unusual that it sounds exaggerated.

“Hey girl!” she trilled. “I am lovin’ this WHETHA! Anyway, just calling to remind you that you have an appointment in our office tomorrow at 3pm.”

As I told the form that I belong to a religious organization and frequently call my friends and family, she told a patient, “Coolio. I will talk to you soon. See ya.”

I was called into the doctor’s office. I quizzed the medical technician on whether my questions would be covered by insurance. She said yes to the iron check and the headaches, but she wasn’t confident about acid reflux. I realized that I would just have to ask rather than make a second trip and a second copay to ask.

She took my vitals. My resting heart rate typically scrambles into the 90s during doctor’s appointments. A medical assistant once told me that when your heart rate spikes in the doctor’s office, this is called “white coat syndrome.” I don’t have health anxiety. I am never worried that the doctor is going to give me a death sentence. It’s more like the social anxiety of being at a two person party where you are almost naked and your conversational partner is determined to find out what is wrong with you.

I peered at the machine. My heart rate was 77. I haven’t had such a low heart rate at a doctor’s appointment in years.

The doctor came in. She seemed bored and uncomfortable around the human body, as doctors often do. She had a vocal style that led her to sound slightly disgusted.

“Do you…get your period?” she said, sounding like a divorced dad talking to his tween daughter.

She came alive when I asked about acid reflux, offering me thoughtful explanations and prescribing a course of proton pump inhibitors. I got dressed and went back into the reception area.

“I am lookin CA-YUTE today!” I heard the woman behind the desk say to nobody.

It seemed possible that my heart rate was so low because the front desk workers in the doctor’s office had been obscurely friendly. It could also be that my anxiety medication was working, or that I have achieved a lifestyle with few stressors, or that exercise was finally paying dividends, or that the machine was broken.

The doctor certainly couldn’t tell me. The psychiatrist wouldn’t be able to tell me, either. We could all only guess. It was a pleasant change, at least. I walked into the bright sun and went home to wait for my surprise bill.

An audio version!

At a dinner party recently, my sister turned to the host.

“So!” she said. “What was your most traumatic moment?”

We were talking about a quality the three of us share, which is parents who are rabbis. Our host, who is my sister’s close friend, has a dad who is a rabbi. My parents are both rabbis. My sister wasn’t asking about our host’s most traumatic moment in his entire life, just his most traumatic moment as a rabbi’s kid. Still, I was surprised by her question. We were only on the soup course.

“Um,” said the host. “I don’t know.” He had just gotten up to bring the main dish to the table. He seemed thrown by the question about the most traumatic childhood moment, as impacted by his dad’s role as the leader of a large suburban synagogue on the east coast.

“Okay—” my sister said, so excited that she didn’t even stop to probe the host in case he just wanted to be asked three times, convert-style, before confessing his trauma, “because our most traumatic rabbis’ kid moment was the one with the congregant who had the gun collection!”

She had piqued the attention of the people around the table. “Gun collection!” people said in surprise.

As kids, my sister and brother and I wandered our parents’ synagogue like young, feeble royals, fending off compliments, confessions, and sly insults from congregants. In line for kiddush lunch after Saturday morning services, a woman would start a conversation with the words, “Your dad was at my husband’s death bed, you know.” I cream cheesed many bagels while listening to people describe the worst moments of their lives.

Mostly, congregants lavished us with attention and praise. They were generous and kind. Of course, those interactions are not the memorable ones. We remember best the times when adults acted inappropriate, or rude, or when we feared they were planning to kill us, as in the story my sister was about to tell.

I was especially surprised that my sister wanted to tell this story, since she wasn’t even there when it happened.

“You weren’t even there when that happened,” I said to my sister, in an accusatory hiss that was not perfectly matched to the dinner party setting.

“Yes I was,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“You were in college!” I said. “Only I was there!” Actually our brother was there too, but I had always felt he was too young to understand what was going on.

We narrowed our eyes at each other over our soup.

“It wasn’t even traumatic for you!” I said, hoping that the other people at the table had become magically deaf. “It was only traumatic for me!”

Well, we told the story. I interrupted my sister every few lines to say that she was in college and could have no memory of this, and she said no I was there I wasn’t in college, and I said well maybe the situation stretched on longer than we both remember, and she said yes, maybe.

The group was amused and horrified by the story, which I do consider to be the lone traumatic episode of my very good childhood, transformed into dinner party fodder on a Sunday night.

“We didn’t even tell the part about the police escorting us home from school,” I lamented silently, as the conversation moved on and everyone started eating the bean-based vegetarian main.

“The thing is,” my sister broke in again. “The reason our parents were so easily convinced that someone was coming to kill us is because—”

And then off she went again, telling the history of our family anxiety, how it was passed down from generation to generation, until the version you see here, manifesting in this digital newsletter.

What the hell, I thought. This is my story of family anxiety that I am going to roll out at some point with a lot of flair and literary styling as a beautiful essay or minorly notable book! And she is telling it as a little crumb of amusement between people’s reports of their recent trips to Japan!

I love to know people’s childhood traumas. I’m sure you do, too. I’m also thrilled to hear about any that happened in adulthood. When I got into essay writing as a teenager, my parents—in a very loving way, you have to believe me—would joke, “Oh no, what are you going to do? You’ll never be a great writer because we gave you such a happy childhood!” There was Nora Ephron with her alcoholic mother and David Sedaris with his cruel father and there was me with endless bedtime stories and pasta dinners and steady reassurances that I was loved and would be loved forever.

Then when I was 17 the gun scare situation happened. And around that same time, a worse thing happened to me. Aha! I thought. My childhood trauma has arrived! And just under the wire.

This week I watched a clip from the new Bravo reality show The Real Housewives of Rhode Island. In it Ashley Iaconetti, a star in the constellation of the Bachelor franchise, makes a tearful confession.

“When I was going on the Bachelor I was always like, ‘I don’t have a sob story! I have no idea what I’m gonna talk about!’” she says, weeping.

The camera pans to other women who sit conspicuously rigid, so as not to be mistaken as nodding sympathetically.

“...kay,” one says.

“Ashley is crying that she has nothing to cry about,” the other woman translates.

I relate to Iaconetti, who accidentally laid bare the way traumatic stories are a form of currency in the arts and entertainment industry, and within interpersonal relationships. When I write, I find myself hoarding these few traumas, as I am now, if saving them for a rainy day. My puny little traumas! My precious, terrible, brushes with horror that made me who I am! I hold on to my threadbare memories in the hopes of arranging them later in a way that will make me legible to other people, and will also be moving, and timely. Unlike Iaconetti, I fear that these are single-use tokens, and so I guard them, waiting for precisely the right moment to deploy them.

The dinner party conversation offered another theory: that traumatic stories are not precious or profitable. They do not have to live in a box at the back of the mind, waiting to be taken out and displayed with breathless importance.

Critics revolt against the use of trauma as the engine of every fictional character because it reduces people to clichés. But the worst moments of our lives really do belong on a list of clichés—they boil down to, as Iaconetti said, “sob stories.” People and life are cruel to each other in just a few predictable ways. Still, I always like hearing people’s traumatic stories. It’s satisfying to get one more piece of evidence about Why They Are Like That.

Anyway, I appreciated what Ashley Iaconetti said. She didn’t want to have a “sob story” to be likable, or to get screen time. She said she just wanted something to talk about.

I was on this very website recently when I came across a post titled “Peptides 101,” by Hannah Bronfman. Bronfman is a socialite, influencer, DJ, investor, and the scion of both the Seagrams beverage family and the Lehman banking family. Her grandfather endowed a prestigious Jewish youth leadership fellowship that I was rejected from as a 15 year old, after an interview when I answered the question “What is your favorite book?” with “Harry Potter.” For this reason I have always felt shame when I see images of Hannah Bronfman.

In her post, Bronfman describes her use of peptides. Peptides are amino acids—to say more would be to pretend to a level of knowledge that I do not have. GLP-1s are peptides, and skincare brands sell serums containing peptides. Insulin is a peptide. And I learned, from Bronfman’s post, some peptides are thought to reduce anxiety.

I vaguely understood that a certain class of tech-adjacent, longevity-curious bio-hackers are “peptide stacking”—buying peptides from the “grey market” and taking them in combination to try to live longer and work faster and look more eerily corporeal. But I did not understand that this dubious cornucopia of pills and shots may extend to anxiety relief.

Bronfman writes:

“I was prescribed peptides by my doctor, who I connected with via the Hone Health portal. Right now, I’m using two nasal spray peptides: SEMAX and Selank (sometimes written as C-Max and C-Link). Both are for focus and brain function but in slightly different ways. SEMAX feels more like pure focus and productivity and Selank helps take the edge off anxiety.”

Reading this, I wondered: why is Hannah Bronfman being prescribed an anxiety medication I have never heard of? Why does she have a sanctioned way to “take the edge off anxiety” that my psychiatrists have never mentioned? Knowing that the ultra-rich have access to anxiety treatments that the rest of us do not has the sting of seeing a popular girl carrying the newest luxury bag, except the status symbol of it is melded with the chance that she will have a more functional, happy, pain-free life than us.

I go to an attentive, thoughtful psychiatrist at a well-ranked hospital in a big city, though. So I am not exactly suffering in this regard.

A few seconds of furious googling revealed that my doctors have never prescribed me peptides for anxiety because they are not approved by the FDA. I had assumed that Bronfman was namedropping “Hone Health Portal” because of an undisclosed ad deal. But more likely, she is tipping readers off to a place to get anti-aging peptides that exist on the grey market—that is, peptides that are legal to buy, but are not regulated.

Should you and I be ordering Selank and Semax from a website that gets around FDA approval by marketing its products as “for research only” and “not for human or veterinary use”? Or should we do a $249 one-time strategic deep dive phone call with Dr. Kristi, who is not a medical doctor but a molecular oncologist, to receive a personalized peptide protocol? What about Dr. Debra Durst, who actually is an M.D. based in Knoxville, Tennessee, and offers “personalized advice on peptides” for anxiety via phone consultation?

I attempted to research the validity and safety of peptides for people with anxiety. These attempts were largely not successful.

I found a Russian study from 2017 that said that rats were less anxious when they took Selank. And I found a Russian study from this year that said that taking Selank made mice less anxious, and less plastered than they get on benzodiazepines. If you are a depressed or anxious rat or mouse, peptides could definitely be a good idea for you.

I could find little to no information about the data behind Selank and Semax from the usual suspects—the WebMDs, the MayoClinics, university health websites, and mainstream publications that cover wellness. (The New York Times published a great piece about biohackers—“each week someone will bring something new,” one of the biohackers said, “and everyone will inject it”—but didn’t mention Selank or Semax.) Even Wikipedia had little to say.

Given this lack of information, I trawled Reddit and Twitter, where people wrote with authority about these peptides, as if citing long established findings published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The most comprehensive and straightforward explanation I found came from TikTok. It was delivered by a doctor who is not a psychiatrist or a researcher, but a cardiothoracic surgeon. (His name is Dr. Michael Richman and he is also on Substack.) This is what he said about Selank and Semax for anxiety:

“The available literature references clinical studies showing anxiolytic effects comparable to benzos, but detailed published results from rigorous, randomized controlled trials are not accessible in western medical literature. Most of the studies have been done in Russia, and are from the 1980s.”

He went on:

“The references do not provide primary trial data, sample sizes—in other words, how many people were in the trial—how they did the study—in other words the methodology — or any statistical analysis that would allow any independent evaluation of efficacy, or ‘does it work.’ And the bulk of the published studies are pre-clinical studies, which means from animal models—they used mice and rats and test tubes, in-vitro mechanistic investigations, rather than peer-reviewed human clinical trial results with detailed methodological data and outcomes.”

“So,” he concluded. “It does not have FDA approval. Nor should it. And it’s not approved as a medication in any western regulatory framework.”

I found this explanation convincing in every way except the fact that it came from TikTok. I reached out to the doctor for a comment but he did not respond. I also found a pretty good written explanation of the research behind anti-anxiety peptides from a psychiatrist, who wrote of Selank, “I cannot recommend it as a treatment because the evidence does not meet the standard I would apply to a psychiatric medication. What I can do is help patients who choose to use it understand the evidence, monitor for problems, and make more informed decisions.”

This all does not add up. Why is a billionaire heiress snorting grey-market Russian peptides that have only been tested on mice and rats? Why are hackers injecting themselves with unregulated proteins? Are they smart risk takers and I am a fool cowering behind red tape? Or is injecting yourself with unregulated proteins just a sign of the hubris that comes from thinking, because of your ability to hoard and earn money, that you are a kind of god?

Eventually, my research led me to a post on a public Facebook group for the city of Springfield, Missouri. I did not feel good about taking advice on my mental health and pharmacology from a public Facebook group made by and for the people of Springfield, but my peptide research had conditioned me to feel open to all voices, regardless of qualification.

“Anyone taking peptide slank for anxiety” a post asked.

One commenter responded, “Hi ladies! What is the difference in peptides vs pills? Like if we are wanting it for depression, or weight loss why would I choose peptides vs going to a Dr?” Her comment neatly sums up the issue here—most doctors will not supply peptides. So if you want them anyway, you make the choice to turn away from medical science and descend into a shadowy backwater of hearsay and dodgy websites. Appropriately, many people chimed in with links to grey-market peptide websites, or offered their own services.

“I’d definitely do the doctor all the way if they were more natural and actually could prescribe more helpful things,” responded one man, who offered his services as a “coach” and, seemingly, middleman for peptide sales. Many people in Springfield, Missouri, it seemed, are trying to biohack their anxiety. One dissenter’s comment caught my eye.

“Exposure to your anxiety triggers is the only cure,” he wrote. “I literally stand in my yard and ask for god to strike me down. Guess what. Never happens and im ok. So are you. Exercise and eat better and itll go away but if you try to mask it youll always suffer.” As a credential, the poster offered that he was a 30-time veteran of the emergency room for anxiety and panic.

His advice, while skipping over a few crucial steps and offering little nuance in regards to the benefits of medication, is more or less in line with the idea of exposure therapy. His comment attracted critics, but he barreled on.

“Humor me here,” he wrote. “Commit yourself to sprinting 30 feet twice a day, cutting out some sugar, doing one full pull up per day, then turning off every damn light and tv and phone 1 hour before bed.”

I believe that medication is a crucial part of treating anxiety for a lot of people. I think many people experience years of unnecessary suffering because people who have no business giving advice about mental health steer them away from medication. But this comment made me laugh out loud, especially because “sprinting 30 feet twice a day” is such a humane, doable exercise suggestion compared to many I have seen.

I am so tempted to order Selank nasal spray that states very clearly “Handle only by qualified professionals in controlled environments,” inhale it daily, and report back. But I am telling myself I should try that Springfield man’s anti-anxiety program first.

If I can make it two months on his program of daily mini sprints and phone breaks, then I get to order the unregulated protein nose drugs as a treat. I’ll let you know if I can stick to the protocol.

The great dilemma of a comfort watch is that good stories have conflict. The anxious viewer demands narrative entertainment without suspense and tension, which is like saying you want a house with no walls. Every so often, I write about a piece of media that struck a balance between jangling my nervous system and putting me to sleep. In the past I’ve written about Mamma Mia! and Sorry, Baby.

I have been watching Survivor season 50 as it airs these past few weeks, having never previously seen an episode of the show. At first, my fiancé watched and I sat next to him on the couch, looking at my phone and making un-endearing comments about the contestants’ inane devotion to the game, and their Spirit Halloween-style relationship to indigenous, polytheistic cultures.

“Oh, I should let him have his little things,” I patronized my fiancé, internally. “It could be worse! He could be watching golf!”

But soon I was mesmerized by footage of a grown man lying in a hammock while another adult crouched on the ground whispering into his ear, “I’ve always respected you…” I watched in wonder as the contestants talked about which of them is the best at finding things, and as they cheered each other on through such challenges as “pushing a box that is filled with stuff.”

Soon, I developed a Pavlovian response to Wednesdays. Waiting for that evening’s Survivor episode, my mind filled with images of software engineers and pharmaceutical salespeople marching across the beach, their eyelash extensions fluttering in the ocean breeze, their abs rippling like the sand at low tide.

I was so unfamiliar with Survivor that I mistakenly thought it was a show about people surviving in the wilderness with few resources—hunting and foraging, building shelters, trying to stay safe in the elements. It’s not. Survivor is about a few things: relay races, gossiping, and lying. It is more like Jewish summer camp than anything I have ever seen on TV. It is probably like other kinds of summer camp, too, but Jewish summer camp is my point of reference. I thought the challenges were going to be things like eating scorpions and walking on hot coals. Instead, the challenges are all appropriate for 4th grade and up—solve a puzzle, try to get a little ball to land in a hole, build a bridge using sticks, swim race. All of the challenges promote the value of teamwork.

Here are some aspects of Survivor that make it similar to Jewish summer camp, or, at risk of seeming self-hating, any summer camp:

• Instead of trying to catch fish or gather kindling for the fire, the contestants mostly hang out in small clusters, bonding by saying bad things about each other

• They are constantly finding new and creative things to do with bandanas

• They get into petty fights and power struggles over things that would have no significance in the rest of their lives.

• They have regular cabin meetings (“tribal counsels”)

• They have to carry around water bottles around at all time

• They form “alliances” (cliques) on the basis of almost no conversation or common ground, just a desire to team up to amass power and dominate the weak

• They revere their authority figure (camp director/host Jeff Probst) and also resent him for always standing around shouting at them and flaunting his mystique

• They are so happy to live in close proximity, with limited resources, and potential for humiliation, among their best friends and their greatest nemeses, that their life during this finite experience begins to feel more real and significant than their real lives

Survivor has three key elements that relax me: it takes place on a white sand beach, the stakes are not that high, and every person is someone who, if you talked to them for five minutes at a bus stop, would cause you to say, “That was a real character!” Their self-awareness flickers in and out like a campfire on a Fijian beach.

Theoretically Survivor does have high stakes—winning a million dollars and going down in “Survivor history.” But, at least in Survivor 50, the contestants do not talk about the prize money, or refer to their financial needs, or their fear of failure. When they are voted off they do not weep. They grin and saunter into the darkness, seemingly happy just to have played the game. Perhaps this is because they know there are more Instagram followers and brand deals to be gained by not setting Jeff Probst on fire with a tiki torch. But the impression it gives the naive viewer is, “I don’t have to worry about these people, and can instead return peacefully to worrying about all of the other things that I was already worrying about.”

I understand that by writing about Survivor I am blithely attempting a critique of a religion that I don’t practice. The end of the season nears and I still don’t understand what a “Shot in the Dark” is. I don’t get the significance of “Exile Island” (is it a reward or a punishment???) I can’t grasp why Cerie is in an alliance with Rizzo, and I believe the conspiracy that the cast’s diets are supplemented by the crew (if these people are really only eating coconuts and fish they catch, why aren’t they all incredibly irritable and lethargic? And why do they have so much time to plot against each other?)

Relaxing during Survivor requires forgetting that Survivor is on Paramount, which is owned by Skydance, which is run by David Ellison, who is cozying up to Trump, seemingly both out of support for his agenda and to expedite a deal to buy Warner Bros, thus consolidating quite a bit of news and entertainment media. The thing is, it is easy for me to forget these facts, or at least misplace them, because they are kind of confusing. Ellison and Trump are appeasing me with bread—b-roll of people drinking out of coconuts—and circus—weekly episodes of a television show that are all, at 90 minutes, longer than the Disney movie Mulan.

The people on Survivor are in a cult. I don’t mean that they are doing anything wrong, just that they have joined a small, isolated culture with distinct rules and a deeply held belief system, and they answer to a charismatic leader. The show is so relaxing to watch them because this whole system is a choice. They have opted into—in fact, begged and pleaded—for a chance to be removed to an island, to live among strangers, and fight over how much rice to cook. They are asking us to join them, for a robust 90 minutes, in entering a world that has a lot of discomfort, difficulty, and disappointment, all of which was chosen by the participants, and all of which will end sooner than they would like.

They miss food, and their beds, and their families, but they don’t want to go back to them quite yet. For them, like for us, the known discomfort of Survivor is simpler, more manageable, and more relaxing, than the suffering of real life.

If you liked this Substack, hit the like button! If you did not like it, you can still hit the like button, I don’t mind.

Above is an audio-recording of this essay, if you like.

Right before I quit therapy I had a few sessions with a psychologist in Iowa City named Nancy. She belonged to a consortium of mental health workers who shared a waiting room, so while I waited to be called into her office I sat surrounded by chimes, statuettes, fliers for Chakra readings, pink Himalayan salt lamps, and a dispenser filled with activated charcoal water that you could drink out of a waxy cup.

When you entered Nancy’s office though, the feeling of being in a boutique filled with healing crystals fell away. A framed diploma declaring Nancy a PhD in counseling psychology hung next to her utilitarian desk. Her bookshelves were stocked with thick psychology textbooks. Unlike my psychiatrist at the time, whose office featured Buddha statuettes, dinosaur figurines, and a framed image of Yoda, Nancy’s office could have belonged to any professional. She was probably in her early 60s, and had a strong whiff about her of a seasoned high school teacher—turtleneck sweater, rimless glasses, allergy to nonsense.

In our first meeting Nancy explained, calmly and cordially, that she did not keep people in therapy for months or years. If we both felt that we were a good match we would work together towards explicit goals for a predetermined period. Nancy described her therapy offering as “empirically supported treatment of anxiety.” She followed the tenants of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is often described as the “gold standard” treatment for anxiety disorders. She even had me fill out The Cooper-Norcross Inventory of Preferences, which allows clients to rate statements like, “I would like the therapist to give structure to therapy,” and “I would like the therapist to focus on my childhood.”

In short, Nancy was doing every single thing I believe therapists should do when treating anxiety. She was smart and ethical. She was respectful of me and my time. I broke up with her after maybe five sessions, and haven’t sought therapy since, even though, as many people in my life have politely noted, I would certainly benefit from it.

In the year and a half since I sat in Nancy’s office I have tried to understand: what was it about her that catalyzed me to take my longest break from therapy in adulthood? How could I quit when I had finally found someone who had so many qualities I had looked for in a therapist?

The problem, I think, was the breathing exercises.

At the beginning of our sessions, as soon as I sat down on Nancy’s cracked leather couch and anxiously clutched the throw pillow that was probably saturated with other people’s tears, she would say, “I’d like to start by doing a grounding exercise.” She spoke in the low, half-whisper of a guidance counselor interacting with a troubled teen.

The exercise was this: trace a triangle on your thigh. Breathe in as you trace the first leg of the triangle, hold your breath for the next leg, and release your breath on the final leg. I drew an isosceles.

This exercise enraged me. It had the opposite of its intended effect. My heart rate soared. I experienced an urge to fight Nancy.

If you have ever been anxious or upset and had another person place their hands on your shoulders, fix you with a look of saccharine condescension, and say, “Hey. Just breathe,” you know how counterintuitive these instructions can be. (The exception, sadly, is if a really hot person does this to you. When that happens it can be fine and even nice.) But Nancy wasn’t doing that thing where you pretend to offer someone help while really just trying to shut them up. Like everything else she did in therapy, she was being intentional, trying to help me using evidence and her own expertise. I knew that. Still, Nancy’s approach infuriated me beyond all reason.

I tried to reason through my bizarre anger at this tiny, knit-wearing woman who had devoted her life to helping people. Theoretically, I wanted to embrace Nancy’s evidence-backed process. I was tired of spending years in therapy offering various half-baked theories on the topic of myself until the clock struck :50. The way I reacted to Nancy’s breathing exercises—the way I have reacted to all breathing exercises, grounding exercises, and excursions into mindfulness ever since I first tried them in the earliest throes of my anxiety disorder—is by taking offense. I am offended by the idea that I should respond to what feels like an emergency with something as anodyne as breathing deeply. I just can’t face the fact that evidence based options feel so small, so meager, compared to the sprawling chaos of an anxiety disorder.

Sensible habits feel so offensive in the face of suffering. “My anxiety disorder has RUINED my life!” I wanted to scream at Nancy. “Stop telling me to breathe in a fucking triangle!” (That’s not true—it would be more accurate, though less satisfying, to say, “My anxiety disorder has IMPACTED my life in a way that has felt cruel but has made me who I am.”) I want to be anesthetized, Nancy. I want to be sent to a sanatorium in the Alps for good clean air. I want to be given a single pill that fixes everything. I even want to be told that science is at a loss when it comes to my problem. I just don’t want to deal in the humiliating simplicity of breathing exercises.

I feel similarly about other practical, “easy” interventions for anxiety: I don’t want to journal. I don’t want to meditate. I don’t want to take a walk. I want someone to put my anxiety on trial and bring it to justice.

My only concern is—what if they work? What if breathing exercises are actually helpful? What if Cyclic Sighing, a breathing exercise researched at Stanford by a team that included Andrew Huberman, actually, infuriatingly, reduces anxiety? And what if journaling, and walking, and meditation—all these things that seem to undermine the significance of suffering brought on by anxiety disorders—are actually useful tools?

Earlier this week I was lying in bed late into the night practically levitating with anxiety. I had agreed, mysteriously, to get up at five in the morning to participate in a live taping of an NBC streaming news show to talk about an article I wrote about podcasts. This has to be one of my worst reasons ever for having anxiety, up there with the time that I lost an entire weekend to panicking about how I had agreed to take a Jewish youth group to an ice skating rink.

I clutched my sheets, my breathing shallow, obsessively thinking, “What is going to happen at my pre-dawn live Zoom Q&A about podcasts???” The hours passed. What is an NBC live streaming show? I thought, wildly. How had I become sleepless over it? How was I going to achieve my dated but nonetheless traditional millennial eyeliner flick at 5am?

A thought occurred: this would be a really good time to know how to do a breathing exercise.

My refusal over the years to develop a “breath-work practice” is an ego issue, I know. It is an instance of letting pride get in my own way, definitely! But I don’t think I can be the only anxious person who is oddly alienated by the simplicity and lack of sophistication that characterizes a lot of anxiety interventions. I think it’s fair to say that some proportion of the 20% of Americans who have anxiety disorders aren’t benefitting from these “free” and “easy” tricks for anxiety.

Some of the responsibility falls on the doctor, therapist, or psychiatrist: you have to convey to us that what we are doing is urgent and will pay off. A 2023 literature review that analyzed studies about breathing exercises found that they are more likely to reduce stress if they go on for longer than five minutes at a time and if they are practiced long term. By the time a person is seeing a mental health professional, she has already been let down and misled by various de-stress tips and products. The practitioner really does have to make the case that this is going to be different, and not as stupid as it seems.

And a lot of responsibility falls on the anxious person: to stop thinking that our anxiety is so magnificent, so complex and unwieldy, that it cannot possibly respond to something as rudimentary as a breathing exercise.

In the course of interviewing people about their anxiety disorders, I’ve spoken to a couple of people who spent time in psych wards while in the throes of terrible anxiety. One of these people, a man who I will call Joe, made a case for breathing exercises that compelled me more than anything I’d ever heard from a therapist. In a group therapy session on a ward after a suicide attempt, he was taught to practice deep breathing and other mental exercises like positive visualization and counting backwards.

“I know this sounds silly but when I count backwards I get my mind to focus on the counting, and it almost relaxes my mind,” he said.

Another person I interviewed, a woman who I will call Lila, was incensed by being taught a similar exercise while in group therapy in a psych ward.

“Count! Just count!” said Lila, laughing. “If you feel anxious, count to 100 or something! It’s like—that just doesn’t do anything.” She sighed, and repeated her words: “It doesn’t do anything.”

I resonate with Lila—her fury, her accurate skewering of incompetent providers. But I want to be like Joe.

Can a person who thinks like Lila learn to think like Joe? If I do not want to be kept awake at night by roiling anticipatory anxiety about Zoom calls, I had better try.

Hi and thanks for reading Uneasy Going! I recorded an audio version of this post in case you want to take a listen while strolling the perimeter of your local data center.

“I would honestly prefer for a sentient AI to kill every last human being on the planet in some hideously gruesome way than for even one more of us to become the kind of amoral, thoughtless person-shaped vacancy that AI threatens to turn us all into,” wrote Becca Rothfeld, a staff writer for The New Yorker and former book critic at The Washington Post, on Substack, in March.

I scrolled through her essay, while a few feet away from me my partner used Claude to code for his work as a roboticist. Across the country my friends were using AI to edit cover letters, to perfect their travel itineraries, to write their emails, and to serve as their confidantes and surrogate therapists.

“It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play in the media business: to speculate who will go AI,” wrote Rusty Foster earlier this month, spoofing the 1941 Harper’s essay, “Who Goes Nazi?” by Dorothy Thompson. Foster concluded, referring specifically to writers and journalists who outsource their work to chatbots, “Kind, good, happy, secure people never go AI.” Rather, “the bored pseudo-intellectual” goes AI.

I clicked away from the tab where I was reading Foster’s essay and scrolled through a listing for a reporting job. It demanded a familiarity with and willingness to use AI tools.

I feel something close to awe, and also to nausea, when I witness the dramatic difference in feelings between otherwise relatively like-minded people when it comes to AI. It is particularly dizzying to pivot between communities of writers, where AI is generally treated as a cancer, and white collar workers in the Bay Area, who tend to talk about AI as something between a fun toy and a man-made miracle.

I reported on this topic for The Washington Post a month ago, and I spoke about it on the NPR podcast “It’s Been A Minute.” I wanted to write a piece about my personal experience because I continue to be struck by the way I feel marooned and alienated by the views and behavior of people around me. This feeling is not quite anxiety. It’s just fear.

Years ago when I moved to San Francisco I went on a few dates with a man who was sort of a sampler pack of Bay Area tech culture touch points: he was a startup founder who lived in an urban commune and was in the midst of some kind of self-improvement challenge that had him swimming in the ocean at 5am most days only to emerge and instantly start reading Stoic philosophy and refusing all forms of refined sugar.

One night over drinks, he started telling me about the race to live forever, about the people who inject and replace their insides to cheat death. I became agitated and started issuing blustering, unfuckable questions: “WHY are they doing that? WHO do they think they are? WHAT are they living for?”

Talking to this man, who knew so much more than me about almost everything, but who seemed completely unaware of basic truths understood by children—that life is precious because it ends, that you will miss out on a lot of it if you obsessively plot its extension—I felt like a medieval peasant, shaking my crucifix in the air after hearing breaking news about the solar system.

The man explained that eventually people will live forever, and they will do it by uploading their consciousnesses onto hard drives. I was so horrified by this that I became that word we’re not supposed to relate to, hysterical. The man tried to calm me down.

“Don’t worry!” he said, in a placating tone. “They’ll still die! They’ll die when we experience the heat death of the universe!”

So there’s always something to look forward to.

Just like in my conversation with that man, my partial aversion to AI allows me to feel drunk on a cocktail of stupidity, panic, and self-righteousness. More than that, I feel lonely. I cannot understand many of the people around me. I cannot understand why I feel repulsed by this technology and they feel excited about the possibilities of it as a tool for their own work and life. Or, they feel inured to what they see as an inevitability that AI-use will become central to the work they do and that they must use it as much as possible so as to extend the time that they will be able to cling to employment.

Generally, American views on AI are more moderate: per a Pew survey, we are more concerned about AI than excited, we are afraid that AI will make people less creative and worse at connecting with each other, and we don’t want AI to be involved in matters concerning God, governance, or matchmaking. (Too late for two out of three.)

I am not anti-AI. I’m not! I’ve defended Waymo to leftists at dinner parties! AI is a category so big that opposing it would feel like coming out as anti-electricity or anti-gas. I just think that our approach to AI should be cautious and focused on regulation. I think it should be less of a free for all of constantly and thoughtlessly generating so much stupid fucking garbage that Space X is making preliminary attempts to put data centers on the moon. “In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute,” Google announced last year.

It’s all good with me if people use AI to sequence genes and cure cancer. It also seems like a reasonable expectation that some people will use AI to generate huge profits. That’s what people do with technology. I just don’t understand the enthusiastic, careless use of AI to outsource some of the only reasons to be alive. Thinking, talking to people, creating art, analyzing art and texts—that’s our most precious stuff.

Every song that ever made you feel anything, every novel that ever transported you, every line of poetry you ever read on social media that made you think, “Wait, should I get into poetry?” was written by a person, not by AI. I want to take everyone by their shoulders and scream this in their faces, but in a likable way. I have never found a way to talk about any topic I care about without being off-puttingly self-righteous, and my approach to AI-use will sadly be no different.

The idea that more and more towns are going to live in the shadow of mammoth data centers so that private companies can lay off more and more employees and deliver more and more value to shareholders…I am confused by the way many people seem to be cheerfully marching towards this future, shrugging that it is inevitable.

Every so often I’ll be talking to someone about how I think maybe we should treat generative AI with a little more skepticism, and the person I’m talking to will say something like, “No offense, but do you think maybe you’re a total fucking idiot with zero historical perspective?” They won’t actually say this, but they’ll imply it by saying, “Well, you know, when the printing press was developed some people feared that it would destroy the art of handwriting and spread dangerous ideas!”

It should be really, really obvious to any adult that generative AI tools are not analogous to the printing press. I think it is more likely that AI use will play out similarly to the way smartphone use has. Not long ago, the first generation of people got smartphones. The phones were shiny and fun and had access to everything that has ever existed in recorded history. They enabled us stay in touch with each other. The map function was really pretty helpful.

That was like 15 years ago. Now we laugh about how our attention spans are shot, how we read less, and we feel less connected to each other, and we somehow work the same number of hours, sometimes more. These are not partisan views—most Americans feel bad about technology use, and scared about what this behavior does to kids. We skim books and buy devices to try to help us use our smartphones less. Of course we still enjoy them—the map function really is very good! But we have no more access to the world we lived in before smartphones. And the same people who mourn that time as a sort of Garden of Eden that we cannot reenter are now repeating this experience with even more impressive technology.

Now all that being said, I would still like to upload a picture of myself to ChatGPT and ask it what lip color would look good on me. My own attempts over the past 20 or so years have not been successful.

Carrying around these views feels lonely, like I said, and stupid like I said, and I find myself grasping for control over other people’s behavior. When I enter into anodyne conversation and the person I’m talking to casually mentions using AI to, say, come up with a recipe, I am seized with thoughts like, “Hey, you know that recipe AI is giving you is based on information that was collected and documented by writers, recipe developers, and food scientists, making it harder for those people to get credit or continue their careers.”

During these conversations I try to not say things like that, but instead talk to myself internally, as I often do, like a small dog on the 4th of July. I tell myself things like, “It’s okay buddy! You’re feeling upset, but let’s just listen, okay? Let’s just listen and let this other person make the choices that are right for her, okay buddy?”

A big myth about using generative AI for writing is that it is so obviously bad that it could never be confused with writing by a human. People really congratulate themselves about this, but they are wrong. People write bad things all the time, and AI writes increasingly good things. When I was teaching college students I would be reading through a student essay, thinking something like, “Wow! Gareth has really grown tremendously as a writer! I love how he’s using figurative language here. I can’t wait to tell him how impressed I am, which will hopefully build up his confidence in his skills, and then lead him down a path to being a more engaged student and having a greater sense of his own abilities—” and then you realize that it doesn’t really make sense that Gareth became an extremely competent writer in the last week, and that in fact this text has a crisp but dead sort of HR-tone to it. Realizing this feels just like when you are eating something and you suddenly become aware of a foreign hair in your mouth. And even then, you don’t know what Gareth’s deal is, and you can’t prove it, and if you’re wrong you will be falsely accusing him of plagiarism and making him feel self-conscious about his writing.

At the Vanity Fair Oscars afterparty last month, playwright Jeremy O. Harris approached Open AI CEO Sam Altman and compared him to a Nazi. Harris named Altman’s choice to collaborate with the Trump government in creating tools of mass surveillance and warfare. But Harris later told The New York Times that his critique of Open AI extends to the way Chat GPT infects everyday life, particularly what OpenAI is “doing to the brains of kids.”

“This technology is dangerous,” Harris said. “I think willfully allowing dangerous technology to be onboarded by society is, in and of itself, evil.”

A few days after reading Harris’ comments, I went on a tour of an exhibit at an art gallery in San Francisco. The tour was led by the artist herself, who explained a special interactive component of the exhibit: visitors could take pictures of their favorite trees in their neighborhoods, which the artist would upload to AI to “generate customized images and short text tributes” which would then be included in the exhibit.

All of my attempts at forbearance and curiosity with other people’s feelings about AI were suspended. I thought this was so stupid and wasteful that I decided to storm out and go buy an expensive coffee. Before I stormed out, I asked the curator to point me to the bathroom, and she told me that it was in the back of the art gallery, through the swinging doors. The bathroom was in a storage area, and when I tried to exit I found myself locked in.

The doors to the storage area had glass panes on them, and I could look and see the tour still going on, a few yards in front of me. The fifty or so visitors had their backs to me, listening to the artist as she held forth on her love of trees and the thrill of using AI to create more pictures of the same trees that there were already pictures of. I banged on the door but nobody could see me or hear me. A woman who was with the tour turned around, peered at me, and smiled, as I waved and gestured. She turned back to the group.

What could they see that I couldn’t see? I thought, as I waived fruitlessly at their backs, hoping someone would turn. What was I missing?

A few minutes passed. Eventually, the same woman turned back, and saw me still pounding on the door. She came towards me and opened the door, smiling.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize you were stuck. I saw you back there, but I thought maybe you were overwhelmed and having a little mental health break.”

“Hahahahahaha nooooo,” I trilled, relieved to be free. “I was just using the bathroom!”

But she was right, I thought. I was actually overwhelmed and taking a little mental health break. So maybe other people really do know something I don’t know.

Hi! I am so happy you are here. I’ll take a moment to plug a few pieces I recently published. I wrote a a personal essay for Hey Alma about whether it’s better to go to a therapist who shares your culture, and an article for The Guardian accurately headlined “I Never Text Back and It’s Ruining My Relationships.” Finally, for Glamour I got to talk to women about their experiences calling off their weddings and engagements. Thank you for reading Uneasy Going!

I got a manicure last week. Getting a manicure is an amazing idea if you want to try to relax while face-to-face with someone who is doing a physically taxing job that might be poisoning them.

Manicures and pedicures are often described as “pampering”—opportunities to relax and unwind. I think for a lot of people, this is the case. I have just never had that experience myself.

For example, when you get gel polish—a popular long-lasting form of nail color—removed, they actually use a small drill. As the nail tech removed my gel polish last week, she pressed the whirring drill too hard on a patch of polish and I felt an icy burn through my nail. I flinched, and we gasped in unison. We held hands, two strangers in a chemical factory, trying not to make eye contact.

I will probably never stop exchanging money for experiences that are marketed as relaxing: massages, day spas, the saunas that float in San Francisco Bay which I keep meaning to try out even though there is something clearly sinister about them. It is in my nature to pay for access to spaces that have a few Pothos plants and a vague atmosphere of serenity, and then scramble around those places like a trapped animal, wondering why I’m not relaxed.

But if I really want to feel calm, for little to no money, anywhere in the world, I go to the grocery store.

As soon as I step into a grocery store, I can feel my nervous system slow down, as if my amygdala has thrown itself on a couch and started scrolling on its phone. In the evenings, I can roam grocery stores for a good forty minutes. Looping up and down the aisles, circling the produce section, I feel my heart rate fall into the double digits. Brightly lit, quiet during off-hours, and open to all, the grocery store projects a sense of abundance. Rest a while next to the soup can end cap, the grocery store invites you. Stay as long as you like.

You can do this in any grocery store, but I do find that it works best for me in a place that is priced so absurdly that when you pick up a wedge of cheese you throw it back like it gave you an electric shock.

When I lived in New York I would go to an independently owned natural foods mecca in Brooklyn Heights called Perelandra. I would walk up and down the aisles, admiring the bulk grains, the smug, imperfect organic produce, the cashew queso in the cold case. I read the copy on boxes of tea sachets, and imagined that I was absorbing the benefits of rose hips and lemon verbena through my fingers. The grocery store feels like it is not subject to our system of keeping time—artificially lit, temperature controlled. Its organization refutes the chaos of life. Everything is in its place, and people are there to help you find what you need.

Compared to a clothing store or a furniture store or restaurant, individual items in a supermarket feel affordable. You can afford a treat in the grocery store: a glossy hothouse cucumber, a single-serving package of luxury peanut butter cups, an architectural pasta shape. At Perelandra I once permitted myself to buy a single $17 pair of briefs made out of bamboo that claimed to be “sweat wicking.” When I sweat in my now six year old, grey grocery store briefs I think of those years, happily weighing out my garlicky kale at the Perelandra vegan hot bar.

Sometimes I went to Perelandra with my friend Katrina, and we walked loops through the store, talking and laughing and reading the copy on bags of popcorn dusted with nutritional yeast. The store was open late, it was warm and quiet, the employees were happy to ignore us. Katrina and I also went to Trader Joe’s at any opportunity—sometimes we went on Saturday nights, instead of going to a bar. Once, as we pushed our red carts side by side past the entryway florals, I asked Katrina what was on her shopping list.

“I don’t bring a list,” she said, straightening her spine, and gazing into the middle distance, towards the bagged nuts. “In Trader Joe’s, I allow myself a sense of play.”

In San Francisco I live two blocks away from a Safeway that is protected by armed guards. You enter through a security gate and can only exit after scanning your receipt. If you don’t buy anything you have to approach an employee or guard in a supplicating way and say something like, “The beans I wanted, sir—they were not on sale, as I had wished.” In other cities I have enjoyed the long aisles and towering displays of Safeway, the American affluence demonstrated by piles of stuff and excessive brand variety. But it is hard to relax in this Safeway.

Instead I have been going to the small, Asian and organic grocery store across the street from Safeway, which sells non-alcoholic aperitifs and chili oils and frozen Kathi rolls.

I spent so much time trying to decide what to get in the treat aisle at a bodega recently, pinging back and forth from the chocolate bars to the cookie display, that the cashier approached me and said, “It seems like you are trying to pick a snack, but you cannot decide, is that right?”

“Well—yeah, that’s right,” I said. The decision between an individually packaged rice crispy treat and a bar of milk chocolate with hazelnuts felt somehow fraught to me.

In my neighborhood in San Francisco, which features both the extreme wealth enjoyed by people who live in towering Victorian mansions and the terrible suffering of people who are forced to live on the street, there are many attempts at “third places.”

“Third place” is a term coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place. Oldenburg compared American life, the way it is possible to just shuttle yourself between home and work, your life narrowed to two buildings, to European life. He wrote of Americans, that compared to Europeans with their sidewalk cafes and public plazas, “We do not have that third realm of satisfaction and social cohesion beyond the portals of home and work that for others is an essential element of the good life.”

A good life, he argued, includes “the third place,” a catch-all term for “a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.” In these places, “the stranger feels at home.”

In my neighborhood in San Francisco, intentional third places include multiple artist-run collectives, and co-owned co-working and community spaces. I have never met an all-lowercase, Canva marketed, Zillennial-run institution that serves water in palm-sized cups that I have not wanted to be a part of, so I am very happy that all of these exist. But these clearly labeled third places offer a relatively limited interpretation of Oldenburg’s third place.

In the introduction to the second edition of The Great Good Place, Oldenburg names old time-y drug stores as a powerful example of a third place, because they were centrally located and “brought everyone into contact with everyone else.”

“Places such as these,” he writes, “serve virtually everybody.”

I know the grocery store is not everyone’s favorite place, that I would experience it wildly differently if I was struggling to afford food, or if I had custody of a toddler. But I like that I can depend on grocery stores. Their doors are open, their lights are bright. They serve, as Oldenburg wrote, virtually everybody.

Gaze at the cheeses, smell the cut flowers, enjoy the refreshing mist coming off the lettuces, the grocery store says. Take respite in this palace of nourishment: you are safe here.

When I was accepted to the University of Iowa’s nonfiction writing MFA, I visited town and had tea with the head of the program. Standing on his porch as we said goodbye, I made a comment about how Iowa City would be an adjustment for me after living in New York. I guess I wanted him to know that before I moved to his two-horse town I had done such sophisticated things as transferring from the N train to the uptown 2 at Times Square.

The program director smiled.

“Fifth biggest city in Iowa,” he said, pleasantly.

Iowa City was so small that it felt like the set of a small budget TV show that kept reusing the same extras in every scene. Walking through downtown I would make eye contact with another person, struggle to place them, and realize where I knew them from: around.

To some of my students who had moved from rural areas, Iowa City was a sprawling metropolis. Writers made it artificially small by congregating in just a few places. Iowa City’s independent coffee shops were jammed with writers reading literary theory and squirreling away thoughts in soft-bound notebooks. Writers crowded into the nonprofit movie theater, and revised their manuscripts at the bar that served seasonal, herbaceous cocktails. In the natural foods grocery store, you could choose between multiple writers to ring up your hummus.

Inevitably, writers went to the same therapist. In early 2023, I started seeing a young, enthusiastic therapist who I will call Ken Kenney. He worked in a therapy practice near downtown Iowa City, in a converted two-story clapboard house across from the bar that allowed writers to throw semi-ironic poetry readings.

That fall, I attended high holiday services with a few writers, including a poet named Jake. Between services, we listed our flaws and the way we might change them.

“My therapist and I have been working on this,” I remember Jake saying.

A few weeks later, I went to the movies with a group that included a new student in my program named Sabrina. She mentioned that she had found a great local therapist. His name, she said, was Ken Kenney.

Sabrina and I were two of the thirty people in the graduate nonfiction writing program. We sat in the same classrooms, listening to the same professors, writing comments like “Say MORE about this” in the margins of each other’s essays.

“Jake sees Ken Kenney too,” said Sabrina. She seemed happy and calm about this.

Jake the poet also saw my therapist Ken Kenney? Ken Kenney, it seemed, was moving seamlessly between genres, keeping track of our emotional entanglements and family histories like neatly filed workshop packets. When Jake and I had talked at high holiday services about working with our therapists, I realized, we were talking about the same person.

I didn’t want to share my therapist, to feel like the barrier separating my most intimate thoughts from those of my peers was as permeable as the partition in a public bathroom stall. But if I had to have a timeshare therapist, it was great to split custody with Jake and Sabrina, two of the program’s celebrities. They both had a mystique that people admired and resented. It reflected well on me, I felt, that I had chosen the same cherubic-faced Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist as them.

Almost as soon as I could get used to the idea that I was emptying myself into the same emotional trough as Sabrina and Jake, the three of us received a cryptic email: Ken Kenney had been fired from the therapy practice. The practice gave no explanation, but offered to refer each of Ken’s clients to new therapists. Sabrina and I both accepted those referrals, but Jake pursued Ken Kenney to his new office.

It’s common for therapists to meet, discuss their cases, and offer each other support. It’s rarer for clients to meet and compare notes on their therapist. Recently, I asked Sabrina and Jake if we could get together and talk about our time with Ken Kenney. Three people saw the same therapist, during the same period, while living in the same insular community. How had the project of talk therapy, in that clapboard house, in the fifth largest city in Iowa, changed us?

Nearly 2 million Iowans live in an area without sufficient access to mental health care. But in Iowa City, a college town filled with kombucharias and live performance spaces, therapists are easy to find. I found Ken Kenney through a referral from the University counseling center, and I went to him hoping for treatment for my anxiety disorder.

“I was looking for anyone who was a licensed therapist who wasn’t a complete fucking idiot,” said Jake. “And I was doing so because I had crippling depression from both my own natural biology and also being in an MFA program in the frigid midwest.”

“I also needed a breathing, and even living therapist,” said Sabrina. “That was pretty much it. I think he was probably the first one to respond. Sabrina was in therapy for anxiety, she said, and for what she described as “having a mommy.”

Sabrina didn’t know that others in our program were seeing Ken Kenney. But Jake did. In fact, a classmate in his program recommended Ken. Don’t you think that’s crazy? I asked Jake. Don’t you think it’s odd that you were crossing streams of psychobabble with another person from your small and insular poetry program? Jake shrugged in a sort of French way, as a poet might.

“I think if I was beefing with that person, or if I was romantically interested in them or something, maybe,” he said. “But given the normalcy of our friendship, it didn’t cross my mind that it would be problematic. And that turned out to be true.”

By the end of his time seeing Ken Kenney, he said, he could name “seven or eight people in MFA programs who were all seeing him.”

I was distressed that I hadn’t contacted all of these people for a larger roundtable interview. It began to feel like that Netflix documentary about the man who donated so much sperm that he sired hundreds of Dutch children. As I thought about this, Jake rattled off a bookshelf’s worth of names of fiction writers, poets, and translators we all knew or knew of, who had also been clients of our therapist Ken Kenney.

Before studying to become a therapist, Ken Kenney had earned an MFA, the very degree so many of his clients pursued. Could it be this factor, in addition to proximity, that drew us to him?

Jake didn’t know about the MFA, but Sabrina did.

“I liked that,” she said. “I liked his whole vibe. He seemed cool, like an 8th grade English teacher.”

The reason I knew Ken had an MFA was that I talked about getting an MFA a lot in therapy, and Ken gently related to me by mentioning his own. Specifically, I told Jake and Sabrina, I talked constantly about other people in my MFA. It was only by great luck that I never talked about either of them in therapy, thus saving Ken Kenney from having to perform a therapeutic poker face.

Ken was unusual in the therapy modality he practiced—an approach called Internal Family Systems (IFS.) The name is misleading: IFS is not family therapy. The word “family” in the title indicates the “family” of “parts” that lives inside you, playing various roles, like, “The Perfectionist,” and “The Worrier.” (The validity of IFS has recently been the subject of a couple of bombshell-ish pieces of journalism.)

“The idea is like…the ‘family’…is inside of you?” asked Sabrina.

“You think it’s going to be like, your Dad is inside you, your Mom is inside you,” explained Jake. “But it’s not. It’s like ‘The Firefighter’ is inside of you.”

In my sessions with Ken, we usually did straightforward talk therapy. But every so often he would ask me to close my eyes and try to locate “parts” of myself and describe their physical sensation. We didn’t do this much because I was so disdainful of it. But Jake tried it.

“I would lay on the couch and close my eyes,” Jake said. “He would ask me very open ended questions, and I found myself not being sure what the right answer was and what I was supposed to be picturing exactly.” Jake’s frustration diminished as his sessions with Ken went on.

“By the end I kind of came around,” he said. “It’s this very psychodynamic thing. There is no set agenda. You are supposed to devise, as the patient, your own course. Even though I found it goofy and very uncomfortable, I didn’t totally regret it.”

By the time Ken was fired, Sabrina had only had two or three sessions with him. Jake and I had been working with him for months.

“I was very shocked and confused,” said Jake. “And obviously the first thing I did was text like four other people who were seeing him.”

“I was really bummed,” said Sabrina. “I thought me and Ken had something really good going on and had potential to do real work together. And then of course, immediately I wanted to gossip about it.”

I asked Jake why he had decided to follow Ken to his new practice.

“I found him to be very compassionate,” he said. “What I appreciate about Ken, not to put him on a pedestal, I felt like we were actually engaged in a conversation. He would challenge me on things.” Since moving to New York after finishing his MFA, Jake said, he hadn’t been able to find a therapist like that.

“I found him to be so insightful that it converted me to the school of thought that having a smart and perceptive therapist is a game changer,” said Jake. “And that you should actually do the therapist dating game for longer even if it means that you’re untreated for a little while.”

Ken was not fired for an ethical breach. When I was referred to a therapist at the same practice, she told me something about how Ken had been practicing in a way that had opened the practice up to a liability issue, something that had to do with treating a patient without having the right kind of supervision. She would still feel comfortable recommending Ken to clients, she said.

The therapy practice referred me to a clinician in the building, but for unknown reasons they referred Sabrina to a therapist who worked elsewhere and practiced somatic therapy, a technique focused on touch and movement.

“I literally lie on a massage table and she touches me non-sexually and it’s literally the most relaxing thing I’ve ever experienced in my life,” Sabrina said.

I asked Jake if he thought Ken had helped with his depression. Yes, Jake said, immediately. Ken had helped alleviate his depression symptoms, and gave him some insights.

“Unfortunately, I think I’m just as depressive as I was when I was seeing him,” he said. “And this is a tricky thing about therapy: how can it be the case that I both have made progress and still am where I was at?”

As we spoke, Jake was undergoing a search for a new therapist. Sabrina was seeing her somatic therapist, plus a couple’s therapist. I was not in therapy, but mentally I had started opening Psychology Today tabs, flicking through badly lit headshots and skimming acronyms. I asked Sabrina and Jake if they ever plan to stop going to therapy. I couldn’t decide, I said, if therapy is a tool to manage day-to-day suffering, or a kind of tutoring, with the goal of self-sufficiency.

“I view talk therapy as kind of an intellectual exercise more than anything,” said Sabrina. I mean, it’s something to do. It’s a way to connect with the self.”

“Ask me in 30 years,” said Jake.

“Do you think in 30 years you will still be in therapy?” I said.

“Probably not,” said Jake. “Probably in 30 years I’ll be saying, ‘I should go see a therapist again.’”

“It’s this or, I’m sorry—I’m turning to transcendental meditation,” said Sabrina. She sighed.

“In 30 years check back,” she said. “Either I will be in a cult, or I will be in therapy.”