A personal essay today, from Kristen Stone. If you’ve ever suffered from anxiety (I have), you’ll know a little of this feeling – the overwhelming sense of your own vulnerability – and worse, that of those around you. How it can spill over into ritualistic behaviours, crossing the border between the acceptable and unacceptable fears. What should a girl be afraid of? What do we tell her to flinch from and how, precisely, she should enact her panic? But I’m talking too much, now. Go on and read this with the quiet attention it deserves. Trigger warnings for domestic violence.
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Anxiety supplement
I haven’t learned about rocks since 4th grade, when the beautiful Miss Finley embarrassed us all with her unbridled sensuality, her puffy blonde hair and silk tank tops. She couldn’t have been 25 even, she was so fresh and unmarried. Maybe i was in love with her, maybe that’s when I realized how there are many ways to be a woman and some of them are impossible. She spoke softly, in a dreamy voice. She taught us igneous and sedimentary, how the pressure of the earth breaks down one kind of rock or melts it in excruciating time lapse into another, how they break and hold together. She told us coquina was so soft you could scratch it with your thumbnail; the thought of the beautiful Miss Finley cutting into rock with her perfect peach nails was too much to bear. She taught us erosion, the way water could lick rock away, molecule by molecule, you couldn’t see it happening but it was, slow like the rocks melting under the earth to resurface, reborn.
I think that was the year I began licking my hands. I could feel the germs on them, if i touched a display rack at walmart or the chain link fence on the playground at school. First it was tetanus, then it was AIDS, poison mushrooms, hepatitis, e. coli, and salmonella.
The world was a surface each day I had to get through.
I would throw myself into anything to feel calm, and that year it was secret prayer under the doe eye of Miss Finley and a lesson about precipitation; I learned remarkable dissociation skills, which is to say half listening while silently obssessing about something else. Sometimes I would say the Lord’s Prayer first, and then tack on a list of names, everyone I could think of: forgetting someone, even my child molester uncle or his ex-wife Aunt Sarah, seemed to be asking for trouble.
If my parents had had an extremely ugly fight the night before, I would say over and over, please Keep my father from killing my mother or himself. (It wouldn’t be for 15 more years, once I became a social worker, that data would confirm what i feared at 10, which was the double murder-suicide as a function of abuse.)
My hands split and cracked and bled. I grew a half moon of eczema between my thumb and forefinger. The pediatrician, seeming unconcerned about all the handwashing, prescribed Dove soap and Crisco, which was applied before bed and covered over with socks and seemed to work.
One of the great mysteries is whether anyone noticed or if I just hid all this anxiety very well.
Where did it start, did it start with 20/20 on Friday nights; Barbara Walters would tell my small smart self new things to fear, electrical fires, mad cow disease.
Or was it my young aunt checking her seat at the movies, because she read in an email that they put needles with AIDS on them at the movie theater?
Was it God himself promising redemption and calm if I prayed the right way, commanded that I accept Jesus Christ, which seemed frustratingly abstract, such that I was never quite sure I’d done it right or completely (which is itself the feeling at the heart of a ritual)— periodically just in case I would redo it, quickly saying in my head I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior in the car with my mom or the line to leave the lunchroom.
I am learning about erosion, how water crumbles rocks over time. The worksheet in front of me shows a shoreline, a waterfall. There are vocabulary words. I am doing it perfectly. I am also praying. Dear God please let my father not kill my mother or himself, amen. Over and over, all day at school. The embarrassingly good Miss Finley has no idea. She is making xs and os in her gradebook, which has a fake green leather cover. She smiles at me and I look away. The classroom is hot from all the sweating kid bodies in polyester jumpers and polo shirts and heavy blue slacks, all the sneakers and socks— stop. If I think about them I will be distracted from the prayer which is integral. I must keep praying until 2:40 this afternoon at the Parent Pick-Up area. If i see my mother’s van everything is fine. if it isn’t there, or if I see my grandmother (either grandmother— the one with the red Honda full of smoke, or the other one in her long silver grandma car; one listens to light rock that always makes me feel hollow inside like I want to cry but can’t; the other one listens to opera and classical music, where there’s nothing to understand) that would mean that my mother was dead. Hanged in the bathroom or stabbed in a pool of blood in the perfect white bathroom. Maybe crumpled inside the green bathrobe we’d gotten her for Christmas—stop. Seeing the pictures distracted from the praying which was crucial, which must continue without stopping until this afternoon when surely another worry would take over. Poison mushrooms or tetanus or car accidents. The days of forever in this classroom march on, stuffy and too bright, each full of this prayer that must be said quietly, on the inside only.
It never occurs to me to pray to feel normal or calm.
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Kristen Stone is a baker, writer, and youth advocate. Her first book, Domestication Handbook, was published by Rogue Factorial in 2012, and her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Adrienne, 30xlace, Glitter Tongue, and elsewhere. She runs Unthinkable Creatures, a small chapbook press and printmaking studio, out of her home in Gainesville, Florida. Find her here: Future Imaginary and Unthinkable Creatures