Tag: anxiety

• A solid bit, an easy laugh

  “Running Gag”
  An original song by me, Paul Fidalgo.

  Lyrics:

  Alright, you know, how on Saturday Night Live they tell a
  Joke, a lot, until it isn’t funny anymore
  Well that’s as good a way as any to tell 
  You about myself and how I manage to
  Relate to those unfortunate enough to find
  Themselves involved in intimate relations with a 
  Man who can’t assemble a coherent personality
  I guess that what I’m sayin’ is I’m a

  Punchline
  A solid bit
  An easy laugh
  I can be your running gag

  Hold on, I think that I just caught you crack a 
  Smile, a ray of hope that tells me that you might look 
  Past the crap and understand the little boy who 
  Had a lot of trouble making friends, okay
  I’ll stop, you’re right, it’s probably too early to
  Begin to dump the bullshit that I put up with when
  I was twelve, but it’s kind of important if you 
  Want to know more about me than that I’m just a

  Punchline
  A solid bit
  An easy laugh
  I can be your running gag
  I’ll slay the crowds
  I’ll impress your mom
  I can be your stand-up man

  And I promise not to cry
  In front of you

  Refresh my brain, what is it we were just talking 
  About? Oh yeah, I was going on about how 
  I can use self-deprecating humor as a 
  Way to hide, but we can change the subject but 
  Before we do I just want to be clear that I am 
  Not a nut; a little on the spectrum but I 
  Swear it’s not something you need to be concerned 
  About. Just keep on telling yourself that I’m just a

  Punchline
  A solid bit
  An easy laugh
  I can be your running gag
  I’ll slay the crowds
  I’ll impress your mom
  I can be your stand-up man

  October 14, 2022

  anxiety, autism, music, video

  ---

• Writing Without a Mask

  Clearly, there’s something I’m not doing right.

  It is my third full day at the writers’ refuge and I am researching my article’s topic, the muscles in my neck and shoulders simultaneously taut and compacted such that I find my range of motion constrained.

  I am in a veritable paradise, with astounding natural beauty, a sublime and comfortable writing environment, surrounded by books and supplies and various corners and nooks into which I can settle and work my craft, smart and friendly people around who are both few in number and fully understanding of my need for solitude, but also interesting and enlightening when I do get into conversation with them, and two weeks to pursue this project in any way I please. Oh, and I am right now looking at a different tectonic plate than the one on which I stand. Seriously, it’s right there. Also, deer aren’t afraid of us, and they hang out and eat apples. Oh oh oh and there’s a hawk that flies around my part of the house, sometimes so close I can look into its eye.

  And I’m lost. Whereas I had begun this retreat with a lot of enthusiasm for this project and eagerness to get it going, I’m now overwhelmed by the breadth of the topic, unsure of the degree of depth that is most appropriate, ignorant of the best practices for this kind of work, anxious about the unwise use of my time, and generally feeling beneath the task. I even think I broke the electric kettle in the kitchen.

  I am being treated to more privilege than billions of people will ever experience, and here I am, angsty. I hope I at least get credit for recognizing the absurdity of my own hangups.

  I know there is no right way to go about this. That’s really the point of this retreat, to give writers the space and time to take things at a pace and within a structure that suits the writers themselves. I’m so accustomed to stop-and-start times, specific formats and styles for particular written products, and an established approval process, that this freedom, this liberation, is bewildering.

  But now that I think about it, I suspect that what’s really going on is very similar to the distinction I make between performing as an actor on stage in a play and giving a presentation on a real-world topic for my job. There is too much of me riding on it.

  Let’s begin with the theatre/work-presentation distinction. Upon learning of my autism/Asperger’s diagnosis, many people who know me from my theatre life are in disbelief. How can I feel anti-social, afraid of human interaction, uncomfortable in crowds, and oversensitive to stimulation and also thrive on stage? It’s a perfectly reasonable question (though I bristle at the skepticism of my diagnosis that it implies), and one that took some time to for me to understand myself.

  When I’m performing a role in a play, there is no question as to what I will talk about. My words are predetermined, and not just for what I will say, but when I will say it. The play will also have been blocked, meaning that where I am in space will also have been set and rehearsed well in advance. Through the rehearsal process, it will be determined how I will say all these words, how I will conduct myself physically, and even how I will imagine my character to have reached those various decisions. There is always room for change, iteration, adjustment, and depending on the production, sometimes even improvisation, but the structure is always there, and it is firm. Most importantly, I am not me. I am someone else. Not literally, of course, but there are sufficient layers between me and the audience (and even between me and my fellow actors on stage) that the excruciating discomforts associated with my autism are, if not wholly eliminated, sufficiently dampened. The role is a mask.

  But take me out of the world of the performing arts, and into the world of speaking on behalf of an organization or a cause, and those layers are stripped away. If I am, for example, expected to give a talk about communications work, I know I will be utterly exposed. Not only can I not play a character (try as I might), but the “real me” must also lay bare whatever degree of expertise I have, or claim to have. “I’m Paul, and this is what I know.” My words, my physical comportment, my inflection, my gestures, and even the very contents of my brain are open to public scrutiny. There is no mask. That is unbearable.

  So let’s apply this basic idea to writing, and, in a way, the dynamics flip, with two different areas of my life producing opposite results. As I mentioned, my writing for work is routinized with established formats and processes. As with a public presentation, I am the one producing the words, but I am rarely writing them in my own voice. In a very real sense, when I write press releases, emails to supporters, and newsletters, I am writing “in the character” of the institution I work for. I’m playing the role of my organization. My job title and the institution’s logo, they are my masks. Those layers are sufficient, once I am settled into the given employers’ needs, processes, and, importantly, voice.

  Here at the refuge, I am attempting to write a long form magazine article on a topic of great interest to me. But I am not writing or “reporting” it in the voice of my institution, nor in the voice of the publication in which it will appear, as one might do with a straight-news newspaper article. With this project, the speaker is me. The facts I present, the sources I’ve chosen to mine, the people whose perspectives I’ve sought, the conversations and quotations I’ve initiated, the things I’ve chosen to omit or gloss over, and the conclusions reached, they’re all me, in my own voice. Whatever is wrong or unsatisfying or weak about the final product is a reflection of me, with no mask to hide behind. That, I tell you, is dizzying.

  Now, one might then wonder, hey Paul, you seem to have no trouble opening every one of your precious little wounds and examining them in detail on this little blog of yours. Too true! And I’m not certain why this kind of writing that I’m doing right now doesn’t make me feel just as vulnerable. But I suspect it’s because I’m rather sure of the topic at hand, that being myself. Even if I’m completely deluded about what is going on within my own tempestuous morass of a psyche, there’s no one else in existence who can claim a greater level of expertise or comparably intimate knowledge. There is relative safety in that. Whatever the reason, exposing my inner thoughts and struggles is far less perilous than claiming the authority to expound upon an external subject.

  So perhaps a healthy approach, and even a more fruitful approach, is to lean into my own inclinations and preferences, and tackle the subject of this project through my own lens. In other words, rather than present facts and an argument impersonally, maybe I can chronicle my own experience of the subject as I absorb it, and recount for the reader my intellectual journey to better understand it. The cliché is that one ought to “write what you know,” but I really don’t know much. So maybe the best thing to do is to write what I am coming to know – of the project’s subject and of what it comes to mean to me personally.

  Okay, maybe I can do that. Take it easy now, oh knotty neck muscles of mine. Let’s get a few deep breaths in. Let’s take in the vast scene of nature around us and indulge in its otherworldly peacefulness. Let’s let the brain soak up what it’s learning and let the new information bounce off the thoughts and values that are already there.

  And then, let’s write.

  (And pay for the kettle I broke.)

  

  ---

  Why yes, you certainly can support my work through Patreon.

   

  October 2, 2017

  acting, anxiety, aspergers, autism, writing

  ---

• A Sore Thumb, a New Face

  I’m on a plane to California, about to spend two weeks at a refuge for writers, a retreat for which I was nominated by a colleague who had himself been a resident as part of a fellowship for writers in the freethought community.

  Being selected for this wasn’t just a surprise. Certainly, I went through all the thoughts of “what an honor” and “what a wonderful opportunity,” and they are very sincerely felt. But my dominant attitude is, “Oh, dear, they’ve made a mistake.”

  Wait, this isn’t the usual imposter-syndrome lament. Let me go at this sort of orthogonally. As I was preparing for this excursion, I figured I ought to get at least a couple of new shirts or pairs of pants, since so many of the nicer items in my already spare wardrobe are looking worse for wear. As poked around the men’s section, haplessly, I found myself fixed to an idea of what a “real writer” is supposed to look and dress like. It wasn’t a fully conscious thought, just something I became gradually aware that I was aiming for as I shopped. Despite the anxiety this caused me, whatever that writerly image is or was, I’m fairly certain I did not achieve it. I’ll come back to this is a bit.

  This retreat will take place in what appears to be a big, gorgeous house in a ridiculously picturesque area of Southern California, overlooking a fault line I think, and yes, the weather is supposed to be heavenly while I’m there. Apart from a couple of formal meet-and-greet meals held by the proprietors, writers are otherwise left to themselves to work on whatever it is they’re working on. When not writing or sleeping, we’re encouraged to take advantage of the local restaurants, outdoor activities, and I think there’s even a tennis court.

  I’ll be in residence with two other writers, selected, I assume, through different means, since my spot is specific to those writing about freethought and secularism. These two writers, my soon-to-be housemates, are very accomplished, particularly for their ages, as I suspect they are both a good decade younger than me, though that’s just a guess. One is an award-winning novelist, the other a journalist with bylines at prestigious outlets and publications. Me? I’ve written a whole lot of press releases and email newsletters. I have a personal blog that more or less no one reads. I have a blog for work where I round up news stories and make dumb jokes. That’s…kind of it. And I’m gonna be 40 soon! I mean, I also now host a podcast that is listened to by a few thousand people, but I was selected for this retreat well before that got started. So what am I doing here, on this plane, heading for this gorgeous place and joining these amazing people?

  I’m not seeking validation. I mean, I usually am, but not here, not for this. I actually do think I’m a pretty good writer, so my discomfort and foreboding aren’t due doubts about my skills. I suck at many, many things — but I’m fairly sure I can write. 

  But I also know I don’t have the resume, the credentials. For the vast majority of my public writing, there are several layers separating me from the material. I am writing in the voice of an institution, not my own. I am rarely writing in the first person, or from my own personal perspective at all, but from the point of view of an organization or one of its leaders. Even were I to grant that my work was uncommonly exemplary, it wouldn’t even begin to approach the prestige or cultural significance of what my fellow residents have achieved with their work. My predecessor for this fellowship who nominated me to succeed him is also incredibly accomplished. Holding a similar position to mine in his own organization, he has been a well known and highly respected leader, not just in secularism, but in political advocacy in general. He’s written books, academic articles, and has had a leading role in the advancement of the cause for which he fights. He’s not only qualified to be at a writers’ retreat like this, he’s overqualified and overdue for even greater honors.

  Oh but hey, I’m kinda funny on Twitter!

  Okay, well, they knew all of this when I was nominated and selected. And they didn’t hedge their invitation with anything like, “Well, you don’t quite have the pedigree we normally look for in our residents, but your friend seemed to think you might be worth a shot.” They were as warm and welcoming and excited about my arrival as they would be for anyone else. (Or at least they made it seem so, which is almost the same thing. As a parent, I know all too well the emotional and psychological cost of feigning enthusiasm.)

  Remember the clothes shopping? Half-consciously, I was focused on looking the part of what I think they think a real writer is supposed to be. I didn’t want them to think of me as a weird outlier, an exception to their usual standards. Just as I have always done as an unknowing-autistic for all of my life, I was aiming to pass.

  In attending this retreat, I am entering a world that is both aspirational and alien to me. I have always wanted to be taken seriously as a writer, a thinker, a creator. I’ve been on the cold street, looking in through the window at that society of the humanities, the creative class, the intellectuals, feeling simultaneously compelled to become one of them and certain that I could never, ever truly belong. So I never stood close enough to that window to fog up the glass. Someone might have noticed me.

  In my mind, this is a world of people with deep, varied, and rich life experiences, who have achieved greatness in their fields, who have been intellectually and creatively ahead of the curve since toddlerhood. And now, they write thinkpieces and longform articles and nonfiction books and novels and poetry, and are rewarded with respect, admiration, income (I assume), a place in a network of brilliant and thoughtful people seeking to learn from and collaborate with each other, invitations to speaking engagements, conference panels, NPR interviews, generous fellowships, and, of course, retreats.

  The stereotype in my head gets richer still! They love nature and trekking about in it. They also love the city and its unrelenting stimuli. They love fancy and eclectic restaurants. They also love — really love — dinner parties, where they drink and laugh and eat exotic food and swap stories of their adventures and the many, many books they’ve read.

  I’m not one of these people (whom I’ve mostly made up). I don’t like dinner parties or almost any kind of party. I don’t like exotic or unfamiliar food. Hell, I don’t even really like eating at all. I wear silly T-shirts and ratty jeans, I read very slowly, and I am averse to being outdoors, what with the sun and bodies of water and insects and all that. My education has been modest and not culturally rich, and both my acting and nonprofit communications careers have been fairly static, owing in large part to my own reticence to do what is necessary to advance socially and professionally. I’m an awkward little man with Asperger’s and a lifetime of experience considering myself broken, failed from birth, only achieving what I have by dint of happenstance and people making exceptions for me. I am the sore thumb. Humiliation is my default expectation.

  But here I am on this damn plane. Here I go, nonetheless, onto alien soil. My best hope would be to go there, to *be* there, as me, unapologetically, and perfectly content with myself as I am, without crossing the line into being ungenerous or unaccomodating. If I am truly not “like them,” then so be it. They asked me to come, and this is who they get. It’s not like I’m going to do any damage or hurt anyone’s feelings. I just might not be the usual thing, or what they expect.

  I want it to be okay to jut out a bit, not like a sore thumb, but simply to stand out as a new face. The face of someone who thinks and acts a little differently and has something meaningful to offer. Someone who, if he’s not liked or appreciated, is okay with that too.

  I suppose I’ll find out if this is possible, at least to some meaningful degree. I’ll enter that world in a few hours. I guess we’ll see what things look like at the other side of a fortnight.

  ---

  If you would like to validate me by monetary means, you could always support my work through Patreon.

  September 29, 2017

  anxiety, aspergers, autism, writing

  ---

• Autistic Alienation: Not as Simple as Intense Introversion

  One thing about Asperger’s/autism that I think is hard for neurotypicals to understand, and is also hard for me to come to terms with, is that as an autistic person, my attitude toward socialization isn’t merely binary. The introversion instinct is incredibly strong, and it’s true that I can’t heal, rest, or reengergize without relative solitude. But that doesn’t mean I therefore never want human contact.

  It gets even more complicated than that, though. If it were as simple as “I like to socialize a lot less than most people, but I do want to socialize a little,” that’d be relatively easy to manage. You just keep social interaction to a manageable level, whatever it happens to be For the individual. But here’s the thing: even human interaction that an aspie might affirmatively seek out is still fraught with discomfort, self-doubt, anxiety, and pain. It’s still exhausting, and sometimes dispiriting, unless it's particularly fulfilling in some way.

  So when an introverted aspie is avoiding other members of his or her species, they may also be experiencing, at an atavistic, lizard-brain level, a longing for human contact, to feel assured that one still “belongs” in the tribe. And even when that validation is achieved in the most positive and affirming of scenarios, it’s still incredibly difficult.

  This is the picture: Imagine a human being whose brain has developed differently than almost everyone they know. They may be incredibly intelligent or talented in some way or other (or maybe not!), and have a great deal of thoughts and feelings they desperately want to express and share. But the agony of submitting oneself to the evaluation of normal people, even in the most banal and benign circumstances, is often too much to bear, or at least too uncomfortable to make it worth the effort. When they do take the leap and try to mix in normal society, the energy drain is rapid, the stress is damaging, and the tiniest faux pas (real and imagined) is burned into their memories as scarring humiliation. So this human being, full of life and solitary, feels lonely, while determined to remain alone. Until the loneliness becomes too much, such that a new attempt is made.

  I miss having a set of friends that I was comfortable with, that I could develop routines with, and rely on for that base-level validation that I was in the right species, that I had a tribe from which I was in no danger of being ejected. I have had that. A lifetime ago.

  I don’t have that now, and most of my experiences after my life in professional theatre has been characterized by anxiety over being banished from whatever tribe to which I submitted myself, or else having no tribe at all, and cautiously yearning for one. (And not knowing that I was autistic in the first place.)

  It’s not just that we want to be alone. But it’s the only way we know we can safely be.

  August 4, 2017

  anxiety, aspergers, autism, introversion

  ---

• Excruciating Information

  A fellow autistic blogger whose work I deeply admire pointed me to this short little PSA video from the UK that she said was revelatory in how it reflected her own experience. And so it is for me.

  Particularly when it comes to the Asperger’s part of the autism “spectrum,” I think people – including actual Aspies – tend to cling to the idea of social awkwardness and alienation as the defining traits. But using this stereotype as definitive ignores what I think is one of the prime causes of that awkwardness and alienation, and that’s the difficulty we have in processing stimuli with the same capacity and at the same rate neurotypicals, and that difficulty manifests not just temporally – it’s not that we just have to sit there and ponder for a few moments and then move on – but physiologically. It’s painful.

  The example you’re most likely familiar with is that of the noisy, crowded room, say at a bar or a party, an environment that can be incredibly uncomfortable for many of us. I usually see it described in terms of the noise level and the variety of voices coming from all directions emitting sound. But that’s just one factor. There’s the visual, of course, as one is surrounded by faces and bodies and objects and movement and nonverbal expressions and cues. And there’s also the tactile, the feeling of one’s clothes, the floor beneath you, the furniture you may or may not have your weight on, the food you likely have strong aversions to, and quite especially the temperature. And that sound? It’s not just the decibels, but the information contained in the voices, what they’re actually saying in the chit chat, in the music blasting, and on and on.

  That’s a lot of information to process all at once, creating palpable discomfort, anxiety, and misery in a context that demands a certain kind of relaxed behavior.

  There are so many other ways this comes up in my life. I can’t for the life of me orient myself in space, for example, so whether we’re talking about driving directions to places I’ve been many times before, or just navigating the interior of a building with more than four rooms or so, I’m constantly bewildered. I can’t process that information at a rate that makes the directions useful, nor can I process the information without extreme discomfort and crippling anxiety, which only makes the processing harder.

  If I get an email at work that is more than a few sentences, I know I will have to relax my brain and read it carefully a few times because too often I have replied or executed instructions based on a misreading of the text or with significant pieces of data missing from my comprehension. That screen full of words begins, in my eyes, as white noise, a garble of glyphs in pixels, especially if it’s part of a threaded conversation. And again, that doesn’t just spark confusion and compel me to take my time, it hurts, it’s dizzying. (So yes, when I read books, I’m pretty damn slow about it.)

  So I understand this young girl in the video. That was me at that age. These otherwise innocuous, benign interactions that a person has throughout their day, these humdrum travels from point A to point B that nonetheless feel perilous, these unanswerable questions launched at you and meant as small talk, the torrent of trivialities that threaten to drown you even when you don’t know why you’re expected to care, the inadvertent offense or problem you cause as a result of your efforts to shield yourself. It’s too much. Even today, though I fake it much better than I did then, it’s too much.

  The world obviously isn’t set up for autistic people to succeed. It’s a miracle so many of us have. And the thing is, I don’t think it would take so much for the rest of neurotypical society to give us a little space. If only it weren’t so excruciating for us to ask for it.

  July 8, 2017

  anxiety, aspergers, autism, video

  ---

• The Long Climb Up to Zero

  I’m on my way back from CSICon, the skeptics’ conference put on by my organization, which took place in Las Vegas this year. One of the presentations was by Anthony Pratkanis, who introduced us to the phenomenon of “altercasting,” wherein a person can elicit desired behavior from others by adopting, and implicitly assigning, particular social roles. So for example, if he effectively assumes the social role of a teacher, we become students, and will find ourselves carrying out the behaviors that are expected of that role (dutifully taking notes if he suggests it, for example). And the power of this altercasting is such that once we have put ourselves into these social roles, we live up to them. We almost can’t help it. It’s a tool of con artists, as well as a skill that can be used for good.

  On my way in to Vegas, I got a message from my wife asking if I knew what day it was. Uh oh, was my first thought. But then she reminded me: the sixth anniversary of the night I was ambushed late at night by two thugs on the street in DC, beaten to a bloody pulp, and sent into a years-long spiral of PTSD and myriad other associated problems. The anniversary date used to have a lot of power over me, almost as though the recurrence of the date would somehow “make it happen again,” which is of course nonsense. In the past couple of years, though, I’ve more or less let the day pass without realizing it, which is a small victory.

  The years of therapy that followed this event, which I’m still working through, subsequently unearthed the vast array of phobias, self-loathing, weird hangups, anxieties, traumas, and other psychological baggage I’d been lugging around more or less since childhood. The PTSD diagnosis, it turned out, spanned far more than just one attack. I had been trained to experience existential terror, fight-or-flight amygdala activation, through years of bullying and abuse in my youth. In other words, I was early on placed in the social role of a subhuman target for derision. And with constant reenforcement, I lived up to it. I memorized it.

  All this time, readers will know, I had been living with Asperger’s syndrome, and had no idea. I only found this out very recently, at age 38. This means I had been born predisposed to feel like an alien, unable to comprehend the behavior of the beings around me, stunted in my attempts to reach out or communicate, and often punished for it. The Asperger’s also contributed to a litany of other ways in which I experienced the world differently from neurotypical folks, so a great deal of my fears and limitations (social, intellectual, physical) were textbook aspects of the autism.

  I felt like an alien for a reason, because I really was different. The misfortune of growing up in a bullying environment led me down the path of believing myself to be a bad alien, a bum unit out of the factory, a lemon, sent into this breathing world scarce half made up. To use Pratkanis’s concept, I likely altercast my social role as an unworthy to others as much or more than it was altercast upon me by others.

  When one is of this mind, I’ve learned, one sort of expects to be called out, to periodically pay some kind of penance for one’s difference, for pretending to be a normal member of the species. Not so fast! We see you. In adulthood, you can go for longer stretches of time without being overtly chastised for trying to pass as human, but the dread of being revealed is ever-present. For me, it was a constant exercise of over-analysis of my behavior, my physical comportment, my speech, the direction of my gaze, my gestures, as well as kind of running apology for my quirks, oddities, and deficiencies. It’s as if to display a running advertisement to the rest of the world that says, “I know I’m not like you, I get it, and I’m sorry.”

  The attack six years ago felt like one of those moments of being caught, unmasked. Ostensibly those assailants were beating me up to get my wallet and phone, but to me, they were punishing me for existing. Not so fast. We see you. In the moment of the beatings, it felt like I was finally going to be killed for it, and that didn’t seem too strange to me. I had it coming.

  I now am meant to unlearn all of this. I am supposed to be working to memorize a different story about myself, to assign myself different, affirming social roles.

  The Asperger’s diagnosis should be making this task easier. Before the diagnosis, this was an exercise in convincing myself I was fine the way I was, and that there was nothing about me that inherently made me unworthy of membership in homo sapiens, which is quite an uphill climb, psychologically, intellectually, and emotionally. My mind had been trained to believe the opposite, and now I had to learn that I was as worthy of respect and agency as anyone else – not in spite of my various quirks, hangups, and differences, but regardless of them. Knowing now that I had been working with an autistic brain all this time should have eased this path, because it explained the majority of my differences and my feelings of alienation, giving them a name and a cause. Rather than working to accept a bubbling, undulating mass of traits, something that seemed scattered and very abstract, I now had a concrete, definitive First Cause. Whereas I had once felt that I had a torrent of faults of my own making with which I had to come to terms, now I knew I had a condition. I was born with an atypical brain, and there was and is nothing to be done about that, so I might as well just be okay with it.

  But three months or so into my life as a diagnosed Aspie (which is a short time, I know), this hasn’t happened. What I hoped would be a huge relief and a license to finally accept myself as I am has proved to be much more complicated and fraught. At conferences, for example, like the one I’m leaving right now, I still default to the social role of the barely-tolerated freak, the alien who needs to at least imply apology for just being there. Awareness of my own Asperger’s hasn’t erased the limitations of that condition, so I still flail and sweat and panic my way through even the most banal interactions (especially those). Rather than accept the fact that I simply can’t perceive what others naturally perceive, I go into a kind of processing overdrive, likely coming off even weirder than I might otherwise, and certainly exhausting myself. The cascade of self-doubt, self-loathing, and shame for existing continues as it ever has. If anything, now I add to my longtime mountain of struggle the knowledge that I am being “a bad Aspie,” failing to accept and live out that reality.

  So even after all this self-realization, after all this really hard work, there remains a social role I seem immune to, over which altercasting has no effect: Respected peer. It’s not as though I get no validation from friends and colleagues. Good-hearted people in my life expend great effort trying to imbue me with some sense of self-worth. But their words, their sentiments, their compassion, sincere as I assume it to be, just bounces off. It simply doesn’t penetrate. Words of encouragement and affirmation sound as absurd to me as being told I have three heads or telekinetic powers. I know it’s not so, no matter how passionately you try to convince me.

  I know, I know. The point is not what others tell me, how they validate me. The goal is to start within myself, to memorize a new narrative of my own making. It’s just proving a lot harder than I thought. Understanding the core source of my alienation hasn’t erased the alienation, not yet anyway. And all I aspire to, really, is to stop at knowing I’m different. To take no further steps, either into self-loathing or even affirmation.

  A mere feeling of neutrality about “the way I am” would be a goddamned paradise. But man, it’s still a long, long way up just to get to zero.

  If you like my work, please consider supporting it through Patreon.

  October 30, 2016

  anxiety, aspergers, autism, depression, ptsd

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• Unavoidable Ambience

  

  I admit it. When I walk through an airport (which I’ve done quite a lot of in the past couple of weeks), and see almost every pair of eyes staring at a phone or tablet screen, I get the feeling that something is wrong. It bothers me.

  This is of course absurd if you know anything about me.

  I adore smartphones and tablets and computers. I also hate being around groups of people, particularly strangers. In large part due to my Asperger’s syndrome, I’m deeply averse to casual human interaction, small talk, and establishing connections with people in meatspace. The smartphone and its ancillary technologies are a gift to someone like me; yes, as a way to escape and feed my mind and sate my need for dopamine squirts, but also as a means for me to communicate and build relationships on my terms, in my own time, and at a safe distance. I am serious when I say that I am so very grateful for these devices.

  And yet. As my eyes survey a public space stuffed with humans, just about literally all transfixed on their phones, I can’t help but feel like something has gone wrong. I mean, they’re not all autistics and introverts, right?

  If anything, I should be relieved. The more people who are engaged with their devices, the fewer there are to creep into my space and demand my attention and energy. As it is, I blend right in, which has been perhaps the chief aim of my existence in physical space since I was 10 years old.

  Am I being weirdly territorial? Do I resent the normals of the world encroaching on my virtual space and leaning on my crutch? I mean after all, I’m in that space to get away from everyone, not meet up with them through a different venue.

  Nah. These people may be online, but they’re still nowhere near me.

  And anyway, I’ve argued before that there’s no reason to be judgmental about someone using a phone. Yes, it appears to the observer that all phone-gawkers are the same, passively consuming some digital confection of little to no value. But for all anyone knows, this person might be reading a scientific paper, that one might be engrossed in a rich novel, and that one might be reviewing important job-related correspondences. There’s no way to know.

  But, you know, probably not. We still have no room to judge, though. I know that sometimes the best thing a person can do to heal psychological exhaustion is to vegetate for a bit, and rest one’s higher processes.

  I suppose some of this has a lot to do with my own conditioning. I grew up to expect people to be interacting with each other when they’re in proximity. Lord knows I was never good at this, or ever liked it — indeed, it’s usually painful. But I knew that I was different for feeling this way, wrong, and well before I was ever diagnosed as autistic or sought therapy for my difficulties. I was the odd duck, while everyone else was doing it right. I learned, correctly or incorrectly, that this socially connective norm was right. To step back out into the world now, and in such a short space of time see things change so drastically, is jarring. I think, what happened to all of you?

  *

  

  For a few weeks now I’ve been chewing over in my mind the recent New York Magazine essay by Andrew Sullivan, where he cops to becoming consumed by the digital space, recounts his efforts to center himself and his priorities, and worries aloud about what the new smartphone era is doing to society as a whole.

  I deeply respect Sullivan — he is a major influence on my work, even when I disagree with him. And here, I do feel like his own, very real feelings of loss and panic have caused him to project too much on the rest of the world.

  Nonetheless, let’s consider some of his observations.

  As I had discovered in my blogging years, the family that is eating together while simultaneously on their phones is not actually together. They are, in [Sherry] Turkle’s formulation, “alone together.” You are where your attention is. If you’re watching a football game with your son while also texting a friend, you’re not fully with your child — and he knows it. Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance. These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human.

  That feels worrying, to be sure. There’s something rather disquieting about the idea that we’re slowly atrophying our fundamental humanity. I don’t know that we actually are, but he’s at least succeeded in scaring me a little.

  But look at one of the examples he uses here. “If you’re watching a football game with your son while also texting a friend…” In a hypothetical scenario in which a person is lost in digital distraction, he chooses another form of distraction as the venue: watching a football game. He doesn’t say whether he means watching one on television or in person, but it almost doesn’t matter. He’s talking about two people in the same place being distracted by the passive viewing of the same meaningless thing. A game! I absolutely grant that the parent and child here are missing out on the chance to connect over a shared experience as a result of the parent’s texting, but it remains that the original activity was one of passive consumption in the first place. (To be clear, I think the parent in this scenario should definitely put the phone away and be with their kid — I’m just pointing out the weirdness and the irony of the scenario Sullivan has chosen.)

  Now put aside for a moment the parent-child aspect of this. Sullivan presumes that the connections being established over a digital medium while watching a football game are less valuable or less meaningful because they don’t occur in meatspace. I’m not refuting that per se, but I’m also not prepared to grant it axiomatically. I have what I consider to be very meaningful relationships and connections with people I have never met in person, and exist to me primarily as Twitter avatars or what have you, and I truly appreciate them during shared experiences like presidential debates. But again, I’m also autistic. And I also know that my in-person connections to people like my wife and children are more valuable and meaningful to me than all the smartphones in South Korea.

  So like Sullivan I strongly suspect, if not from my own inner life then from my observation of other humans, that people need these social skills that have been “honed through the aeons.” But there are countless tiny signals and nuances in the digital realm as well, so there is the possibility that we are just honing new skills that will adapt us to a changing world.

  It’s kind of the story of human civilization anyway, isn’t it? A wandering species of animal that somehow stumbles along building megacities and spacecraft and internets as its neocortices and amygdalae do-si-do throughout the millennia, hoping we don’t murder too many of each other and open too big of a hole in the food chain for some other species to become the boss. (I’m looking at you, octopuses.)

  *

  Sullivan also says that spirituality itself is being replaced by the unavoidable ambience of consumable content, because spirituality requires silence.

  The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn.

  That’s a bit of a reach. The claims about the nature of reality made by faith traditions have indeed been disproven bit by bit over the ages, and we do now live at a time when they have been so utterly demolished by science — and even lived experience — that the outright rejection of faith in general becomes an increasingly tenable and normal condition. Has the noise of media contributed to this? Almost certainly, but I think it’s as much the content of that noise as it is the quantity.

  

  However, I think there can be little doubt that our current state of affairs is one in which there is precious little space for silence. And too many of us aren’t wise enough to seek it out of our own volition. Sullivan got wise, but only after driving himself to the brink. I am also very new to the notion that silence, space, and meditation (in the broadest sense) are not just sometimes pleasant or preferable, but necessary, physiologically and psychically. Silence is medicine I must remember to take.

  And I must remember it on my own. Apart from the encouragement of my wife and therapist, there is no mechanism built into the digital age’s social infrastructure that either imposes or easily facilitates this (unless the power grid goes down). Our world is built on an increasingly complex lattice, made up of strands of distraction. For now, the choice is entirely our own to close our eyes and refuse to follow each strand as it passes our awareness. And it’s a choice that becomes more and more difficult to make all the time.

  Those hundreds of people I see in one glance around the airport, each to a person gazing into an imperceptibly dense mosaic of pixels; if they’re not interacting with each other as I have grown to expect them to, I wonder if they ever find silence. I wonder if they ever seek it.

  As an Aspie, I am highly sensitive to noise, crowds, and torrents of stimuli. So maybe that’s what concerns me when I see them, that I unconsciously perceive that even if I can’t literally hear it, there exists among this sea of glowing rectangles an ever-increasing amount of noise, forming into a tidal wave of clamor that will eventually sweep me out to sea.

  

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  October 1, 2016

  anxiety, aspergers, meditation, smartphones, spirituality

  ---

• You Don’t Seem Autistic to Me: Asperger’s and the Fear of Not Being Believed

  [Updated below]

  Do you remember when you were a kid, and being sick meant the tantalizing possibility of staying home from school for a day? I was usually pretty pleased to be just sick enough to avoid the misery of middle and high school, as long as the illness in question wasn’t something agonizing. (I did have some brutal ear infections back then that I did not enjoy.)

  I remember that I would become pretty defensive about just how sick I really was. “Are you sure you’re not well enough to get through the day?” my parents would ask. I, taken aback by my parents’ skepticism, would respond with incredulity. “Yeeeesssss! I’m suuuuuure!” That defensiveness was due to the fact that I knew I wanted to be sick, and I knew that it was possible that I could maybe make it through the day, that I was perhaps playing it up a bit. It didn’t occur to me then, but does now, that this over-dramatization of illness on my part was probably already being taken into account by my parents and their decision to allow me to stay home. Melodrama was built into the stock, as it were.

  Today something very similar is cropping up for me in a whole new way with my recent diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome. (Here’s my first post on this new revelation, and some follow-up.) I am finding myself feeling very defensive about the fact of my condition. I am often under the suspicion that certain people in my life doubt the reality of my Asperger’s, that they think I’ve either gotten a bad diagnosis, or that I’ve somehow manipulated the process to get it.

  In reality, only one person has actually said anything like this, and it was said with the best and most generous of intentions, saying that I am just too “charming” and personable to be someone with Asperger’s, comparing the behavior they see from me with others they know with the same condition, and who seem very, very different.

  And I get that. Many people with Asperger’s, and many of the fictionalized portrayals of Asperger’s in entertainment, have glaringly severe social impairments that are obvious and off-putting to neurotypical people. There are aspies who really look like they “have something.” Whereas I don’t seem that way to most people. I would venture to say that no one, save my wife and therapist, would have ever entertained the notion that I might be at all autistic. I pass extremely well in most cases.

  And why wouldn’t I? I have spent the better part of four decades trying to not seem like an alien, but suffering under the constant stress of my what I perceived to be scrutiny and revulsion from others. I had every incentive to appear as normal, as charming, as personable, and as funny as possible when in the company of people. And when attention on me wasn’t a requirement, my incentive was to blend, to disappear, to go as unnoticed as possible. As far as my brain was concerned, this was a struggle for survival. I, at a biological level, believed I needed to pass and to blend in order to live.

  And I had no idea why it was so, so incredibly hard. I had to assume it was my own stupidity, laziness, obliviousness, or defectiveness.

  So of course I don’t seem like an aspie to most people most of the time. As a contrast, there’s a person I know who I strongly suspect is also an aspie, but hasn’t felt the same need to adapt or ingratiate themselves to others, and has instead fully embraced their quirks, to hell with everyone else if they don’t like it. I never had the luxury to go in that direction, and it never occurred to me to be an option. I felt I had absolutely no choice but to pass.

  And like the kid who is secretly glad to be sick in order to be able to stay home and watch TV all day, I wanted this diagnosis. I hoped the neuropsychologist would come back with a clear statement that I, indeed, had Asperger’s. It promised to explain so much of the pain and alienation and utter confusion I’ve experienced all my life, and it would mean that it wasn’t all due to my own failures to “live up” to the rest of the world’s norms and expectations. So I worried that in my testing, I might unconsciously try to “game the system,” and make myself seem more “aspie” (as though I would really know how to do that). Just as I was worried about others’ suspicions of me, I was suspicious of myself.

  This worry, though, turned out to be a pointless one. The testing, which took about 10 hours total, was so, well, alien to me, so removed from anything that I thought could relate to Asperger’s or much of anything else, I couldn’t have gamed it if I’d wanted to. And like the mom who already presumes their sick kid is probably overstating things just a little, these tests and evaluations have unconscious leanings already taken into account, as their abstractness and inscrutability are a definite check against the gilding of psychological lilies.

  In the interviews and written portions of the evaluation, I did check myself for embellishment, but it turned out I felt no impulse to embellish. Honest, straightforward answers according to my own genuine thoughts and feelings were enough. They spilled out. I told my story as honestly as one could, because that story was full and rich and silly and sad all by itself. It didn’t need any dramatization or exaggeration. It was whole on its own.

  And the doctor’s diagnosis was indeed definitive. There was no hedging, no “jump ball,” as Ray Romano’s character on Parenthood put it when he looked into the possibility of being an aspie himself. It was for sure. The doctor described it as “severe,” meaning firmly on the spectrum, and she explained how my results on the barrage of seemingly unrelated tests all confirmed this, one after the other.

  She also described how people with Asperger’s commonly find themselves drawn to the arts and to acting in particular. Aspies usually have sharp minds and good observational skills, and use those to their advantage in learning particular crafts and in the imitation of others’ mannerisms and behavior. I’m a pretty good stage actor, and it turns out I’m also a pretty good neurotypical imitator. As I said, I’ve had almost 40 years of practice.

  So it’s no surprise that I don’t “seem” autistic to most people. The doctor actually tried to impress upon me what a remarkable achievement it is that I’ve gotten this far, with a master’s degree and a meaningful job and a wonderful wife and amazing kids, all while trudging through this morass, and navigating through the confounding labyrinth of my differently-wired brain.

  But rather than take pride, I tend to feel defensive. I still stress over scrutiny. I still worry about the doubts of others. Just as I’ve felt like a fraudulent human, always about to unmasked and humiliated (which, remember, I internalize as a genuine threat to my survival), here I am again afraid that others will think my autism is overstated or a mere performance.

  Just last night I had a conversation about my autism with someone who has their own personal experience with people close to them who also have Asperger’s, and I felt like I was drowning. I rambled and sputtered, I spoke too loud and too fast, and I kept lurching back and forth between filling up conversational space and worrying that I had gone on too long. I was a hot mess, and now I realize it was because I was afraid I wasn’t being believed. This person had not said or done anything to make me think that, but I just thought that. In discussing something so new and personal and raw, I scrambled and flailed to protect myself.

  I don’t want to feel that way anymore. Part of this new chapter of my life is the beginnings of acceptance and belief in myself, regardless of what others think, or even more important, what I perceive or suspect they think. That would be true even if I didn’t have Asperger’s.

  This is real. This is who I am, and who I have always been. And though it is as old as I am, for now it is also new. In some ways, I am new. The coming months and years will find me experimenting with and easing into new ways of being and behaving that better suit me, and stepping back from many of the affectations and masks I’ve layered upon myself over the years. Many of those layers will stay, because they, too, are me.

  I guess, when it comes down to it, I get to decide. I will try not to make that process harder on myself by worrying about the imagined doubts of others, which only fixes those layers more firmly in place.

  Update August 27: Since writing this, one thing should be clarified. Some of the doubt I imagine to exist, but likely doesn’t, is about me, but another more problematic version of skepticism is doubt about the neuropsychologist who diagnosed me. And I just don’t know what to say to that. She’s an expert in her field, with decades of experience, and a particular specialization in adults on the spectrum, and she tested me for hours and hours over a period of months. And that’s in addition to the diagnosis of my regular therapist. But they don’t know what they’re talking about? 

  Honestly, if you think my doctor is wrong, I don’t know what to say to you. I’m not sure why you’d know better than them, or know enough to think they somehow screwed up completely. But it’s very frustrating.

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  August 26, 2016

  anxiety, aspergers, autism, autism spectrum disorder

  ---

• Asperger’s, Corrective Lenses, and the True Self

  What does it mean to “be yourself”? I think it means to behave as you would if you were more or less unconcerned with how others perceived your behavior, and I assume it’s implied that this being-yourself behavior is largely within the bounds of the law and socially acceptable norms.

  My recent diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome has opened up the opportunity for me to let go of my self-doubt and self-mortification, and to begin to embrace my Aspie nature, within reason, without concern for how it plays. It sounds pretty exciting! A lifetime of anguish can now be discarded, and real liberation experienced! I can be myself! I can be the real me!

  The problem, however, is that I’m not sure what the real me actually is. I’ve never really experienced the unfettered, unthreatened real me. Depending on the circumstance and either my comfort level or lack of inhibition, I presume have let varying degrees of “real me” emerge, be it in small drabs or convulsions of impulsivity that I have almost always regretted. But to put down all of the armor, to remove the masks, and to deactivate the constant self-surveillance, I do not know what that is. I don’t know who that is.

  I mean, it’s “me,” right? But “me” is also the sum of my experiences plus the “real me” of genetics and biology. By that way of thinking, the self-loathing and self-censoring mini-golem I have been all my life is the real me.

  However, now I know about my condition. I know that my brain was wired differently at birth through no fault of my own (or anyone else’s). So this new knowledge is now one of those experiences, it’s a new piece of “real me.”

  Which I guess brings us back to where we were. So maybe the question is, what is the real me now?

  One way to answer that might have to start with a different question: What would I like to be the real me now?

  When the prospect of being prescribed things like anti-anxiety and anti-depressive medication first came into my life, I was very reticent. I was hung up on the fact that what makes me who I am is my brain, just the way it is. While taking certain medications might make me feel better in certain ways, and make life more manageable, I feared that the medication would fundamentally change who I was, by tinkering with the chemistry of my very Self.

  But what I came to accept and appreciate is that if we’re lucky, life, being ridiculously short, offers us the chance to augment or repair aspects of our existence that hinder our well-being. I wear glasses to correct my vision, and I don’t consider blurry vision to be a key aspect of my true self. Having corrected vision absolutely impacts how I perceive and interact with the world, with countless internal and external implications. It’s a small thing, to wear glasses, but its effects are life-altering. But I don’t feel I’m being untrue to myself to wear them. If anything, I now consider them a part of my identity. I have adopted them into my “self,” so that “real me” is, among other things, a guy who wears glasses.

  And so I decided it could be for pills to make me less sad and less scared. The real me would now be a guy (with glasses) who takes pills to make himself less scared and sad. That feels okay.

  Today, I’m a guy who’s just found out he’s autistic at the age of 38. I didn’t have the benefit of this knowledge growing up, so I assumed I was faulty and subhuman, sent into this breathing world scarce half made up.

  Cynthia Kim of Musings of an Aspie wrote something about self-acceptance that echoed my own experience, to a point:

  When you grow up knowing that you’re different – and worse, suspecting that you’re defective – acceptance doesn’t come naturally. Too often, autistic individuals are acutely aware of the ways in which they don’t measure up to social norms. As a child, I knew that I wasn’t like most of the other kids and in the absence of an explanation, I assumed that I was simply doing something wrong.

  Finally having an explanation for my differences forced me to challenge some long-held beliefs about myself. What if all these things that are wrong with me – I was still thinking more in terms of “wrong” than “different” – aren’t my fault?

  Those first inklings of acceptance brought me immense joy. Decades of thinking I just wasn’t trying hard enough were cast in a new light. I wasn’t defective; my brain worked differently.

  I hoped for immense joy, but it hasn’t come yet. When the diagnosis was confirmed, there was no light from the heavens that lit up my soul and freed me from my past. A burden was lifted, surely, but a different one was placed on me, one that sounded more or less like “now what?”

  To be sure, self-forgiveness is coming. I now know why I didn’t “measure up to social norms,” when “be yourself” was simply not an option. And that’s very welcome. But what’s not clear yet is how to move forward.

  Here’s what I do know. I want to drop the armor and masks in a pile, and walk away from them forever. I want to shut off that self-surveillance system that’s been running inside me since I can remember, and disconnect the power supply.

  But I also want to know which of my Aspie quirks and predilections can be fully embraced, which I have to regulate, and which I have to bury. I know I can’t let go of all control and turn into some hyper-misanthropic live wire. I have responsibilities, and I have people I care about who need me to regulate. Who need me to put my Asperger’s traits aside as best I can, at least sometimes.

  So it seems what I need to do is to start examining all these pieces one by one, and experimenting with what works and what doesn’t, which aspects of the “real me” I can run with, and which ones need to adjusted or worked against. I’ll need to discover how they work in different combinations with each other, and in what contexts. I’ll need to decide which ones I actually like, and which ones I want to curtail because of some unhappiness they might bring.

  What eventually becomes the “real me,” then, will take time to emerge, and be at least in large part of my own making. I’ll be a guy with glasses, who takes pills to keep from getting to sad or scared, whose brain is wired to have some real big problems with the world around him, who also has some gifts to take advantage of, and who found out at 38 that he has Asperger’s syndrome. Somewhere, in all that, I hope I can find a real me.

  And I hope that eventually I can, for the first time in my life, be myself.

  August 14, 2016

  anxiety, aspergers, autism, autism spectrum disorder, depression, identity, self

  ---

• A More Forgiving Lens

  

  I have never felt like I belonged in this species. I resembled a human, and I could force myself to awkwardly ape the basic mannerisms of people, but I would always suspect that there was something alien about me, and that everyone else suspected (or knew) the same thing.

  A lot of this alienation is in regard to my relationship to, and interactions with, other people. I’m a pretty severe introvert, that’s no secret. Being around people, even those I love and feel most comfortable with, utterly exhausts me. But I’ve always felt that there was more to it than mere introversion. For as long as I can remember, I’ve struggled to relate to almost anyone, unable to comprehend others’ values, aspirations, needs, obsessions, or subtexts.

  As a result, I’ve been at a loss as to how to blend, to appear as though I do understand, or at the very least to keep my bewilderment hidden. So I’ve thrown an inordinate amount of processing power at figuring out how to appear normal, how to talk, stand, sit, move, gesture, and where to fix my gaze or how to modulate my voice. I pretend to value the same things other people value and aspire to the same kinds of things they aspire to, even to the point of almost entirely convincing myself.

  That alienation, this constant dissonance, was of my own making, I believed. I didn’t share the same interests as others because I had somehow failed to grasp the obvious reasons they were important or provided joy. I didn’t engage in sports or other physical activities because I was weak and afraid and unwilling to put the time in to not be that way. I had trouble comprehending instructions and directions because I was being self-absorbed and inattentive. I had trouble reading for any length of time because I was superficial and distracted. I upset people I love, not giving them what they needed, because I was negligent, self-centered, and oblivious. I didn’t want to socialize because I was a stick in the mud, narcissistic, and timid. I didn’t want to go on big adventures, travel, take big risks, or throw myself into new situations because I was cowardly and lazy. That summed up why I fared so poorly, academically and socially, throughout much of middle and high school: I was cowardly and lazy.

  What else could I conclude? And having reached such a conclusion, over and over, in every circumstance from childhood to my late 30s, brought self-hate, depression, anxiety, resentment, and resignation. How could it be any other way?

  I did have one suspicion, though. A suspicion that kept popping into my awareness, something that felt familiar, but also sounded too alien even for me.

  That suspicion only grew, however. When I would air it out loud to someone, it would be summarily dismissed. I, not trusting my own perceptions of the world, not knowing how to be a person, conceded to the dismissal. But only outwardly.

  I stopped conceding. I have finally pursued this suspicion to its end, and, well, it turns out for once I was right.

  Last week, at the age of 38, I was officially diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of Autism Spectrum Disorder, along with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

  I have Asperger’s. I am autistic.

  I’m so very glad to know. And I’m also glad that there was no hedging on the part of the doctor, the neuropsychologist who tested and diagnosed me. As my wife Jessica and I sat down in her office, the doctor mercifully began by saying, “I’ll cut to the chase, because I know you’re eager to know,” and told me that I had what she characterized as “severe” Asperger’s syndrome. Not severe in the sense of debilitation or in some kind of danger, but meaning that I’m firmly, well into the spectrum. Had the diagnosis been fuzzy, a borderline case, I’d never stop wondering and doubting. Having it be so clear-cut was a relief.

  When I first began toying with the idea of getting tested, I couldn’t avoid the fact that simply knowing I had Asperger’s, if indeed I did, wouldn’t really change anything. There’s no medication to take, there’s no real treatment. I’d just go on as I had been. I had to ask myself, well, why bother?

  Here’s why. The dissonance of my life – my strange predilections, my quirks, my strong and irrational aversions, my inability to read or connect with other people, my lack of interest in the experiences of life, my intractable obsessions over particular topics and utter lack of curiosity for almost anything else, my desperate need for safe and reliable routines, my spacial disorientation, my hypersensitivity to heat, sound, and light, my clumsiness and lack of coordination, my over-reliance on rules and logic, my inability to think in broad, big-picture terms, and most especially, the panic, pain, and exhaustion I experience in even the most benign social situations – I have always ascribed these things to my being a failure as a person. A lazy, cold-hearted, short-sighted coward.

  Now I know that much of it (not all, of course) stems from something I was just born with. There was an actual condition that made it impossible that I could ever be and think like everyone else. My brain was literally different from theirs, and there was nothing I could have done about it.

  Generosity of spirit is one of the virtues I value most, but it is never something I allowed for myself. Instead, I have tortured myself over my past, for the things I endured and the things I felt I had brought upon myself, because I had failed at some point to become fully human. I blamed myself for having neglected to learn how to be a normal person. I wasn’t just unable to cut myself a little slack for the failures and disappointments of the past, I had forbade myself from doing so. To forgive myself, I felt, would be to allow myself to continue to fail and disappoint.

  Now I can reevaluate. I can look back on the story of my life through a more forgiving lens. I honestly don’t know what that might do to me.

  As I sit here now and tell myself this is real, it’s hard to accept, even though it’s mostly welcome. I obviously have a great deal more processing to do. Some of that processing I’ll do here, in writing, as it seems to be the way I best understand and express my thoughts. In writing, the rules and parameters, and there are no social cues to miss or misinterpret, no eyes with which to avoid contact, no expected time frame in which to form and verbally express a thought, no expectation that I intuit the nuance and give-and-take of a real-time conversation. Here, I don’t have to second-guess my very worth as a human being.

  Actually, maybe that’s the first thing I should do: Accept, finally, that there is nothing to second-guess, and that I don’t have to pretend to be normal anymore. Maybe I never did.

  ---

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  July 31, 2016

  adhd, anxiety, asd, aspergers, autism, depression, introversion

  ---

• Accomplishments

  The challenge today was to be alright with accomplishing nothing. Which turned into something else.

  I’m parenting solo with only one of the kids, my 3-year-old daughter, as my wife and 6-year-old son are on a whirlwind trip to visit friends in far-off places. I am enjoying the chance to spend solo time with my daughter, though as my wife will attest, I already exist in a state in which I am constantly wrapped around her little finger. Nonetheless, it’s nice.

  The week had been productive in a number of ways, not just from work, but in the restarting of my podcast after a brief hiatus, beginning to noodle with music once again, and most impressive to me, my having installed a dishwasher with no help, and no errors. 

  But then I had my weekend with my daughter. Saturday was all about catering to her. Her brother was going on an adventure, and she was not, so this was a day to spoil her a bit, and that took the bulk of the day. Today, Sunday, was more or less a normal Sunday, with stuff to take care of around the house, and a kid to occupy (usually it’s two of them, and I have a partner in parenting). 

  We played with her stuffed animals, we played doctor and patient (I needed a shot of course), and we spent a good amount of time on this beautiful, cool day at a playground. She loves the swings. She could stay on the swings all day. And of course, she must be pushed.

  I could feel an anxiety rise in my chest. The work week was about to start back up. Nothing had gotten done in the house. I needed playtime to last as long as it could in order to fill time, and yet I worried over the time that was ticking away. For…what? I didn’t know.

  I tried to be still. She was in a kind of state of blissful sublimity on her swing, time having even less meaning than it usually does for a 3-year-old. I wanted to join her, at least a little, in that state. It didn’t have to be bliss, but I could at least reject the concerns for Things to Be Done, for time filled purposelessly. I could, maybe, just be okay with being there, for as long as it went. 

  I don’t know that I quite got there, but I got closer.

  And then I thought, well, I’m not actually “doing nothing,” even though I am working toward being content with exactly that. I am doing something absolutely crucial.

  I am raising my daughter.

  Raising a child isn’t something that is “accomplished.” It is not a task. It is a (hopefully) lifelong series of moments, overlapping and tumbling and grinding and slipping by. It is a long line of fractions of seconds, in which I make connections of varying degrees of strength and meaning with my child. It is both glacial and ephemeral. 

  It is each push on that swing. 

  I didn’t accomplish much today. But I did push my little girl on her swing for as long as she wanted. I accomplished a lot today.

  

  April 18, 2016

  anxiety, parenting

  ---

• Permission to be Unproductive

  A thing a sack of problems like me is supposed to do to mitigate crippling anxiety and PTSD is to allow oneself to escape, to decompress. I am notoriously terrible at this. And it’s not just because of the overt crazy from which I suffer, but all manner of tangential hangups.
  Let me begin with an experience from earlier this afternoon. I was having my twice-yearly dentist appointment, which is really just a chunk of time during which a very nice hygienist scrapes, polishes, and flosses my teeth, wonders aloud at my bizarre lower teeth (long story), and warns me again to floss more.

  But because I don’t floss much, portions of this otherwise banal process are rather uncomfortable. I was already coming into the appointment is a kind of emotionally exhausted daze, so this seemed like a good time to practice separating myself from any stressful stimuli, to rehearse something less uncomfortable.

  So as that little sharp thingy scraped away at my teeth, and occasionally jabbed my tender gums, I made a point of gazing deeply out the window, trying not to think too hard or intentionally process what I was seeing, but just allow myself to take in the clouds, the colors, and the very slow movement. If I couldn’t see the window, I’d watch whatever tool was being used on me, as its handle went back and forth. I didn’t consider in detail what it was doing, just kind of stayed with it visually.

  I had some success with this, and found it somewhat helpful. But the larger point is that I need to make myself escape in this way, become a little “mindless” more often, and at targeted times when I really need it.

  I was unable to do it last night. I simply couldn’t allow myself to escape, to divert my attention from my issue-of-the-moment, but I so wish I could have.

  My five or six regular readers will know that I have a lot of hangups around how I spend my time. I loathe going to bed, and I resist sleep, seeing it as a kind of “little death.”

  I read books slowly, and often nod off, and worry about what other books I’m missing out on, what other things are happening while I’m reading, and what more productive things I should be doing. This is probably why I have tended to favor nonfiction over fiction, because at least with nonfiction I’m “learning” something in a way that is more concrete than I might with fiction.

  I have made an attempt to calm myself and escape through music, and that turned into a nutty and obsessive hunt for The Perfect Headphones, documented here. But there again, I feel that allowing myself to sink into a reverie of musical consumption is somehow wasteful, that better uses of my time are beckoning. What they are, I don’t know.

  And more of the same with TV and movies. I resist them both because I know that they take up chunks of wakeful time that I could spend on something that matters.

  What are these things that matter that I ought to be doing? I guess writing, more creative pursuits, and whatnot. But do I engage in them when I’m not “escaping”? Not usually! Obviously, I do write, I do at rare times make music, but I’m certainly not filling every moment in which I could be watching a two-hour movie with artistic fulfillment. I’m probably just dicking around on the Internet and thinking about phones I don’t have.

  But I’m coming around a little. A few weeks ago, because I knew we’d be seeing Age of Ultron soon, I leaned back in bed, plopped my MacBook on my lap, plugged in my headphones (I have stuck with the same ones so far!), and watched the first Avengers movie.

  It was about the most therapeutic thing I’d done for myself in years.

  What a release! What an escape! For the length of the film I was gone. I was just in this fantasy world, absorbed in something utterly removed from my own life, and when it was over, I felt, well, almost rested, even though it was probably two in the morning.

  Most movies aren’t going to be that effective in this way, I know that. But there are plenty that are. I still have hangups about getting stuck in a movie that just isn’t all that good, and wasting those hours. But hell, being a parent, I can really only make time for the best of the best anyway. Experimentation with something stupid or ponderous is a luxury I don’t even have.

  I am also being swept away by Seveneves, Neil Stephenson’s newest novel. Fiction! Long, long, epic fiction! Taking me away from me. I still nod off too easily, and I still take way too long to read, but I am trying to let that go.

  Because at issue here is not achieving some sort of cultural or content-consuming quota, but to escape. To give my self a chance to get some distance, some room to breathe. So if it takes me all year to read Seveneves, whatever. So be it. (Or so I am telling myself.)

  What really needs to happen is for me to be okay with being utterly unproductive, to allow hours to go by without anything to show for it. Not in total idleness, but in active removal. Not “boredom” per se, but engagement in activities or experiences with no industry attached. There can be some productivity as a byproduct, like when I zone out while mowing the lawn or assembling some new shelving piece or something for the house. But that’s incidental. Even in those “productive” times, I’m still not “here.” I’m still getting out of my own head.

  This should not be hard for me, but it is. I know I wasted years of my youth on cable and late night TV, that I threw away precious time – after school, on summer vacations – time I could have used to better myself in some way. I just let my brain rot on pop culture, which was itself an escape from other things. But it was a poor avenue of escape, a kind of trap in itself.

  But I’ve since overcompensated. It’s time to find the balance. The nice thing is that the only one who gets to decide what that balance is, is me.

  That’s also the bad thing.

  June 30, 2015

  anxiety, books, film, movies, music, ptsd

  ---

• Threat

  What I think people don’t understand about those of us who suffer from intense anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder, and the like, is that having an intense response to something is not a mere intellectual construction that one can be argued out of. We don’t put a few bits of data together and make a rational decision to freak out. The freak-out comes as a result of something our body, including the deepest and most animalistic parts of our brain, has learned, rehearsed, and taken as the unchanging truth: “I am under threat.”
  And to the person having this experience, it seems entirely rational, plain as day, whether it could be rationally justified or not. The actual facts are immaterial, really, other than how they serve as stimuli to a fight-or-flight response. What doesn’t work is trying to convince us not to be freaked out by pointing out the facts. More data only fuels the fire, gives more things for our brains to be afraid of.

  Because what’s happening is physiological, it’s chemical, even though it can express itself in language after it’s been through our brains’ processes. Particularly for PTSD (my particular flavor of crazy), we’ve been “trained” to respond in certain ways to threats (real and imagined) by our past experiences. Some event or series of events have served as rehearsals for our lizard brains, to the point that the perceived threat that kicks the fight-or-flight response in gear becomes The Truth. It is so compelling, in fact, that it also entirely convinces the “higher” parts of our human brains, the ones we like to think of as rational.

  What happens then? The rational parts of the brain don’t resist the mania of the lizard brain. Instead, the rational brain goes to work justifying and bolstering what the lizard brain is telling it. Lizard brain says “threat,” rational brain says “drop everything and analyze all aspects of threat; actual and hypothetical; past, present, and future.” In these cases, the rational brain is kind of like CNN when a plane disappears.

  I can’t get into it here, but there’s a threat I perceive in my life right now. I am being told my everyone in my life that the threat is very small — not nonexistent, but not worth obsessing over by any means. I am, nonetheless, obsessing over it, to the point of panic, to the point of a heart pounding against my rib case when I’m merely sitting and watching a movie with my 2-year-old daughter on the couch. I hear a sound, I sense a movement, I think of benign things, it all leads down the same path. I imagine every possible scenario of how this threat might manifest, the ways in which this threat might hurt or kill me, my wife, my kids. I remind myself of how almost anything could set this threat in motion, that its catalyst is entirely unpredictable. That means that this threat could appear at any time, in degrees that range from nuisance to unspeakable horror.

  The facts don’t help. Every bit of data given to me about the situation, meant to allay my fears, only gives me further avenues to explore as to how things might unravel. It’s like a conspiracy theorist, where every fact meant to disprove a ridiculous assertion only serves to confirm it.

  I know that the thing I’m supposed to do, as someone who’s been in a lot of therapy for this kind of thing, is to reverse what my lizard brain has rehearsed. To rehearse a new automatic response. But it has to go in the opposite direction of the original “bad rehearsal.” Instead of the experience being dictated by my lizard brain, and into my rational brain, I have to begin in my rational brain and work it backward. Instead of letting my lizard brain determine my physiological state (the heart pounding, the tightened muscles, the widened eyes, the quick breathing, etc.), I have to let my rational brain tell my body what to do, which should in turn “rehearse” my lizard brain to a new status quo. It’s incredibly difficult.

  And it is made all the more difficult because, remember, my rational brain is already in the can for the worldview of the lizard brain. My rational brain believes that the threat is real and ever-present, and for me to tell it something contrary to that feels like an enormous lie, a sick joke, like trying to convince yourself that Santa Claus is real, or that two plus two equals banana. Everything inside me tells me that the threat is real, and all attempts to convince me otherwise are wrong, or worse, additional aspects of that threat.

  The only solution to that paradox, frustratingly, is more and more rehearsal of the “correct” outlook. Even if every fiber of my being believes it to be a lie, the rehearsal will, in theory, eventually begin to take. My lizard brain will learn from the adjustments in thinking, in breathing, in refocusing. It will resist, but by rehearsing, it becomes the new normal.

  But it is so hard. It is so hard. And that threat is right there, guys. It’s right there.

  June 29, 2015

  anxiety, ptsd

  ---

• Death by a Thousand Emotional Microtransactions

  
  How much do you care what people think of you? How much do you care what people you’ve never met think of you? How much do you care what people you’ve never met think about any individual choice you make or opinion you share? How much do you care what people you’ve never met think of the specifics of the format, timing, wording, tone, or technological means of the opinion you’ve shared?

  If you use Twitter, or social media in general, you already kind of know the answer, or at least you’re learning it.

  I have been learning some lessons myself about social media; how it can be used either passively or with intention; how it informs our personal identity; and how I have allowed it too much unfettered access to my nervous system, among other things. Clearly, for all its benefits, Twitter is also an enormous source of potential stress, eliciting what I call the Torrent of Feelings. I won’t get into the myriad factors that make this so. Browse this here blog, and you’ll see other ruminations on this subject.

  What occurs to me lately is that a lot of the stress that Twitter (et. al.) engenders has to do with our perceptions of being judged. The more you present yourself on one of these platforms (and I’ll just use Twitter for now, since it’s my traditional platform and I’m tired of typing provisos indicating “et cetera”), the more you have your sense of self and identity wrapped up in it. And that can make one sensitive to the scrutiny that comes with such exposure.

  Freddie deBoer recently put it like this:

  “You’re doing it wrong” is the internet’s truest, most genuine expression of itself. For whatever reason, the endless exposure to other people’s minds has made the vague feeling that someone, somewhere, is judging you into the most powerful force in the world.

  But what is being judged? The more I think about it, the more I think the answer is “everything.” And not “everything” in the sense of one’s whole self. That is happening, but it’s piecemeal. Very piecemeal, granular in the extreme. Because of course no one can encapsulate their whole selves in a tweet, or even a series of them, so judgment comes in small units. The hyperscrutinization that people experience (I know I do) on Twitter happens tweet by tweet, and on down.

  Of course you can be called out for the substance of your opinions and choices, whether deservedly or not. But you can also be derided for your word choice, the timing of your tweet, your grammar, your nuance, your lack of nuance, your hashtag use, your frequency of tweeting or lack thereof, what client you’ve chosen to tweet from, and so on. And in those instances, though they are highly focused, the effect on the recipient is to add it to the collections of judgments about themselves as people. As Boone Gorges puts it, “A life spent on Twitter is a death by a thousand emotional microtransactions.”

  And while I strongly advocate using Twitter and social media with great intention, there’s not much you can do about this micro-judgment phenomenon besides not using Twitter. That’s because Twitter is used by humans (usually), and humans, even the ones we really like, also tend toward the shallow and the knee-jerk response in an environment that fosters that kind of thing. Gorges again:

  Every tweet I read or write elicits some small (or not so small) emotional reaction: anger, mirth, puzzlement, guilt, anxiety, frustration. I’ve tried to prune my following list so that when I do find myself engaging in a genuine way, it’s with a person I genuinely want to engage with. But there’s a limit to how much pruning can be done, when unfollowing a real-life friend is the online equivalent of punting his puppy across the room. So all day long, I’m in and out of the stream, always reacting to whatever’s coming next.

  And there’s a domino effect. Especially during times of collective stress (such as the siege on Ferguson, the death of someone notable, etc.), those on the periphery peek in, see the Torrent of Feelings swirling around them, which causes them to judge the validity of that. Erin Kissane writes:

  In the flood of information and emotion from something like Ferguson (or war crimes or an epidemic) … there we all are, gradually drowning. So people get huffy about the volume emotion that these events arouse—angry that others are angry about the wrong things or too many things or in the wrong register. … (I am properly angry, you are merely “outraged.”)

  It should be noted that of the three writers quoted here, all three have left Twitter. DeBoer’s been gone for a while I think, and the other two announced their exit in the quoted posts.

  Now, I’m not leaving. I have too much invested socially and professionally in Twitter to foreswear it. I will have to make do with diligent pruning, and accept that it will require a degree of fluidity: maybe I mute or unfollow certain people at certain times, and then bring them back to my feed at other times, for example. I will probably screw some of it up.

  All of this is to say that Twitter is valuable, but we human beings are so damned vulnerable. The Twitter service does not care at all about this vulnerability, and probably thrives as a result of it. But I think we can do a lot to both harness Twitter’s positive value while being highly mindful of its power to kill by a thousand cuts (and this is before we even get to outright abuse, harassments, and threats, which is a related problem at a much higher temperature). I’ll be thinking about these things as I tweet and react, but also as I take in the reactions of others to me. It won’t be easy.

  —

  Image by Shutterstock.

  October 25, 2014

  anxiety, twitter

  ---

• The Quest for Peace, Through Headphones

  
  I am told that I am poor at being “in the moment,” and I confess it to be the case. I am nothing if not riddled with anxieties, large and small. At my worst, I am engulfed in worries, drenched in waves of stomach-sickening dread, doubt, and guilt. But normally, just going about my day, I maintain a manageable baseline of unease; the quiet hum of preoccupation with Other Things always resonating, if just barely. I am told this is bad for my health, to say the least.

  I come by it all honestly, with anxious genes from my forebears, and traumatic life experiences from childhood and adulthood that have primed my lizard brain to needlessly rev itself while idle, overeager to burst into full fight-or-flight mode at the least cause, be it from a sense of physical danger to thoughts and fears of a more existential, personal, or mundane nature.

  But while my limbic system is asserting itself, life is happening. There’s my wonderful family (who, in fairness, trigger not a small amount of anxiety themselves), music to be carried away by, books to be lost in, the lovely natural world that surrounds me here in Maine, Earl Gray tea, writing, bicycle rides, cool autumn air, my guitar, and even dumb video games and TV shows. To enjoy these things, I need to be there for them. I need to be “present.” Usually, I am not.

  Being in the moment, being present, having a feeling of mindfulness; these things are enormous challenges for me. Elusive, to say the least, even when sincerely pursued. Being present, letting go of worries and preoccupations, takes up such time, time I could be spending being worried and preoccupied. There are all those Other Things!

  The thing is, though, the worry and the preoccupation and the anxiety, it’s killing me. It’s ruining my sleep, shredding my nervous system, bruising my heart, pock-marking my brain, dampening my intellect, deadening my creativity, atrophying my muscles, and robbing me of genuine connection with my wife and kids, who I love deeply. I suffer from depression and I struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder, but it’s also true that I could improve things by leaps and bounds if I could just manage to make room in my life – in my mind – for one simple thing.

  Peace.

  All this is to say that this is why I went on a weird and frustrating quest over the past few weeks trying to find a nice pair of headphones.

  You see, even though I’m a musician and songwriter, actually listening to music, escaping into it, was something I’d lost the knack for sometime in my late 20s. As the Internet and podcasts and Other Things ascended, becoming absorbed in an album became a rare thing for me. I suppose this happens with a lot of people at this age; music is something we obsess over (and spend way too much money on) as teenagers and college students, and then more or less abandon as we become Regular Adults, save for occasional trips of nostalgia.

  There’s another odd sore point for me, in that listening to good music comes with the baggage of opportunities missed. I once firmly believed that I would become a singer-songwriter by trade, and make a life of writing, recording, and performing music. Now that this is clearly not going to happen, it becomes more diffiult to enjoy much of the music I used to, or ought to, for it recalls thoughts of a youth spent, talent squandered, and lessons not taken. At times I get wrapped up in fantasies of what might have been, which, for when I was young and hopeful, was an exciting dream about a future, and as an adult is now a sad yearning for what can now never be.

  Nonetheless, in the here and now, it seemed to me that music might be a good way to claim some peace for myself. Goodness knows, we have such easy access to so goddamn much of it, that there’s almost infinite choice. I have music in my iTunes library that I’ve owned for over a decade and probably never even pushed “play” on. But music, and audio more generally, seemed like a good way to ease into the pursuit of peace. When I sit to read a book, as Other Things go on around me, I could put on a pair of headphones, play some instrumental music, and escape into the world the author has laid out for me. (What more often happens is I that get distracted or fall asleep.) I could listen to guided meditations and affirmations to start rewiring some of the bad connections and memorizations encrusted in my addled brain. This wouldn’t be a way to be in the moment with people or nature, per se, but it would be a start, a first step toward letting the Other Things go, just for a little while, in favor of peace.

  To do this, I’d of course need a decent pair of headphones, right? You can’t achieve inner peace with crummy earbuds, right?

  Once upon a time, I’d had a kind-of-nice pair of over-ear headphones. Bose OE2’s, which sounded nice and warm, and were more or less comfortable, though cheaply built and easily broken. Before my quest for peace, I’d decided they were not being utilized enough to justify holding on to, so I sold them. (I also had sold my Kindle Paperwhite, since I was reading so much on my iPad mini – a choice I now regret for related peace-pursuit reasons.)

  Now, I actually think Apple’s EarPods are quite nice for what they are, and we have at least two pairs of them in the house. I know there’s a kind of geek-cultural agreement that these are risible peaces of junk, but I have found them rather comfortable and sufficiently nice-sounding to serve most of my listening needs over the past couple of years.

  But I didn’t think they’d suffice for finding peace. One needed comfortable over-ear headphones for that. I mean, everyone knows this, right? For true peace, you can’t have a little nugget in your ear canal vibrating the air and your skull. What you need is a couple of cushions lovingly embracing your ears, with earphones that produce a soundscape rich with detail. That’s the only way to peace, of course.

  This was the tenet I had subconsciously agreed to, anyway. So I started researching and looking for deals. I was excited to find Logitech’s UE 4000 headphones go on some crazy discount to under $20, so I snapped them up, and at first thought they were a true epiphanic discovery. It wasn’t too long, though, that I realized they were painfully uncomfortable, with a kind of mushy, heavy sound. Dissatisfied and needing to find an alternative, my hunting instinct was triggered. It was time to shop for serious.

  Let me say something about this. This is a thing with me, when there is an Important Purchase to be made, something takes over and I become obsessed with the process, consumed with researching possibilities, combing the Internet for bargains, digging through enthusiasts’ message boards, and gathering opinion. I used to only do this on those rare occasions when a new computer was to be bought, but that became a lot easier once I switched to Macs in 2004. But headphones were a new way for my meticulous shopping beast to howl at the moon.

  Thinking on it now, how could it not? Headphones are the perfect snare for me: they are of near-infinite variety, there are models and makes that are widely agreed by certain communities to be superior, but dizzying nuance exists not just between price points and types and manufacturers and brands, but within those brands and individual models. And then there are factors that can affect one’s decision such as the quality of the production or compression of the music in question; the source player, be it a computer, an iPod, or a hi-fi system; the earpads, be they stock or purchased separately, made from all manner of materials; one’s surrounding environs; and even that maddening myth (is it just a myth?) of headphone “burn-in.” Audiophiles can give wine aficionados a run for their money, which they need a hell of a lot of.

  And it’s not as though I live anywhere near a place that sells decent headphones, and has sufficient models on display for testing out in person. Yes, Apple Stores and other such places have headphones to sample, but they almost exclusively make available cans that are far out of my price range, which was really anything over $100 (technically, there is plenty below $100 that is out of my range, but as we can see rationality was lacking throughout this quest). I was limited almost entirely to what I could actually get delivered to my house. That meant actually buying them.

  I won’t bore you with the shipment-by-shipment details, but suffice it to say I spent a great deal of time on websites like Head-Fi.org, r/headphones, and deep within the lowest levels of Amazon customer reviews. And by this time I have to assume that there is a red flag over my name, or perhaps a bullseye target over my picture, at Amazon’s returns department.

  My primary experience was with three models: Sony’s MDR–7506, Audio-Technica’s ATH-M40x, and Sennheiser’s HD 380 Pro.

  I began with the MDR–7506, which The Wirecutter has long named its top choice, and has been a staple of Those in the Know since they were introduced in 1991. I was at first surprised by how neutral they were, with no Beats-like thumping bass or Bose warmth. But I was quickly shocked by the level of detail I could suddenly percieve. I could hear the slightest taps of Erin McKeown’s fingernails on “Queen of Quiet,” and the bass crescendos in Pantera’s “Walk” sounded like they were physically coming toward me. But they were also rather uncomfortable. After a few minutes, parts of my earlobes would begin to ache. I tried a few minor hacks with the earpads to mitigate this, but the discomfort was undeniable.

  Surely, I thought, the M40x’s would be perfect. Everyone (and by that I mean a lot of tech geeks) knows the M50x is some paragon of headphone perfection, and the M40x would just be a small step down in, well, some tech spec or other. They were big, rugged, puffy-looking, and extremely well-regarded.

  But to my ears, they were claustrophobic where the Sonys were expansive. The sound was meaty, focused, tight, and powerful, but somehow scrunched. I doubted my own perceptions, thinking that I might even be wanting the “wrong thing,” for how could I not like these? But on top of the sound, they too were too painful to wear for long stretches. Replacing the earpads with something softer only made the sound feel empty, drained. Off they went.

  The Sennheisers were very strange to me. Rather than pressing against the ears, they completely surround them, so your lobes never make contact with the hardware. I thought that might be just the ticket for my enormous ears, but the clamping sensation on my skull was off-putting, and the sound felt slightly tinny. Bass came through strongly, but mids were weak, as though being heard, well, in a can.

  During this process, I began to doubt my senses. Could I even distinguish between crummy and high-end headphones? Was any of this even worth it? One night (yes it was late) I tried comparing the EarPods to one of the contender models, and found I couldn’t tell the difference anymore. I was going a little bit crazy.

  I was feeling anxiety over the time and effort and money being put into this quest. I felt guilt. I felt worry.

  At one point, I returned to the Sonys. Something indeed had been lost. The vast expanse of soundstage I had perceived from my initial experiences no longer struck me. Had I simply become acclimated to better headphones generally since my first time around the block with them? Or was there really nothing special there to begin with?

  Despite the wash of “wow-ness” being gone, I found I still appreciated the “true” sound they produced. Not perfect, as some vocals sometimes came through a little recessed for my taste, but they still came across as superior to the others I’d gone through. I tried out a couple of different kinds of earpads that didn’t change the sound too drastically, but made them far more comfortable.

  You can clearly see what happened here.

  This all began with a sincere attempt to be more in the moment, to have a taste of relaxed mindfulness, to let go of immediate anxieties and remove myself from the frenetic stresses of work, parenthood, the news, battles on Twitter, and the like. But the process became its own source of stress. I simply had to find, if not the “perfect” solution, the solution that maximized the resources I had available to me, by way of money, time, and access to the objects themselves.

  But I realized I was never going to achieve some kind of zen state by way of the headphones themselves. (If there is a doorway to the sublime to be found through headphones, it is likely well beyond my price range, so I may never truly know what it is to live with a pair of $400 cans, alas.) I finally understood that I could just pick a pair that was good enough, and move on to what started all of this. The quest for peace.

  As I write this, I am donning my new Sony MDR–7506’s. I have a pair of Auray Ultra Deep earpads on them, which give a little more isolation and bass, and are far easier on my ears than the stock pads. I am still choosing between those and a pair of Beyerdynamic velour earpads, which are much softer, but a little less isolated, if barely. So I suppose this leg of the quest is not entirely over. But it’s manageable. It is not suffused with anxiety, just a twinge of guilt over the additional $20 spent on whichever pads I stick with.

  I can stop worrying now about all the Other Headphones that I might test out. The next step, the first real step, begins now. It begins with writing this essay, with enjoying music through the good-enough headphones I’ve settled on. It begins with knowing that my family is here in my house with me, safe and tucked in for the night, and feeling my connection to them even as they’re not in the same room with me. It begins with being in this moment right here, right now, and then it begins again with the next moment. And I can be in those moments with nice headphones, with crummy earbuds, or even, when I’m ready, with blessed, blessed silence.

  ---

   

  Note: Full credit to Iyaz Akhtar for first having the idea for using the Superman-related phrase “quest for peace” in  the sense it’s used here. In fact, he has a whole show about it.

  October 8, 2014

  anxiety, audio, depression, headphones, music

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