My Newfound Social Anxiety Post-Pandemic
Debut Gone Wrong
In book three of War and Peace, Princess Marya Bolkonskaya and her father greet Prince Vasili and his son Anatole Kuragin at Marya’s father’s estate, Bald Hills. Marya spends the majority of her time in service to her father, whose routines and habits must be precise so that his work (whatever he does) is to be done. Prince Andrei’s pregnant wife has recently appeared on the scene, and moving from the cosmopolitan and upbeat city to the rural abyss has Marya redoubling her efforts to provide comfort and care. So when it dawns on Marya that she must be dressed in “proper” attire to meet Anatole, who has some interest in marrying her, in her father’s eyes she overdoes it:
He noticed the change in the little princess’ dress, Mademoiselle Bourienne’s ribbon, Princess Mary’s unbecoming coiffure, Mademoiselle Bourienne’s and Anatole’s smiles, and the loneliness of his daughter amid the general conversation. “Got herself up like a fool!” he thought, looking irritably at her. “She is shameless, and he ignores her!”
Book Three, Chapter Four -War and Peace
What follows for Marya in the meeting is a combination of social disgraces and anxieties, brought about not only by a miscommunication of intentions, but of desires. She has no intention of marrying Anatole, and Prince Kuragin seems to think of Marya as ugly anyway, and dismisses her at that. Marya’s father, though painfully unable to correctly express his affections, cannot bear letting his young daughter out of his sight. She displays the discipline and rigor he does in another medium, that of service. Marya carefully explains as such. “My vocation is a different one,” she thinks. “My vocation is to be happy with another kind of happiness, the happiness of love and self-sacrifice.”
For a large sum of my life, I have been raised on this assumption, spoken with more or less beauty or frame of mind, in a religious or secular vocabulary. That other people’s happiness is more important than my own, come what may. As a result, I find conversation to be stimulating when couples disclose important information in themselves, as if seeking guidance. I am poor at providing guidance. Fortunately, I also as a result have little interest in judgment, as my sphere of influence, like Marya’s is so small that judgment is unnecessary as a currency, for who would I tell? In such a manner I have gained a reputation as a confidante. The friends that I keep, though small, I feel to be very close, and for most of my adult life, pursuing a calling as a teacher seemed an obvious fit for someone such as me, who loved people in the abstract and possessed a calm demeanor when encountering angry people as flesh and blood individuals.
But 2020 was a particularly painful reminder similar to Marya’s awkward introductions. For lately I have begun to experience problems returning to society, like starting a car engine lying dormant for too long. New kinds of insecurities have cropped up, the kind I have not seen since my adolescent days. I am experiencing social anxiety.
Absorbing Absence
I have realized as an adult that there is no such thing as being untouched by reality. That in all moments, imperceptible changes occur that my self has little interest in until the movement is too late, and then I am reeling, like I am on a boat through white water rapids without my glasses. I have seen, at passing thirty, that I cannot help but be the accumulation of so many moments as to become a slave to them. We ridicule the elderly for their stubborn behavior, and promise ourselves to never reach that level of immovability. And yet we, all of us, arrive to that train on time.
Ever since the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine in late March, my heart has been filled with the exciting promise of “beginning again” like a father feels when holding their first born child. That history, and therefore time, are immaterial, that one can shirk off any event like turning the television off, or putting the smart phone away. I am running habitually, and I am keeping a steady diet. I read great big books and am still capable of great big thoughts. That April is over and a healthy summer is approaching. Life is restarting.
But it has not, and cannot, feel the same. A year of solitude brought on meditation, hours of reading, time walking alone along neighborhood streets, lawn equipment droning on in a never-ending tumble of seasons. Time, rather than be received with greater clarity due to my stasis, became more opaque. I take the garbage bins out more irritably each time. Is it Wednesday again? While running, I have come across thoughts that dismiss reality as being exactly as Thomas Hobbes described. The tedious comings and goings of working people remind me not of how wonderful life is, but of how miserable the rat race can be of going to work and coming back, and wondering where all the time went. I felt bifurcated between how I was living as unemployed and how the world described itself. I suppose it was like Prince Andrei, who began to feel that attending balls over and over in the same drawing rooms was not reality, and therefore open combat against Napoleon was where he should be called, never mind the prospect of dying on some hillside in needless pain. To see the rambunctious behavior of the 24-hour news cycle on television throughout the Biden and Trump political campaigns, and compare it to the deadness of the suburban Texas landscape, made me feel as if there were two Americas. Instead of the typical discrepancy between rich and poor, it was between the two that Marya was forced to navigate and did so poorly: that of public scrutiny and private routine.
To some extent, I believe in Marya’s calling. So I have organized as best I can meetings with my friends, to have them over for us to periodically watch movies and comment on the latest goings on with work. Several of these friends work from home, experiencing simultaneously the pleasures of those private routines, while also painstakingly staring at computer screens until all sense of depth in their Being leaves their bodies. On the other hand, several other friends experience the pleasures of person-to-person work in the service industry, yet also become exasperated by how much is expected of their emotional intelligence. Library workers and zoo employees, coffee baristas providing training in a completely different city. In both of these lines of work, I believed I could, like Marya, provide some bastion while I was unemployed. Whatever the cost, I thought, I would interrogate their emotional state to such an extent that they believed themselves taken seriously. My public and private friends.
But what I did not realize in making these attempts was that the ground beneath my feet cracked under the weight of a person expected to perform emotional triage when larger portions of my day were spent in pandemic exile. More time spent at home, waiting for packages to arrive. Less time navigating conversations with strangers. Even the miniscule ones, like asking for a table at a restaurant, or for a drink at a bar, turned out to matter. Now, in coming back to these places, the feeling is like overexposure in a camera lens: the brightness turns my eyes away. Perhaps that is the best place to start, with eye contact. As a teacher, eye contact is important for children, yet here I was unable to provide a semblance of acceptance to strangers and friends alike. My voice next. Rather than form sentences with thought and consideration, I fumbled all phrases. Just last night, when I was gathered with my friends, I felt like a waiter spilling plates from the tray. “Greater than the sum of its,” I said, stammering, “No, when the work is greater than the sum of its parts, maybe there is something not the same as that, like an opposite.” My friends, staring, waited for a delivery that grew harder to articulate. “Is there a term for that? For the parts, greater than…than the sum?” This conversation came totally out of context from whatever the topic was that my friends were discussing earlier. I had totally subjugated my self-imposed mission of being a supplicate. Heart rate increases, another glass of cabernet decreasing more rapidly, and an inwardness so black that I once again lost the topic of conversation.
This cycle has been a recent but systemic trend. Each night, after we say goodbye, and I pick up whatever vestiges of great lines I can from Moby-Dick or Metamorphoses sitting on my night stand, I bring up the idea to my wife that, in fact, nobody likes me. That, rather than be some form of social aid, I belligerently dictate the conversation like some Russian leader. That maybethe only reason I invite people over is for my benefit only, so that I may try on certain opinions in a laboratory setting, so that I might reproduce my findings gained from solitude. My wife tries to talk me down each time. They find us endearing, she says. When I text friends privately on my behavior, they respond each time with “You were fine.” And even then the problem continues. “Am I texting about this too much?” I think. “Am I annoying them with this plying for compliments?” And so on.
Whatever I can critique myself for in the years prior to this moment, I never had this problem in the past. In fact it was quite the opposite. Most of my life has been met with a kind of naïve and unselfconscious optimism that some have found endearing, others hilarious, and some pathetic. This oblivious behavior has gotten me in trouble with work, where I saw no issue with confronting a principal very publicly about the use of vocabulary workbooks when the research was very much against it. Other times, like in dancing and singing and in writing, like now, a great many displays of my work has been done so without any idea of how it is to be received. “The critics have the ideas,” Louise Gluck wrote in one of her poems. “We artists are just children at our games.” And to some degree I am a child in that way, that I had so little awareness of how my work was affecting others that I have had some arguments and fallings out with people based on what I have written. I stopped dating a young woman I met in Houston, after she had read some juvenile memoirs I had written. Luckily the relationship was nascent, but even if it wasn’t, I do not believe my shrugging of my shoulders would have been all that different. Social anxiety was never involved in any of the process. This is not uncommon, as many writers are flummoxed when their books are critiqued so irascibly that shock ensues. Several come straight to mind, most recently Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob was met in her country with such force that it undeniably shook her. Her belief in the power of public conversation was invariably ruined from there on out, as she was met with harassment campaigns online that we all, unfortunately, come to know now as commonplace. I of course am so excited to read the book that I am debating leveraging my father-in-law, who lives in England, to supply me with the British release four months earlier than ours in the States. In any case, the point I am trying to make here is that where once I would have shrugged off any such idea of social anxiety, now it seems to infect each moment, and in the times I hate it most.
And I consider myself well-adjusted. By the time one reaches 30, the hope is that people come to know their own powers and limitations. For me, my time with myself has proved that I have an unwavering patience and calm when communicating with other adults and their children. My biggest powers in teaching have never really been my ability to teach. My lecturing voice is monotone and dull, and my strategies have been based on building skills rather than on impressing a deep knowledge. No, what I seem to do best is to slowly win people over with a constant demeanor regardless of the circumstances. Where in the past, this skill would have been rewarded, here in the United States, the skills of the caring class are difficult to account on a balance sheet. Therefore it evades a cost-benefit analysis. Therefore it is considered useless. Monetary value is of no importance to me. Like Marya Bolkonskaya, it is very difficult to choose a life otherwise.
Which is why, when the effects of a yearlong pandemic have saddled me with this social anxiety, I take it very seriously. It makes me dread returning to teaching. If I cannot put my own house in order, how am I going to provide attention to the rest of the world, shaken as they are too with the ripple effects of stagnant social encounters? One night, my wife and I had an argument bad enough that I went out on my bike to a bar in the city. One waiter, mine, was warm and charming, and he offered samples for me. Another, who I could see at a distance, pushed in chairs with such force that it turned the heads of all of us there. Strangely, no one complained, yet no one offered succor either. In fits of rage, malice, or madness, was this to be the new era of our time, that of lashing out in every direction, met only with an apocalyptic indifference? “This is the way the world ends” T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Hollow Men”. I dare not write the rest.
We Must Bridge Ourselves
The amount of mass shootings to occur in the United States once our collars were removed gives me the understanding that I am not alone in this bizarre whiplash experienced in suddenly “going public.” I would like to tell you with this essay, wherever you are, whether you are in the deepest throes of the pandemic, or whether some post-vaccinated light can be seen at the end of this particular tunnel, no amount of drastic change in your person can be blunted. For me, the best course of action has been to write about it and talk about it, not as some form of personal squabble signifying something permanent in me that is here to stay. The best method has been to distinguish it as some artifact, some outside influence, more as a token of recent events than any sort of personalization inside me. It is not pervasive either, for these social anxieties have no bearing on my power to write, read, or take in the whispering of the trees as the most beautiful sound I’ve yet heard.
And it is not permanent. This too shall pass. If we are to believe in the power of other generations when faced with calamity, we know that there were people who never rose above it. But some did. People flourished after the Holocaust, and no other modern travesty could ever match that systematic extermination. So we must do our best to keep this returning to civilization in perspective.
Marya Bolkonskaya only achieves her gracious, interpersonal powers most astutely with a reservoir of patience that she keeps for herself. Until we become accustomed to the daylight, we must let our eyes adjust.
Originally published at https://theroyleline.blog on May 2, 2021.
