It is difficult to keep one’s focus after a day, let alone a week or month or lifetime, of anxiety. Being anxious is like being saddled with another mind — a second brain. Your first brain, your regular brain, is engaged in the tasks of the moment: making breakfast, taking a shower, answering emails, etc. Your second brain, meanwhile, is engaged in worrying — about everything. It is picking apart memory and sensation and interaction for things that suggest risk. It is monitoring the world. It is watching, vigilantly, for traps and pitfalls. So there you go, just another person on just another day, but you have two sets of controls that you must operate, two nervous systems operating simultaneously, like parallel processors. (I actually don’t know what a parallel processor is or does, but you get the point.) This can get very tiring very quickly. By lunchtime, anxious people tend to get detached and foggy. By dinnertime, they are yearning for unconsciousness.
(Disclaimer: this blog will propose many metaphors for anxiety over the ensuing months. Not all of them will work very well.)
This helps explain, I think, a certain distractible quality in the clinically anxious. As a class, we aren’t reliable. We tend to forget appointments and important occasions like anniversaries and birthdays, and we tend not to return phone calls on time.
And we tend to lose things.
This drives our spouses insane. Which makes us more anxious. Which makes us lose things more frequently. Which drives our spouse insane. And so on and so forth until the marriage counselor finds a way to break the cycle.
What I’m trying to say is: I lost my iPhone. I’d spent the day at the Central Park Zoo with my four-year-old daughter, which sounds nice but in fact would be a trial for even the sturdiest of constitutions. First there is the difficulty of entertaining a preschooler during a 30 minute subway ride. Then there is the difficulty of carrying the preschooler five blocks to the zoo because “her legs are tired.” Then there is the difficulty of navigating the Sunday zoo-and-park crowd, which is uncommonly German on this fine October morning. Then there is the difficulty of the depressed polar bear — the only attraction she likes — refusing to swim or walk or even lift its head, and the whining this engenders, and the refusal to eat lunch despite an clear case of low blood sugar, and the tears and the stamping of the feet and the going totally physically limp a la Vietnam War protestors being arrested and carried off to jail ca. 1968, and finally the total meltdown in the middle of a pathway stained with bird shit and hot-dog mustard.
And remember: there is a second, anxious brain going on all the while Brain #1 is dealing with the practical demands of parenthood.
And so, by the time we were on our way home—in a cab because she had fallen asleep in my lap on the subway back to Brooklyn—I had already progressed to the desire-for-a-coma stage of the anxiety sufferer’s day, and was no longer fit to be responsible for my own property. It took only 15 minutes for me to realize that I’d left the phone in the backseat of the cab. My wife called the car service later in the day, but so far no luck. No one’s returned the thing.
Someday some economist should calculate how much property loss per annum is attributable to people being too anxious to operate their own lives.
