A Conversation Between Me and Myself
Me: The veggie burger is the moral thing to do, but man, I really want the chicken sandwich. It’s fried and crispy and it has a little zing to it. You know I love me some zing. I haven’t had meat in a few days, so I should be allowed this indulgence. Right?
Myself: Well, you know, if everyone thinks that way, we’ll never dig ourselves out of the hole of climate change. The atmosphere doesn’t award you a medal for doing the right thing a few times. This is an existential threat! Plus, have you thought about the conditions those chickens live in?
Me: Oh god, you’re right – how could I even consider the chicken sandwich? What with those cages and the antibiotics and the pure, unadulterated suffering… I know better, yet I continue to do the wrong thing. I’ve been given every privilege a person could ask for, and here I am pining for a chicken sandwich like its nirvana. Will I ever learn?
[20 minutes later]
Me: Fuuuuck I’m gonna get the chicken.
I snap into reality, the glow of the phone in my hand the only source of light since the sun set 20 minutes ago. My thumb quivers over the Nashville Chicken sandwich option. It descends in slow-motion, as if to remind me:
I don’t have to make this choice
I shouldn’t make this choice
Oh won’t someone PLEASE think of all the children irreparably harmed by this choice
My thumb meets the button. The deed is done.
That’s one small chicken sandwich for man, and one panic-stricken tailspin for the same man.
Fear Here, There, Everywhere
For years, any decision of even the slightest consequence would unfold this way. I’d lie in bed and labor over the relative efficiency of making coffee before using the bathroom or vice versa. “Was it better to sweat the onions or the garlic first?” I’d wonder as the burner scalded the underside of an empty pan. (My kryptonite: anything that required several actions done in a sequence of my choosing.) I’d chew up so much time in deliberation that “Do whatever, just do SOMETHING” would have cruised to a comfortable victory in any hypothetical race.
It’s easy to observe my past self from my current perch and laugh at the insignificance of these “dilemmas.” That, however, is a privilege of hindsight – nobody who knows better chooses to fall apart multiple times every day. If you imagine the mind as an oven, my temperature dial was turned all the way up, and anything that entered would, in short order, burn beyond recognition. Innocuous comments turned into sinister riddles, wisecracks into grievous personal insults. Whenever I close my eyes and envision the settings of these prior panics, I can feel strain in my shoulders and weight in my forehead. My mind has since reworked itself, but my body remembers.
I was hazily aware of the fact that I was afraid at the time – I knew, for example, that other people didn’t shrink from their fast-food orders the way I did. What I could not see was the all-encompassing depth of those fears (a fact I’d only clock after finishing The Mindbody Prescription). The world was a minefield fraught with danger at every turn, and I could never predict what might throw me next. The most egregious example I can recall: when I lived in Hong Kong, I worked myself to the nub trying to figure out why the city’s double-decker buses were painted yellow and red. The simple answer is “Someone in charge liked those colors,” but that wouldn’t do; electrical current pulsed through the empty space in my brain, shocking me until I could provide a more sophisticated explanation. (I do not mean that metaphorically – the sensation of electrocution was as real as the movement of your eyes across this line.)
So when a mind this quick to fear was introduced to painful and sustained physical distress, what chance did it have? When my physical symptoms first arrived on the scene, I naturally thought they were unwelcome – but they were new, and like all of the physical symptoms I had before, I thought they’d subside. Two weeks later, the symptoms were still there, and worry began to mount: “If they’re still here… are they always going to be here?”
Perhaps there are things more terrifying than the prospect of a long life lived inside a prison of physical pain; if they do exist, there are not many of them. It would take years from this moment to realize that, in worrying about this prospect, I brought it that much closer to fruition. I had unwittingly fired the starting gun on the cycle of fear and pain outlined in “Into (And Out of) The Abyss.”
Getting Off the Carousel
My therapist is a more generous person than I am, because when I raised the Crisis of the Chicken Sandwich with her, she didn’t fall out of her chair laughing. She patiently listened to me while I relived the panic. When I finished, she simply offered, “What if there is no correct choice? What if either one is fine?”
As her words hit my eardrums, I felt the tightness in my chest, an ever-present symptom, uncoil. Her perspective – so simple and so unbelievably foreign to me at the time – made sense. I had spent so much time leaping from one pole to the other, never once giving thought to the spectrum of choices in between. My mind had observed the near-infinite permutations of a fast food menu and reduced the options to two: Right and Wrong. There is an absurdity inherent in this kind of rigid thinking; it just took my therapist’s grace and candor to point it out. My body clearly understood her and responded accordingly.
Along with my experience reading The Mindbody Prescription, I now had two pieces of evidence that information could, by itself, change the shape and contour of my symptoms. Two isn’t many, but it’s a lot more than zero, and I could now see how accumulating ever more evidence might, eventually, lead to profound somatic change. I was years away from such change, but I could now see a glimmer of hope that it might arrive one day. Hope is the opposite of fear; when one dominates, the other shrinks. These moments – when insight led to physical relief – were the key to reversing the balance of my power inside my body.
I stopped counting pieces of evidence shortly after this episode. If I had to guess my number today, I’d probably say “a thousand” and then quip that the volume of evidence doesn’t matter nearly as much as the weight of my belief in it. And for where I am now, that’s true; as long as I’m paying attention, there are innumerable reminders that I am physically okay and that pronounced symptoms are (probably) an outgrowth of fear. I wouldn’t say I’ve “conquered” fear – it’d be hard for me to believe that anyone has ever done so completely – but I’ve learned to contextualize and modulate its impact. I know where the dial on the oven is, and I can decide when to turn it.
At the beginning of my recovery, though, every piece of evidence felt like manna from Heaven. I cannot overstate how important it was to hear my therapist’s counters to the stories I’d unwittingly told myself about my decisions and their consequences. With proper attention, fears can heal, just as broken limbs do. But I don’t have the first clue about how to set a bone correctly, and I sure as hell could not have stepped outside my own mind to see the silliness of its creations. If belief in the validity of John Sarno’s ideas was my first step toward recovery, my second step was realizing I couldn’t do the rest by myself. To resolve my fears, I’d need to learn to speak them out loud.