Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety Read online

  Advance Praise for

  Monkey Mind

  “Monkey Mind does for anxiety what William Styron’s Darkness Visible did for depression.”

  — AARON T. BECK,

  father of cognitive therapy

  “You don’t need a Jewish mother, or a profound sweating problem, to feel Daniel Smith’s pain in Monkey Mind. His memoir treats what must be the essential ailment of our time—chronic anxiety—and it does so with wisdom, honesty, and the kind of belly laughs that can only come from troubles transformed.”

  — CHAD HARBACH,

  author of The Art of Fielding

  “Daniel Smith maps the jagged contours of anxiety with such insight, humor, and compassion that the result is, oddly, calming. There are countless gems in these pages, including a fresh take on the psychopathology of chronic nail biting, an ill-fated ménage à trois—and the funniest perspiration scene since Albert Brooks’s sweaty performance in Broadcast News. Read this book. You have nothing to lose but your heart palpitations, and your Xanax habit.”

  — ERIC WEINER,

  author of The Geography of Bliss

  “Daniel Smith has written a wise, funny book, a great mix of startling memoir and fascinating medical and literary history, all of it delivered with humor and a true generosity of spirit.”

  — SAM LIPSYTE,

  author of Home Land and The Ask

  Anxiety once paralyzed Daniel Smith over a roast beef sandwich, convincing him that a choice between ketchup and barbeque sauce was as dire as that between life and death. It has caused him to chew his cuticles until they bled, wear sweat pads in his armpits, and confess his sexual problems to his psychotherapist mother. It has dogged his days, threatened his sanity, and ruined his relationships.

  In Monkey Mind, Smith articulates what it is like to live with anxiety, defanging the disease with humor, traveling through its demonic layers, and evocatively expressing its self-destructive absurdities and painful internal coherence. With honesty and wit, he exposes anxiety as a pudgy, weak-willed wizard behind a curtain of dread and tames what has always seemed to him, and to the tens of millions of others who suffer from anxiety, a terrible affliction.

  Aaron Beck, the most influential doctor in modern psychotherapy, says that “Monkey Mind does for anxiety what William Styron’s Darkness Visible did for depression.” Neurologist and bestselling writer Oliver Sacks says, “I read Monkey Mind with admiration for its bravery and clarity. . . . I broke out into explosive laughter again and again.” Here, finally, comes relief and recognition to all those who want someone to put what they feel, or what their loved ones feel, into words.

  “I don’t know Daniel Smith, but I do want to give him a hug. His book is so bracingly honest, so hilarious, so sharp, it’s clear there’s one thing he doesn’t have to be anxious about: whether or not he’s a great writer.”

  —A.J. JACOBS, author of Drop Dead Healthy

  and The Year of Living Biblically

  DANIEL SMITH is the author of Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity. He has written for numerous publications, including The Atlantic, Granta, n+1, New York, The New York Times Magazine, and Slate, and he has taught at Bryn Mawr and The College of New Rochelle, where he holds the Mary Ellen Donnelly Critchlow Endowed Chair in English.

  Visit Daniel Smith at

  www.monkeymindchronicles.com.

  MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

  SimonandSchuster.com

  • THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS •

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  JACKET PHOTOGRAPH © KAREN GENTRY/SHUTTERSTOCK

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

  ALSO BY DANIEL SMITH

  Muses, Madmen, and Prophets

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  Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Smith

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition July 2012

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  Designed by Akasha Archer

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Smith, Daniel, date.

  Monkey mind : a memoir of anxiety / Daniel Smith.

  p. cm.

  1. Smith, Daniel, date—Mental health. 2. Anxiety disorders. 3. Mentally ill—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  RC464.S59A3 2012

  616.85’220092—dc23

  [B] 2011025971

  ISBN 978-1-4391-7730-3

  ISBN 978-1-4391-7732-7 (eBook)

  Author’s note: The events described in this book are as real as I could manage. Certain names and details have been changed to protect me from legal and emotional ramifications, which, trust me, aren’t fun. Also: memory is unstable. We do our best. If you suspect a passage has been tarted up for dramatic purposes, email me at [email protected]. I’ll tell you whether you’re right, if I even know myself.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for art on the following pages. Page 119: “Here I and Sorrow Sit,” drawing by William James, Houghton Library, Harvard University, call number MS Am 1092.2 (55). Page 120: Lion tamer, chromolithograph, Gibson & Co. (Cincinnati, Ohio), published c. 1873.

  I don’t know what is the matter with him, and the doctors don’t know what is the matter with him, and he doesn’t know himself what is the matter with him. We all say it’s on the nerves, and we none of us know what we mean when we say it.

  —Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

  Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.

  —Vladimir Nabokov, “Signs and Symbols”

  For Joanna

  contents

  why i am qualified to write this book

  episode one

  1. genesis

  2. hurricane marilyn

  3. monkey mind

  4. esther

  5. the trip

  6. the dagger

  episode two

  7. freedom and its discontents

  8. the diagnosis

  9. an actor prepares

  10. people of the book

  episode three

  11. the facts

  12. the pits

  13. anxious love

  14. brian

  15. digging a trench

  monkey mind

  why i am qualified to write this book

  About ten years ago, when I was living in Boston, I had a therapist whose office was in a clinic across the Charles River, at the top of a tall hill. The therapist, whose name was Brian, had a beard and moustache the color of ripe mangoes, and in his spare time he acted in community theater. Often the productions Brian performed in had historical settings, and he would groom his facial hair accordingly. Brian was the best therapist I’ve ever had, compassionate and patient and wise. But his appearance could be unsettling. One month, as
opening night for The Secret Garden approached, he trimmed his beard progressively thinner while he grew his moustache thick, extending it down along the sides of his mouth. It was like getting counseling from General Custer.

  I had started going to Brian because I was deeply anxious. I’d been so before. This was my third and most serious bout with acute anxiety, and as with the others, my condition seemed disconnected from the facts of my life. I had graduated from college the year before, with honors. I had a prestigious job, loyal friends, a good apartment I shared with a bright and beautiful girlfriend, and as much money as I needed. Yet every day was torture. I slept fitfully, with recurring nightmares—tsunamis, feral animals, the violent deaths of loved ones. I had intestinal cramps and nausea and headaches. A sense of impending catastrophe colored every waking moment. Worse, I had the distinct sense that catastrophe had already occurred. I had made the wrong decisions, gone down the wrong path, screwed up in a ruinous, irrevocable, epoch-making way.

  One afternoon, in this state of mind, I walked to therapy. My weekly walks were perilous in that without the distraction of work I was free to berate myself with impunity. There was no need even to concentrate on where I was going—the way to Brian’s office lay on the Freedom Trail, a two-and-a-half-mile-long path marked by a painted red line that leads through some of the most famous landmarks of the American Revolution. Boston’s beloved Freedom Trail: the Commons, the Granary Burying Ground, the Old South Meeting House, the Old North Church, the U.S.S. Constitution, . . . Brian’s office. It was as if the entire experiment in American democracy was fated to culminate in my recovery.

  Anxiety is the most common of psychological complaints, not only the clinical condition that applies to the most people (nearly three of every ten Americans), but, it’s often said, a universal and insoluble feature of modern life. Everyone has it; everyone must deal with it. While the corollary to this is that everyone’s anxiety is different, shot through with idiosyncratic concerns and confusions, the experience is unified by its painfully hermetic character. Anxiety compels a person to think, but it is the type of thinking that gives thinking a bad name: solipsistic, self-eviscerating, unremitting, vicious. My walks to therapy, for example, were spent outlining with great logical precision the manner in which my state of mind would lead me to complete existential ruin. A typical line of thought went something like this: I am anxious. The anxiety makes it impossible to concentrate. Because it is impossible to concentrate, I will make an unforgivable mistake at work. Because I will make an unforgivable mistake at work, I will be fired. Because I will be fired, I will not be able to pay my rent. Because I will not be able to pay my rent, I will be forced to have sex for money in an alley behind Fenway Park. Because I will be forced to have sex for money in an alley behind Fenway Park, I will contract HIV. Because I will contract HIV, I will develop full-blown AIDS. Because I will develop full-blown AIDS, I will die disgraced and alone.

  From freeform anxiety to death-by-prostitution in eight short steps. Most weeks, I found that I could kill myself off before I’d crossed the bridge into Charlestown. This gave me a half a mile to fully experience the ignominy of my downfall: to see my mother wailing like a Sicilian peasant over my lime-complected corpse, to see the rabbi eulogizing my unfulfilled promise, to hear the thump of dirt on unfinished pine, to accompany my two brothers as they rush home from graveside to pull the plastic wrap off the cold-cut platters and switch on the coffee urn. Meanwhile, mounting the hill to the clinic, near-horizontal against the angle of ascent, I would do my best to weep—for cathartic purposes. These were pathetic attempts at weeping, the bleaty cries of someone who has wept himself dry, like an ape laughing: “Hunh! Hunh! Hunh!” Sweaty with strain and agitation, I would try to manufacture bona fide tears and always I would fail. By the time I arrived at the clinic I was typically so demoralized I could barely stand. I was twenty-three years old and I looked like Nixon resigning the presidency.

  My opening monologues in therapy, like my en route self-destructions, rarely varied. I would open by insisting that I was a thoroughgoing wreck. My anxiety had grown so intense over the preceding week that I could no longer in good faith work. The only honorable thing for me to do was to leave my job. Following that, I would insist that my pain was so acute that it surely signaled legitimate insanity of one stripe or another, and that it would border on malpractice for Brian to continue to see me as an outpatient; what I required was hospitalization, preferably at an institution with manicured grounds and nurses who wore starched white hats with red crosses embroidered on them. Finally, I would plead for help. I would insist that Brian tell me what to do. Please, I would say. Please. Just tell me what to do. I can’t do this on my own. I’m not capable. Tell me what I need to do. I’ll do anything. Please. I’m begging you. Please. What should I do?

  It was at some point during this opening speech, on the afternoon I am talking about, that Brian interrupted and asked if he could film me. Brian taught graduate students, he explained, and he sometimes used videotaped sessions during his seminars, for training purposes.

  “You want to tape me?” I asked.

  “For training purposes,” he said. “You can say no, of course.”

  “I can?” I said. “I can say no?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “It would be all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d still be able to teach?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it’s OK?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  And so we carried on as if he had never made the request. For the forty or so minutes remaining in the session I sat wretched with hopelessness as Brian nodded and made maddeningly benign facial expressions, as was his habit. Then I retraced the steps of Paul Revere and Sam Adams and all the rest of the great patriots, this time in reverse, and returned to the office for the few terrible hours remaining in my professional day.

  It was only later, while riding home on the train to hide under the covers until morning, that I realized why Brian had wanted to tape me. It was the same thing that had happened to my brother David, years earlier. When he was in grade school, David had severe buck teeth, broad and walrus-long. His overbite was so pronounced that our orthodontist, when he had finally managed to correct the problem, used a plaster cast of David’s teeth as a display during lectures at conferences, as if to say to the world of corrective dentistry, “Behold, people! This is how bad it can get!”

  My case, I realized, was Brian’s bucktooth mold. I was the clinical example: the etching of the arch-backed epileptic; the lithograph of the withered, birth-defected arm; the tumor with lips and a tongue; the six-eyed, noseless, baguette-shaped head in the jar.

  I was anxiety personified.

  episode one

  If you really feel like you have to write a book, at least have the decency to start it with a man and a woman making love.

  —Advice given by my grandfather, who was morbidly obese, lived in south Florida despite a proneness to malignant melanomas, and read only novels by the detective writer Ed McBain

  1.

  genesis

  The story begins with two women, naked, in a living room in upstate New York.

  In the living room, the blinds have been drawn. The coffee table, which is stained and littered with ashtrays, empty bottles, and a tall blue bong, has been pushed against the far wall. The couch has been unfurled. It is a cheap couch, with no springs or gears or wooden endoskeleton; its cushions unfold flat onto the floor with a flat slapping sound: thwack. Also on the floor are several clear plastic bags containing dental dams, spermicidal lubricant, and latex gloves. There is everything, it seems to me, but an oxygen tank and a gurney.

  I am hunched in an awkward squat behind a woman on all fours, a woman who is blond and overweight. Her buttocks are exposed and her knees are spread wide—“presenting,” they call it in most mammalian species. I am sixteen years old. I have never before seen a vagina up close, an in-per
son vagina. My prior experience has been limited to two-dimensional vaginas, usually with creases and binding staples marring the view. To mark the occasion, I would like to shake the vagina’s hand, talk to it for a while. How do you do, vagina? Would you like some herbal tea? But the vagina is businesslike and gruff. An impatient vagina, a waiting vagina. A real bureaucrat of a vagina.

  I inch closer on the tips of my toes, knees bent, hands out, fingers splayed—portrait of the writer as a young lecher. The air in the room smells like a combination of a women’s locker room and an off-track betting parlor, all smoke and sweat and scented lotions. My condom, the first I’ve had occasion to wear in anything other than experimental conditions, pinches and dims sensation, so that my penis feels like what I imagine a phantom limb must feel like. The second woman has brown hair done up in curls, round hips, and dark, biscuit-wide nipples. She lies on the couch, waiting. As I proceed, foot by foot, struggling to keep my erection and my balance at the same time, her eyes coax me forward. She is touching herself.

  Now the target vagina is only a foot away. Now I feel like a military plane, preparing for in-air refueling. I feel, also, like a symbol. This is why I am here, ultimately. This is why, when the invitation was extended (“Do you want to stay? I want you to stay”), I accepted, and waited who knows how long in the dark room for them to return. How could I have said no? What I had been offered was every boy’s dream. Two women. The dream.

  Through a haze of cannabis and cheap beer, I bolster my courage with this: the dream. What I am about to do is not for myself. It is for my people, my tribe. Dear friends, this is not my achievement. This is your achievement. Your victory. A fulfillment of your desires. Oh poor, suffering, groin-sore boys of the eleventh grade, I hereby dedicate this vagina to—