I do not know what good online therapy is going to do me. My mom made me make an appointment last Sunday after I kicked a hole in the drywall. It is the third time I’ve done so this month, and the second time I’ve almost dislocated my own knee in my rage. My dad is running out of plaster.
The news says that the average American today has the same levels of anxiety as a 1950s asylum patient. I’d like to know what in the hell they were taking in 1950 and maybe to have some myself. I don’t want to lobotomize my wife or smoke three packs a day, but maybe there was something else they had that soothed them. Maybe it was the black and white. I bet no bull has ever charged at a checkered flag.
My dad won’t let me take medication–he says it’ll turn my emotions into a jumble of wires. When you heighten one thing, you dampen another. Then you end up medicating the shortcomings of medication until suddenly you’re spending more time fixing the solution than the original problem.
In order to stop climate change, the US government once considered putting a layer of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to deflect solar radiation. They would use tubes, held up by helium balloons and extending like uncanny fire hoses all the way up to Jesus. Then they could go on emitting as many deadly gases as they’d like. The true reason that project got shut down was not logistics; the government was more than confident they could pull off planetary botox. It got canceled because once we put gas up there, whichever country pumps the tubes controls Earth’s thermostat. We didn’t want nuclear war over an extra snowstorm in Denmark.
My mom said she wanted this fixed before I left for college, this problem where whenever I sit still long enough I start to hate myself. I asked her if maybe my brain was not being harmful, but truthful. Most people are too damn calm to call themselves out on their own bullshit, always making excuses for kicking holes in other people’s drywall. At least I’m realistic.
My girlfriend’s parents won’t let her go back to school until she “fixes” her eating disorder. She tells her parents that the average “cured” eating disorder survivor enters and exits treatment seven times, and that each treatment lasts from one to six months. She says the last time she went to Melrose, her therapists coaxed her into unwellness and when she was ready to leave, they stole all her clothes and refused to release her. She’s not sure if being cured is worth doing that again.
Right now, scientists endorse painting cities white to reduce the amount of heat they absorb. White surfaces reflect up to 86% more solar radiation than plain asphalt; it could buy us back valuable years’ worth of emissions. The main issue with this one? Shit gets dirty. They’d get gradually less reflective until ten years after the first painting, when we’d have to paint the whole city over again. The gift that keeps on taking.
Before I left for college, I met with a lady named Dr. Clemens once a week. I have no idea if she was good at her job, because I was probably the easiest patient God ever made. I’d walk in, ramble about my life and what worried me, and she’d nod her head quietly and tell me that my feelings were real. My parents would pay this woman $150 an hour for this vital service. Richard Powers says that sixty minutes of reading and half an hour of exercise every day does as much to cure anxiety as weekly therapy. Since then, I haven’t really trusted therapists. I get most of my advice from books.
My dad tended to slam doors when I was growing up. I remember one winter I came home for Christmas, and my mom told me casually that there was no remote for the downstairs TV. My dad had smashed it to pieces, dashed it on the tile floor, but you couldn’t tell from her smile. We had plenty of money for a new one–my dad worked hard at the job that sent him into this rage. Isn’t that a strange fix: the only way he can buy plaster is to kick more holes.
If we were to clear an area the size of India and plant it entirely with trees, choke the earth with roots and fill the skies with leaves, we might just capture enough carbon to save ourselves. Just like us, trees are carbon-based life forms. When they grow, they take in carbon dioxide from their surroundings and turn it into bark and leaves and branches. We just have to store enough poison gas in the shape of trees to save ourselves. Unfortunately, India is currently covered in people–1.4 billion of them. If we started planting, all those people would have to move somewhere else. They’d need wood to build houses and fuel for their stoves, and pretty soon they’re yelling timber in Nepal. So much for a forest.
At a party last winter, I made out with a stranger for the first time. Every girl I’d kissed before just tasted like mouth, but this one tasted like lemons. She felt like warmth and spiked hot chocolate, and our bodies fit together perfectly. It was easy, simple like a sunset–something that just happens. The moment she let me go, though, I felt like a convicted man waiting outside the courtroom. I called my best friend and all I could tell him was that I swear this girl wanted to kiss me–I swear I’m not a monster. I swear I am good, Will–she told me that all of this was okay. I know, he said. I know.
Scientists think that anxiety evolved because people who worry are people who survive. We’re hardwired to recognize danger, to obey the rules of the group, to learn from past mistakes. Trauma makes sense, because if I get chased by a bear once, it’s best that I don’t try to cuddle with the next one I see. If I scare a girl once, maybe being wary is the best way to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Climate change deniers argue that the world has always been warming and cooling, spinning through climatic cycles. In an elliptical orbit around an imperfect sphere of a sun, on a tilting, wobbling axis with shifting magnetic poles, of course there will be some temperature variation. The main issue here is that Milankovitch cycles don’t operate on human timescales. The fact that the dinosaurs broke a sweat doesn’t diminish the fact that Nana used to cool cakes on the patio in October and now she can fry eggs on the deck in December. Precedents don’t make things any less harmful or extraordinary. They just highlight how fucked up things are today.
I am tired of forgetting how to breathe when my parents do my laundry. I like accountability, the way that my room is only a mess when I make it a mess and clean when I make it so. I like being a little god, but considering I have no thunderbolts I should probably learn some manners. I would like to tell my parents thank you and gratefully put on a clean pair of jeans.
I am tired of hitting myself when walls will not do, when things don’t go according to plan and I am walking down the hallway trying to regain control. The reset button is in my forearm–I know just the spot. If I punch the right spot, my fingers curl into a fist. The limb gets dazed, and then I get dazed, and when I can see the bruise I know I’ve restarted. I am in pain, and my arm has witnessed it; I have been dramatic and self-pitying and this is my punishment.
I am tired of hating myself enough to hurt myself.
One time I ran into the yard to have an anxiety attack and my dad cornered me in the basement. He blocked the door frame with his body and told me to breathe, holding me there while sobs thrashed against my clenched lips like an ocean in a bottle. When he left, my mom cried.
She told me violence will drive people away.
I asked my best friend if I was going to be the kind of lover who cries after sex. I asked my mom if this unchecked anger could lead to domestic assault. I asked my therapist if fear and rage were just my lot in life. She told me that I get to choose what happens next.
If the world embraced oceanic iron fertilization, we’d sow the waters with iron-laden compounds to feed phytoplankton (those little squiggles that baleen whales like to eat). Phytoplankton are photosynthetic like trees, but we wouldn’t have to evict a subcontinent to store our carbon in them. With our iron, they’d increase rapidly in numbers and then die, lugging their excess carbon to the bottom of the ocean. It might disrupt food chains and ruffle some feathers (pelicans, mostly), but it would also knock out a quarter of our yearly emissions. Some things ought to be put to rest.
The first guy to pour iron sulfate into the ocean is gonna feel pretty stupid. From the outside, it will look like a rain dance, a middle finger held at climate change. He won’t really know why he’s doing it; someone told him it would help. The man might not even believe anything needs fixing.
Pretty quickly, though, he’ll realize how easy breathing can be.
Scott Sorensen is currently pursuing an English degree at Dartmouth College while also performing standup and writing satire for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern (satire magazine) and poetry for the Stonefence Review. He hopes to become an English teacher and maybe get super duper famous on the way.