Anxiety and the Crisis of Memory

Four years ago, the world turned dark.

It was January, 2009, and the spring semester was about to begin. The fall term had been difficult but victorious: I wrote in my journal that I felt myself to be "between the hammer and the anvil," yet the pressure exhilarated me. For one of my courses I had written over 300 pages between August and December, and in the other I had earned a nearly perfect grade in Old English.  After two years of uncertainty, I was finally beginning to believe that I was actually smart enough to be in a doctoral program.  I lived and worked with a wonderful community of students and scholars. I had a challenging and loving church home. I was on good terms with my parents and all my friends. 

Lights were all around, but I could only see the darkness. 

Intellectually, I knew everything was okay and more than okay, but that January, just before the first week of the new semester, something broke.

I felt like my world was tottering on the edge of a cliff. I couldn't stop crying, and I began to tremble uncontrollably. I couldn't articulate what was wrong precisely because it seemed that everything was wrong. A blackness hovered around the edge of my vision, as though I might blink and find the world extinguished. The first week of classes began: I went to school, taught my freshmen, attended my own classes, always on the verge of tears. I managed to do my work but little else, and when a friend asked when I had eaten last, I couldn't remember.

I couldn't remember. I don't mean I couldn't remember what was upsetting me: if anything could be called a "cause" of my anxiety and despair, it was probably three years of unresolved stress that I had written off as being "normal" for a diligent grad student. At the time, however, the fact that I could not remember goodness haunted me more than anything. During that dark January, my memory seemed to have betrayed me. One day, for example, I was walking from the library to my car when the name of a Victorian writer--Walter Pater, I think it was--flashed through my mind. Walter Pater has never been particularly important to my work, but in that moment, my mind quailed, and I started to panic. I felt guilty and exposed, as though my dissertation director might materialize in the parking lot and demand a full biography of Walter Pater. (He never did, in case you were wondering).

Throughout that January and into the spring, my memory turned sullen and silent. Walter Pater, I soon realized, was the least of my worries.

I couldn't remember how it felt to enjoy being alone.

I couldn't remember why sunshine had once made me smile.

I couldn't remember the confidence that had come from past semesters of successful coursework. 

I couldn't remember anything ever being easy; my anxiety never disrupted my teaching, but little tasks like picking up a pencil to write a note felt like training with lead weights.

I couldn't remember looking forward to the future. 

I couldn't remember how to quiet worrisome thoughts. 

I couldn't remember.

Most terribly, I couldn't remember the good gifts--peace above all--that God had given me in the past. Gone was the calm certainty my faith had always delivered. I don't mean that I no longer believed in God; I mean that my emotional response the world--fear and trembling--didn't match my claims that God was faithful, and loving, and compassionate. With every tremor, I seemed to contradict scripture. I was worrying about everything. I was neither strong nor courageous. I let my heart be troubled. I did not consider the lilies. 

And yet, once I realized that my anxiety was a crisis of memory, the black margin around my eyes began to fade. Work was good because it distracted me from fear, but in any spare or solitary moment, I poured all my energy into memorizing psalms, especially Psalm 84.

At the same time, many able hands began collecting and carrying memories I had lost in the dark. An excellent counselor helped me identify some of the thoughts that were feeding my anxiety, and challenged me to remember the promises God makes through the Bible. My friends remembered to invite me for supper or study sessions several times a week. My father came to stay for a week, then my mother, then my friend Julianna, and their presence--their mere, marvelous presence--reminded me that I was not alone. Other friends took time away from their own jobs, studies, or families to call and tell me about the times they had struggled with depression, and how they had come through. The books I read for my classes, especially The Pilgrim's Progress, The Book of Job, and Walter Brueggemann's The Message of the Psalms, reminded me that feeling pain did not mean I was unfaithful. The music of John Michael Talbot filled my mind so beautifully that anxious thoughts fell silent.  

I have no idea if my experience with anxiety and depression was typical. Thankfully, I have not endured anything similar since that strange spring four years ago. Regardless, I know that what I endured for a season, some people battle for years. The dark margin which I suffered so acutely is a chronic condition for some. And the betrayal of memory, the spiritual amnesia--perhaps that also haunts  other children who have forgotten they were created in the image of God. 

I often write about memories on this blog, and that's not because I am merely nostalgic by nature (though I am). I use this blog to remember the yellow weight of sunlight, the joy of friendship, the delight of good work, the strength of gardens, the wisdom of sparrows who make their nests on the altars of the Lord. 

Home Sweet Homecoming

October 20. The window panes are cold. My fingers trace ridges and valleys across the dark glass, trying to remember the architecture of the mountains we saw yesterday. Tired and peaceful, I think that tonight could almost be a college night. After a long day on campus, we lingered over a late supper, and now I am working at the computer late at night, a marked-up manuscript on the desk beside me. Lauren and Charlie are just across the hall; Emily and Kevin could hear me if I called their names. Tomorrow we'll meet Eric at First Baptist for church, and Jeremy might join us for lunch afterward.

It could almost be home. The familiarity of this night, this place, is bewildering and consoling all at once because tonight is not, after all, a college night. We are all nearer twenty-eight than eighteen, and instead of a dorm, Kevin and Emily's house is our gathering place. Sharing a meal with these friends is no longer a common joy, but a rare event--it has been years since we were gathered around one table, and it may be years before it happens again. This is not home, but homecoming.

My dear friends Dave and Mandy live here in our college town, and on one wall of their living room, they have painted the words "Home is..." in large letters.  They and their friends have written other words and phrases to complete this sentence all around the wall, and Saturday was my turn. I contributed a curious line from George MacDonald's Lilith.  "Home," I wrote, "is ever so far away in the palm of your hand."

This is the paradox of homecoming. We return to a place and a time that was home, traveling across memory, miles, or both, but we know we have not come to stay.

 Walking in the shadows of familiar buildings on Saturday, I began to catalog all the friends I would need to see walking to the cafeteria, or perhaps headed towards the dorms, before I would feel that I had really come home. This was not mere nostalgia; I don't wish I were eighteen or twenty-two again, and I would not come home, even to my beloved college, to meet my friends unchanged. I want a more-than-Facebook vision of the people they have become, with real voices telling stories about work and ideas and families. I want hugs and handshakes and looking-in-the-eye. I imagined all these friends gathered around Kevin and Emily's dining room table, but even as I indulged in my fantasies of reunion, I could not ignore the distances that were keeping us apart.  For some of the friends who once made Carson-Newman home, finances, jobs, and miles prevented their pilgrimage to the east Tennessee foothills. And there are other kinds of distances that, I knew, would have followed even my dearest friends back to our alma mater.  We might gather, but there would be subjects tactfully avoided at dinner, questions left unasked as we recounted the recent news. Home, I often think, is ever so far away. 

I was prepared for these distances, braced against awkward conversations and tentative reunions. I had resigned myself to any number of tepid "remember whens?"  Instead, I spent all weekend overwhelmed to see the ways in which the virtues that first drew me to Carson-Newman had grown in the lives of my teachers and friends. As a high-school senior, I had my choice of full scholarships to several colleges and universities.  I chose Carson-Newman because everyone I met there invited me, in one way or another, to become the sort of person I longed to be. I was a shy, neurotic, self-absorbed teenager, and by the time I finished high school I was very nearly sick of myself. When I visited Carson-Newman, I met young men and women who were brilliant without pretension, kind without condescension, fun without stupidity. Their confidence, kindness, and service attracted me more than any number of brand-new residence halls or manicured flowerbeds. Returning as an alumna, I realized how remarkable and rare these virtues are. I came home, after all, to friends who plan October picnics of pumpkin stew and ginger tea; who wash up the supper dishes without being asked; who spend their days teaching high school students to love reading or math; who go out of their way to include others in a conversation; who stand up for their convictions about the environment; who train dancers; who raise children to love truth, beauty, and goodness. I came home to the faculty who inspired me to be a professor--wise, compassionate men and women who greet their students with eager questions and hugs after half a decade.

All weekend I found myself wanting to hold on to everyone I met, literally to wrap my fingers around their wrists and to touch their faces. I want to be among these people, I thought. I want to live my life with their courage, grace, and kindness. I felt the same rush of hope and longing that led me to this school. This, I realized, is the reason for homecomings: not to retire from daily strife, not to escape into nostalgia, but to witness and remember what it takes to establish a home. It takes Emily's curiosity. Shannon's enthusiasm. Kevin's steadiness. Jeremy's thoughtfulness. Eric's fidelity. Lauren and Charlie's merry kindness. Dave and Mandy's creativity and convictions. Mari's courage. Mark's lovingkindness. Keith's wit. Rachel's compassion.

 As a student, I always cried at the end of each semester, and my flight back to Texas could have been one of those bittersweet journeys from one home to another. My heart was heavy as a thousand miles unfolded between me and Carson-Newman, but some of that heaviness came from the weight of gratitude. The home I have made in Texas owes so much to what I learned in college. I have no idea where my next home will be, but I will be proud if it, like Carson-Newman, is a place where people become more than they knew they could be. When we find such places, we do not always have the privilege of staying for long, but somehow, our true homes have a way of following us. Through faith, hope, and love, through friendship and imagination and determination, you may be startled to discover that home is in the palm of your hand.
   

Eric, me, Lauren, Charlie, and Kevin. Home sweet homecoming, indeed.

With Emily, fall 2005

With Emily, fall 2011