Eclipsed by Fear
I was very game for the Essay War.
Ryan, a fellow Substack writer and good friend from my college days, suggested we both write about the—at that point, impending—eclipse. Six days after the event, Ryan wrote a beautiful piece about his experience of it in Cleveland and the conflicting feelings about humanity and modernity it brought up for him. Leading up to the event, I did not know what I was going to write about an event so deeply written about already. I was lucky enough to naturally live in the path of totality and considered taking a day trip out to Fredericksburg or Waco, towns where people would be flocking in from all over the world by the thousands. That sort of communality for such an event could be miraculous or annoying. Ultimately, I landed on annoying and decided to experience it from the antisocial cocoon of my backyard instead. I did not know what I would write about in my eclipse Substack. But I knew inspiration would strike me.
I woke up that morning feeling potently miserable. I stayed in bed as long as I could, a familiar, implacable knitting needle of anxiety poking my back. I went downstairs and busied myself making guacamole. I looked out the window and examined the light. It was ugly. The eclipse had not begun, but already everything looked different—a mocking, repugnant grey. I taste-tested my guacamole and promptly spat it into the sink. It tasted fine, but I felt nauseous.
My boyfriend’s parents came over to enjoy the once-in-a-lifetime event, handfuls of eclipse glasses in tow. As we stood outside, hotdog buns crisping on the grill, the sky began to darken, and cheers could be heard from around the block. Totality was nearing. On my phone, I Googled “When will Eclipse end” and started a countdown in my head for the moment the whole ordeal would be over and done with. The dread I felt was acute but hard to pinpoint. The clouds dissipated like wet tissue, and everybody stared up at the sun with their eclipse glasses on, relishing in the moment. It looks like a pancake. What a view! Celeste, don’t you want to come see? Come quick! You’re missing it!
I put my NASA-approved glasses on, glanced up at the sky, said Wow, then rushed inside and started slotting dishes into the dishwasher. My dread, I realized then, came from the eerie feeling that if I went back outside, I would purposefully look up at the sun without glasses and permanently blind myself.
But don’t you trust the glasses? asked a doctor friend when I told him about my fear of retinal damage the following week.
I don’t trust myself, I wanted to reply.
I glanced at the eclipse so briefly that I have no solid recollection of what it looked like, just an abstract flash of black and yellow. The only thing I can remember clearly from that afternoon is the swell of nausea in my stomach, the relief I felt when the sky returned to normal.
Anyway, this is a piece about anxiety.
***
I was twelve when “The Thing” first happened.
It was the week of the middle school dance. As eighth grade president, I was in charge of organizing it, a role I relished in all my glorious prepubescent bossiness. The Thing happened on a Monday night. I drank a Diet Pepsi after dinner, later than I was technically allowed to, an act I attributed significance to after the fact. I went to bed, then woke up in the middle of the night desperately needing to pee. I went to pee, then got back in bed and was unable to fall back asleep. Ten minutes later, I needed to pee again. And again, after that. The pattern repeated itself about five separate times until I was finally able to fall back asleep.
When I awoke for school the following morning, I had a strange feeling—a feeling that I’d perhaps forgotten something important, something I did not want to remember but something I must remember. I felt an almost physical clenching in my head, almost like my brain was trying to decide something for me. It reminded me, then, that I had gotten up to pee seven times the night before, and that this was significant. I stood up, a cold tingle of adrenaline in my head. I went to the bathroom and peed for the first time that morning. Leaving the bathroom, in the hallway now, I stopped abruptly. I wondered if I needed to pee again. I wondered what it would be like to never be fully empty, to always be conscious of my bladder. The panic gripped me so hard that I ran downstairs, as if to escape it. I tried to eat breakfast but couldn’t. I tipped my cereal into the trash. I went to school.
It’s hard to explain this whole sequence of events now without it sounding ridiculous, but in that moment, in the upstairs hallway of my childhood home, it was almost as though somebody had reached into my head and flicked on a switch. I went to school, and anxiety pulsed through my veins, so focused and absolute that it felt like electricity in my wrists. The week went on, and the feeling only got worse. I’d always been an anxious child, scared of strange men and being home alone, but this was different. I tried to explain it to my mother, but it was impossible to articulate in a way that got to the root of the issue, in large part because I did not know what the root of the issue was. She told me to take my mind off it, but even when I wasn’t thinking about it, I was thinking about it—a low, persistent hum in my ear canal. There were moments of relief only in the morning, before I remembered to remember. It stopped being about pee and started being about The Thing, the feeling of something not being right.
Looking back on it, I realize this was perhaps the single most significant week of my life, a week I’d graft everything I felt onto for the next ten years. If it sounds opaque and peculiar, it’s because it was, and this, I believe, is by design. I imagine my anxiety as an entity, a computer program trying to optimize itself for greatest effect. The alienation is where it thrives. If reassurance was what I craved most, then the possibility of reassurance would be stripped from me by making my terror as abstract as it was embarrassing.
The week ended with the middle school dance, which was a success. I was so busy throughout the night that I was able to “take my mind off it” for a couple hours. I had a nice time, a flurry of action, a feeling of pride in what I had organized. As the event was winding to a close, I stood on the dance floor, “Party Rock Anthem" playing loud. The feeling then swelled back to me, suddenly, like a horrible smell, so absolute that I could not picture life without it. It smelled like clutter. It smelled like being trapped. I remember the way the lights looked, blue across the faces of my peers. I was certain that nobody had ever felt this way before.
***
In her memoir about anxiety and OCD, Because We Are Bad, author Lily Bailey describes waking up with a new intrusive thought: “This morning, when I wake up, I picture some white skating boots and my head. For hours, all I can see is the tip of the blade smacking into the back of my skull, gradually chipping away at the bone until blood spurts everywhere. I convince myself I will never be able to think of anything else for the rest of my life, and the thought swells and magnifies.”
It’s difficult to describe intrusive thoughts to people who don’t experience them, but this depiction is a great example. Alongside the thought itself comes the fear that it will never disappear, a fear which further roots the thought into the soil of one’s brain. It can be as benign as a phrase playing in a loop in your head, as horrifying as a grisly and unwanted image. The common denominator is that it is there and you don't want to be, and the more you fight it, the harder it sticks.
The Thing went away for a bit, and then came back, dressed up differently. I was fourteen and had just smoked weed for the first time. The following morning I woke up, and I could feel my anxiety, yet again, weighing its options, and deciding to fixate. For the next six months, I spent my days obsessed with the fact I had altered my brain with cannabis. I had rituals associated with this, often checking to see what my hands looked like, telling myself that if I was still high, or maybe schizophrenic, my hands would look weirder than they did. (Nothing like gazing intently at your hands every few minutes to prove you are mentally sound!) I was not able to get external reassurance that everything was okay. Yet again bolstering itself on isolation, my shame in betraying my loved ones and doing drugs fueled my anxiety. The rituals, then, were all I had. Besides the hands, I compulsively wrote letters to myself on my Notes app, including “proof” that my brain was okay: if you had destroyed your brain you would not have gotten a 96 on the history quiz. You had two minutes and thirty-seven seconds today where you forgot about everything entirely. If your brain really was altered, you would not be able to forgot for even one second! On my grainy laptop Webcam, I recorded videos to myself in brief and delusional moments of clarity, saying things like “Everything is going to be fine!!!!” and “Even if you did alter your brain, maybe that’s not a bad thing!!! The best writers are insane!!!!” I chatted with strangers on Omegle, telling them my problems and seeing if they could help. This resulted in minimal therapeutic aid and more unsolicited penis sightings than I would have hoped.
The one person I was able to confide in was my twin sister, Aurora. She knew exactly what I was going through because she had a brain that was wired the same way. Since before I can remember, she was anxious. As a kid, she had intervals where she was afraid of aging ninety years overnight, seeing a clown every time she blinked, and getting a yodeling song stuck in her head for the rest of her life. She was afraid of sleeping, was and still is afraid of planes and elevators and being deepfaked committing a heinous crime. We all made fun of her, chalked it up to eccentricity, but the reality was that these obsessions would torment her, and she would perform rituals to “ward them off,” including falling asleep with loud music blasting through her noise-canceling headphones to “prove” that falling asleep isn’t scary. Once I experienced The Thing, I knew exactly what she’d been feeling and felt terrible for ridiculing her so much. As she got older, her anxiety funneled into health anxiety, which became so severe while in college that psychosomatic shoulder pain materialized into a physical lump. All we had to say to each other back then was, “I just thought about gravity for too long, and now I’m afraid this is going to be a new Thing,” and we’d understand completely.
It would be hard to track and describe all the intrusive thoughts I have had because there have been so many. The marijuana fears fizzled out once I had gathered enough evidence that I was “normal,” but then came the obsession with eyes, as in I can’t believe my whole existence is funneled through these things, the obsession with the way my heart feels in my chest, the obsession with the probability that I will accidentally murder my beloved dog in cold blood because I am secretly a viciously violent person.
In his essay about the eclipse, Ryan laments how “We have reduced most of these striking revelations, which have arrived at an increasing pace in this enlightened era of precision and exploration, to make metaphors for our own narratives.” Of course, this is exactly what is going on here. It’s a bit sad to me that I am incapable of enjoying something as spectacular as an eclipse because I am unable to claw out of my Self. My anxiety seems to sabotage events I am looking forward to the most: birthdays, holidays, striking me down in the middle of an acting performance with cold, icy fear. It took me a long time to realize that this was my brain’s attempt at protecting itself from the lack of control inherent in joy. Do not let your guard down.
***
Lily Bailey, author of Because We Are Bad, has had compulsions since before she can remember, including nighttime rituals that sometimes would take her all night. Her rituals and intrusive thoughts revolve around the belief (or, rather, fear) that she is a bad person or will become one if she doesn’t very carefully analyze her own behaviors. “There may be no God,” she tells herself at a young age, “but there are still things we need to protect ourselves from. And if we can’t pray to God to make you an okay person who people like, we must make it happen ourselves.” She describes how working with children worsens her condition: “I dislike wrapping presents because I panic that I’ll put something inside that could get me in trouble when it gets opened. As I’m wrapping today, I worry that I’ve slotted a confessional note in with Matteo and Stanley’s and cyanide in Phoebe’s, and, weirdly, that I’ve eaten all the biscuits in Minnie’s and just wrapped up air, crumbs, and a handwritten note saying “yum;). I console myself that when the children have gone home, I’ll unwrap the presents and check what is inside.”
Today, I am afraid that I will give my dog, Mango, grapes. Grapes are poisonous to dogs. I am not afraid that I will do this on accident. I am afraid that I will do this on purpose, that there is another version of me who could come out at any moment and destroy what I care about most. I also refuse to drive for many reasons. One of those is that I am certain I will veer into the other lane without a warning, even to myself.
Bailey is finally able to find peace and comfort in a diagnosis, but the real tipping point into “wellness" for her arrives after she attends a support group for people with OCD. She describes lying in bed after her first session, “feeling more comforted than I can ever remember feeling. There are people like me.”
As for myself, I did not want to consider something I knew all too well, which was that I had anxiety, and possibly something more. In fact, I did not entertain the idea that I might have anxiety until I graduated college, much less anything else, and even then, the idea itself became an intrusive thought, an obsession I needed desperately to disprove. I was at work, reading Vice (don’t all horror stories start this way?) when I clicked on an article about obsession. A woman was so convinced that she was capable of inadvertently killing her best friend that she turned herself in to the police, only to be diagnosed with OCD. I knew immediately, without question, that whatever mental health diagnosis she had… I did, too. I have held beliefs about myself because of intrusive thoughts, merely because I was unable to distinguish them from real wants and desires. Even though my worst intrusive thoughts horrified me, I felt that, by virtue of the fact that my brain had conjured them, they must reveal secret desires.
I should have been thrilled to discover I wasn’t alone. But instead, I felt cold terror. I did not want to be associated with these crazy-anonymous-vice-interview-fucks. I was a “high functioning” New Yorker with an incredibly demanding and competitive job. There was no way I was sick in the head like this lunatic! To mitigate this fear, I went fully fucking insane and spent every morning “proving” to myself… compulsively, some might say!… that I did not have OCD. WOULD SOMEONE WITH OCD DO THIS?? I screamed inside my head as I left my bed unmade in the morning. WOULD SOMEONE WITH AN ANXIETY DISORDER DO THIS?!?!? I demanded as I white-knuckled the Subway pole while listening to Radiohead so loud my jaw started to throb. Normal, normal, I was NORMAL!!!
Things reached a boiling point during the early days of the pandemic. I became so obsessed with the idea of dissociation that I could not sleep. I was terrified that I would not be able to tell the difference between my dreams and reality. Certainly, this was compounded by real-life events; the world was imploding, and it was not a coincidence that my anxiety and obsessive tendencies were worse than they ever had been, though I somehow didn’t connect the dots at the time. In April, I drove up with my dad from Central Massachusetts to Manhattan to check on my apartment, which I had not yet decided to give up on and move out of. Entering the apartment, smelling my own hot breath inside a bandana mask, I remember balking at how small it felt—cosmically small, wrong, like I was a giant—proof that something was off, not just in the world but in my own head. Toward the end of that same month, I went to CVS to pick up some necessities. It was my first time seeing a large group of people wearing masks, and the image was so uncanny, so viscerally wrong, that I felt I was surely in a dream. It was the most mentally unwell I have ever felt. With my job remote and no more busy social life to tether me to reality, I began to fall apart.
Aurora, for her part, was having daily panic attacks after eating a weed brownie and developing a tenuous “relationship with reality,” and I was feeding off her energy, a downside of twindom. We would sit across the living room from each other, her crocheting and me ripping the skin off my lips, resenting each other for being anxious. My dad insisted that the root of my problem was a lack of sleep. He suggested Ambien, which I knew I would have a bad reaction to and die instantly. So, we compromised, and he gave me melatonin. I said thank you and put it in my pocket and didn’t take it, opting to lie in bed instead, staring at the ceiling, my body giving into sleep briefly before thrusting itself back into the land of the living, feeling like I was falling out of a moving bus.
After weeping hysterically over the fact I could not enjoy a DIY Kitchen Karaoke session without feeling like I’d taken a heroic dose of shrooms, I realized I needed proper help. The anxiety was so dizzying I thought perhaps I had Vertigo, still clinging onto the hope that this couldn’t all be coming from worrying. I scheduled a Telehealth appointment with my GP, a middle-aged woman whose only recognition of mental health issues is feeling “blue” in the winter. She referred me to a behavioral therapist named Greg, who refused to tell me anything about himself but who, from context clues, had a cat he loved very much. Greg put me on 5mg of Lexapro. I was willing to take the SSRIs out of desperation, but I was NOT willing to admit that I had “Anxiety,” much less anything else. Anxiety was for jittery losers, and I was not a jittery loser.
The first month on Lexapro was misery incarnate. I felt worse than I’d felt before. Sleeping only became more challenging, my brief interludes of unconsciousness patterned with disturbing and vivid dreams. I regretted getting on the drug, considering it merely a new addition to my list of things to be terrified about. If weed hadn’t altered my brain irrevocably when I was fourteen (it had), this psychotropic drug surely would.
And yet, a month in, I found myself lying on the hammock in the garden and realizing I was hungry, a sensation I had not felt in so long. Of course, I quickly reversed this, my mind scouring every possible thing to be anxious about until I’d worked myself up into a tizzy about the fact that I could hear. But the fact remained. I had had a moment of peace. My sleeping slowly improved. I started eating ice cream at night. I could enjoy Friday Night Lights without obsessing over what it would be like to perceive the world through the eyes of Kyle Chandler. I was able to laugh. Not a hysterical I’M NORMAL laugh. A real one.
Once I realized the anti-anxiety medication had helped me, I was able to admit that I had anxiety. That was as far as I was willing to go. The Thing was not to be mentioned to Greg. The intrusive thoughts were to stay locked inside. We stayed within the safe confines of generalized anxiety, even moving on to relationship anxiety. (Does the new guy I’m seeing even like me? Will he run for the hills when he sees that I’m basically taking lithium to control my profound mental illness?) I had reached a moment of stability. Greg said I’d come a long way. He was proud of me. Do you have a cat? I asked him. What would it mean for you to know that? he replied. Sigh.
Still, the probability that I did indeed have at least a touch of OCD was undeniable. One night, drunk on Sauv Blanc from the box, I did something I had always felt a needling desire to do but had been too afraid to. I searched “OCD” on Reddit.
For those of you who don’t know, I love Reddit. For all its faults, I think it’s the most honest place on the internet. If I want to know what it feels like to get stung by a brown recluse, I run to Reddit. If I want to know what firefighters really think, I run to Reddit. Some argue that researching mental illness online is a bad idea. For the most part, I agree. It’s easy to fall into the sweet-smelling trap of self-diagnosis. We see it all the time on TikTok: people convincing themselves they have DID and other rare disorders for one reason or another. But I wasn’t looking for confirmation bias because I didn’t want to have OCD. I was drunk and curious. That was it. But what I saw when I looked at Reddit was undeniable evidence that I was one of them. For the first time in my life, I saw thought processes completely and undeniably mirroring my own.
“My brain is always searching for something to worry and obsess about, and it’s exhausting…” a user wrote. “as soon as I “solved” a problem a new one instantly pops up.” Another wrote, “I’m having a hard time even watching the first minute of a show without rewinding because I feel like I didn’t look at the right spot, or wasn’t paying attention.” And yet another: “Anyone else feel like the thought they are stuck on will last forever?”
After reading the “obsession” article at work, I reasoned away my fear that I had OCD by reminding myself that I did not have classic “compulsions.” I do not wash my hands over and over until they’re raw and bloody, I don’t turn the light on and off three times like people do in movies. But learning more about OCD, through Reddit and elsewhere, I realized I do have compulsions after all. They are just mostly internal. My constant need to “prove” to myself that I am not a bad person, repeating phrases and words in my head to cancel the “bad ones” out.
Toward the end of Because We Are Bad, Lily Bailey describes agonizing over how to balance her new job and her vacillating mental health. “And that’s when the answer I have been looking for suddenly arrived,” she describes, “like a gift: so simple, so pure, it’s amazing I didn’t think of it before. I’ll be honest.”
Honesty. It’s funny to see how the intrusive thoughts deflate when I say them aloud. Once, I was terrified because I realized I could see my arms out of my peripheral vision. Another time I convinced myself I was going to die because I put fertilizer on my vegetables without gloves. I went through the house and disinfected every surface because I could not remember which ones I’d touched before washing my hands (spoiler alert: I had touched none of them).
It’s funny how little these thoughts seem to matter, now that they're out in the world.
***
In his essay, Ryan laments that “every invention towards measurement and every internal drive towards Reason has squashed that magic, reduced it to the invisible and the weak.”
In this way, I suppose, the magical thinking distortions created by my anxiety allowed me to experience the eclipse in a more “pure” and “traditional” way. With absolute and unadulterated terror, like it was in the old days.
When I read Ryan’s Substack, I admonished myself for not experiencing the eclipse more fully. What will I write about now? I sat on the back patio later that day and read Lily Bailey’s memoir. When I got to the last page, it occurred to me. I’ll be honest.