Learnèd and afraid, 10/7/19
If you'll recall, I sent my last email the day before my first day of classes. After that day, I promptly ghosted everyone I cared about, because I wildly underestimated how hard being in grad school would be. "School is for babies!" I thought to myself as I drew up a schedule on which I optimistically wrote "gym" three days a week. School is for babies, and babies have the monumental task of learning how to function in the world from a place of complete ignorance.
I think the second class session I attended in the program really set the tone. The class, "Writing and Reporting Workshop," is colloquially known in the program as "reporting bootcamp"; it's a five hour "lab" that stretches from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Friday. That day, after a few hours of genial introductions and a discussion of news values, our teacher gave us an assignment. "I'm going to let you guys go for lunch," he said, "but I want you all to come back with three story ideas, with sources attached." As in, go out into the world (or at least, the environs of NYU), chat up random strangers, and somehow gin up ideas for potential news pieces, which we were to pitch to the group on our return. He must have seen the stricken looks on our faces, because he added, helpfully, "Don't let that fear own you."
Some time later, while I was wearily brushing my teeth after another long day of class and readings and writing and sending emails and ignoring all responsibilities that lacked a deadline, it occurred to me that fear did, in fact, own me. Moreover, it was making me an excellent student. I arrived at every class fifteen minutes before it started because our teachers apparently hate tardiness; I'd go to sleep trying to come up with ideas for my assignments or wondering when on earth my sources would get back to me, and spend an hour in the hazy dream-state before waking fretting about it too. (Even my subconscious wasn't free!) At some point, I began organizing my time with a simple heuristic: I would work on whatever stressed me out the most.
This is nothing unusual, honestly. I suspect this was my default state for the first 21 years of my life. For one of my classes, we had to read David Foster Wallace's essay "Authority and American Usage," which is nominally about dictionaries but is really about the politics of American English. There's one part where he earnestly explains to one of his black students that while Standard Written English (or Standard White English, as he also calls it) is no more legitimate than Standard Black English, it's what they need to learn to get ahead. What stuck out to me most was the closing line of his spiel: "And, [STUDENT'S NAME], you're going to learn to use it, too, because I am going to make you." School is coercive—it forces you, the student, to do stuff you don't really want to do. And sure, we accept school because we understand that learning is good for us, but when it's 1 a.m. and you're dragging yourself through some impenetrable text, your proximate motivator isn't high-minded self-improvement but pure, animalistic fear. People might wax rhapsodic about the joys of learning, but really, learning sucks. To be really effective, it hits your weak spots over and over again. So we need to be pushed to do it, and often, that push is fear. (Speaking of weak spots, I have gone to the gym exactly once in the last month.)
Fear—and specifically, my fear of cockroaches—is also making me a more responsible renter. I wash my dishes immediately after I eat, take out trash at least once a day, and wipe down my counters with disinfecting Clorox napkins every time I prepare food. And I've perfected a new kind of one-pot cooking: I boil water for pasta, and then I put a ton of raw vegetables and sauce on top (no muss, no fuss!). I haven't seen any live cockroaches skittering around my place yet, just one dead one when I first moved in, but that hasn't stopped me from peering cautiously around the door every time I come home.
But something happened recently that really tested my mettle. About a week ago, I heard a weird clattering noise from the corner of my kitchen, which startled me from my copy of David Halberstam's The Fifties (which is, by the way, a wonderful book). I cautiously got up, checked the dishwasher to see if maybe some cutlery fell from the top rack, and saw nothing amiss. I thought no more of it.
Wednesday: It's the first Wednesday of the month, so the exterminator shows up. I tell him I haven't seen any roaches, and cautiously ask him if that's typical for the apartment. "That's really good," he says encouragingly. He says most people haven't had any problems. "I do smell something, though." We check the kitchen cabinets, and then he leaves.
Friday, 5 p.m.: The smell is stronger. A gas leak, perhaps? After I get home from my reporting class and submit something due "by the end of the week," I peek in the cabinet where the smell is strongest, just to double check and—is that a snout????
6 p.m.: I interview Nicole Starace, a child psychologist at Stanford, about school phobia.
So, here's the thing. Part of the reason I've been so busy is that for the past four weeks, I've been working on this piece about phobias (which, medically, are debilitating fears that interfere with one's life). And after talking to about nine people on the nature of intense fears, I'm beginning to see fear as something both incredibly common—everyone is afraid of something—and incredibly limiting, if it's not properly handled. The way we tend to handle fear is to avoid it, which, according to every single doctor I talked to, is the exact opposite of what we should be doing. Or take Oprah, who is apparently afraid of balloons. Her staff threw her a giant surprise party for her 40th birthday, with balloons everywhere. "No way around it, just had to walk through them," she says in this adorable and uplifting video. Is there any more inspiring image than Oprah walking through a thicket of balloons she's absolutely terrified of?
Anyway, there's a week-dead mouse in my kitchen cabinet, killed by a trap I didn't know was there, and somehow I need to get it out of my apartment. I am witless with fear. I do not do well with dead things. But I know what I have to do, even if I really don't want to accept it. Science is forcing my hand! So I video call the most fearless person I know to bear witness, and whimper the entire time as I use a Swiffer mop to scoot the dead mouse, dark and sad and trailing a dull brown skid mark, into a waiting plastic bag. And as I grasp the bag with the tips of my fingers, tie it off, put it in two more bags, tie those off, and gingerly carry the whole thing down to the trash room, I feel like maybe—who knows?—I've learned something.
—Chelsea
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Shameless self-promotion/sponsored content/advertising section
I wrote this review about a book about seaweed, which is really about leaving California. And! Here's my first appearance in the New York Times Book Review, with reviews of three dystopian thrillers.