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Dear James,
I’ve never been an anxious person. However, since the election, I’ve been experiencing what I imagine are anxiety attacks. (I initially went down a cardiology rabbit hole, as I’m told is common for your first time, but ultimately landed on circumstantially triggered panic.) Cutting to the chase: I’ve realized I’m no longer feeling enraged or even hopeless but instead I am fearful … of Men. This is a difficult state of cognitive dissonance to be in, given that I have a lovely and kind husband and a young son who epitomizes the term mama’s boy, and I have luckily never experienced a traumatic event that would trigger these vague but crippling thoughts. So how do I separate my fear of Men (capital M) from my love of men (lowercase m)? I’m asking you in particular because your name is James, and because you seem to have the wise, fatherly vibe I need from a person who might tell me the truth without making me spiral.
Dear Reader,
Well, I’ve had a few panic attacks, and I’m also a man, so let’s see if I can be of any use to you.
Once upon a time, in some dank, forgotten venue in London, I saw the spoken-word performer Don Bajema opening for Rollins Band. (Those were the days: You heard some poetry and then you got flattened by some rock and roll.) The line of Bajema’s that fixed itself in my memory—the line with which, as I recall, he ended his set—went something like this: So what can I do, what can I do but try like fucking hell to be a man?
It took a few years, and some belated growing up, before I understood why I’d hung on to these words in particular: because they prophesied my own basic sense of manhood. Being a man—a realized man, a non-chaotic man—is something (I learned) that you have to work at. You have to try like fucking hell, and keep trying. A man’s sense of himself, like a dodgy website, is always under construction. For as long as he lives, there’ll be something provisional and precarious about it—which can lead, if unacknowledged, to all sorts of trouble, usually for the women and the children in his life. But a man who’s carrying his own weight, who knows his own frailty and can manage it, will give a woman or a child no reason to be afraid.
Having said all that, I’m as reluctant to talk about uppercase-M Men as I am to talk about uppercase-W Women, for the simple reason that I don’t know any. All of my friends and loved ones—men, women, and nonbinary—live in lowercase, trying hard, screwing up, doing their best, falling short, hurting people, delighting people: the standard human comedy. They’re not mouthing off on podcasts or writing hot takes. They’re people, not pundits or politicians. I know that the incoming wave of Trumpism bears with it a foaming mantle of boors and braggarts and shouty ideologues, all carrying on with apparent impunity. But that is just so much noise. It really is. It will pass. Don’t let them get in your head.
Anxiety loves an abstraction, some big zero of a concept that it can chew on infinitely. A free-floating Fear of Men, like a Fear of Death or a Fear of Insanity, is ideal food for Johnny Panic (as Sylvia Plath called him—in The Atlantic, as it happens, back in 1968). It’s tiramisu to him. So cut him off. Get down in your own life and talk with your own men: That’s the level at which to conduct the grand negotiation between the sexes, which is always evolving and which will evolve (I’m assuming) forever.
My own panic attacks, as I now see them, were a primer in ontological instability—for which, in retrospect, I’m grateful: Knowing how close we all are to the Howling Nothing, that’s good stuff for a writer, good stuff for a human being. At the time, however, it was bloody awful. For you, in the thick of it right now, I prescribe deep breathing, cold showers, reduced caffeine, repeated viewings of What About Bob?, and a session or two with Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos.
One foot in front of the other,
James
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