By Georgie Fehringer
“I can make connections between fears. Between cars skidding on gravel and my cousin driving off a cliff. Between camping and hunters in the trees. Between hitting a hookah full of weed, walking barefoot through the woods, calling the fire department for sunstroke, and dying in a classroom full of kids.”
It’s a level of bone-deep exhaustion running on fight or flight for half of your life. I go to the club and I dance. I drink and I dance and I sweat and I drink and I try not to think about how every bass hit is followed by a gunshot, and I repeat this until I no longer worry. This isn’t an argument per se, I'm not laying the groundwork to change anyone's mind. I am drinking and dancing and bracing. My mind has already been rewired. I am an obsessive circle of thought; these are only a series of moments: I am dancing in the club, or sitting in a classroom or sleeping on a couch and staring so long into the living room light I am no longer anything but the adrenaline running like the legs of a stray ant down my neck and arms and out through my fingertips.
When I was an undergrad someone threatened to shoot up my school and the mass evacuation led to the rewire and it led to other issues and this is a true story: I inch closer and closer to being the one teaching in those rooms. This is just one moment out of many moments that put together the things I try and forget, the snatches of memory that float behind the eyebrows I manicured this morning. I have many more bad just like anyone else. I have many more good too, I suppose.
What is an acceptable fear? Spiders, or darkness or drowning? Meeting new people, going new places, driving a car, pumping gas. Forgetting to turn off your oven, triple-quadruple checking the locks, ordering at a restaurant, public speaking, speaking. Being alone in your living room, shadows moving in half sleep states, getting pulled over, police, bullets piercing your back, dancing, not dancing, being seen too little or too much or out a window you don’t know you’re being seen through, walking a dog, making a phone call, the parking lots of places you’ve never been, car crashes, liars, loneliness, brain shocks, shocking scandalous hometown heroes turned neo-Nazi been neo-Nazi, Swastikas at the swap meet, getting stabbed on the corner of 4th and John, smoking outside, pick up trucks, falling in heels, cancer, swimming in lakes and getting a flesh eating bacteria, liver failure, losing your cell phone, school shootings, shootings, death threats– again, or ever, death and dying both state and process, mental and physical– pain, numbness, roofies, alcohol poisoning when the shakes set in, debt, failure, success, sticking your arm out the window in the car so you hand explodes on the metal posts you pass, running your car off the freeway–into the back of a semi, sunburns, racists, being forgotten, Florida, kidnapping, going outside, locking yourself out of the house and falling from heights.
I can make connections between fears. Between cars skidding on gravel and my cousin driving off a cliff. Between camping and hunters in the trees. Between hitting a hookah full of weed, walking barefoot through the woods, calling the fire department for sunstroke, and dying in a classroom full of kids. And I’m not a journalist anymore, never really was, but I might have been in a newsroom or two and I might have received a death threat or two and it might have taken two hours to evacuate if we hadn’t driven the car straight through the grass. And I am tired of remembering: their sincerest wishes for all monkeys to hang — the way I remember valentines from elementary school. Sharp spots through a thick veil. I don't think I'd give it up in a redo; I'd just rather remember the champagne. But when my mother called and I told her I was receiving death threats, she didn't want to celebrate with me. Not the first time or the second. It’s not the first time or the last.
I’m not a journalist but I know how to use the inverted pyramid, the hierarchy of information. I know all our places within it and how we must be paced. So if you asked me to try, though I’d rather not. If I was to try, only for your sake really, it might look something like: America winning war for right to be first thought on citizens’ minds and within its rights to make mental adjustments to anyone who might forget; 28-year-old, five years in still triple checks doors from the inside of an empty house.
Speculation is a natural companion of anxiety and that is especially apparent as a writer who has anxiety and writes about it. In fact, I’d go as far as to say a significant portion of my anxiety disorder is based on speculation, what ifs, and unanswered questions, and reactions to unanswerable questions.
There is a direct path from speculation to anxiety. Like, what possibilities does an unlocked door have? And how does that thought lead to the need to set traps around my house to catch this fully fictional intruder who now exists in my head? And how does that lead to a fear of windows? And how does that lead to an absurd few months where I can’t cross my living room without a taser, because what if someone crawls through the window? It’s never happened before but there always this moment and the next and the next.
When I write about anxiety I like to use lists, stacking question after question to show the rapid and thick accumulation of anxious speculation, the physical manifestation of how things build, the walls and weight, and heaps of thoughts that can trap me under their collective pressure. There is a speed to a never-ending list and to anxiety that both feels too fast and too slow at the same time, like running with a weighted blanket on the ocean floor.
This piece is about living with the consequences of living. Of continuing to exist and dance in the shadows or under the spotlight.
Georgie Fehringer is an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, an Iowa Arts Fellow, and the 2022 Melbourne Emerging Writers Festival Writer-in-Residence. Their writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Chicago Review of Books, The Rumpus, and TIMBER among others. They live in Iowa City with their (very) clumsy cat Mushu. You can contact them at GeorgieFehringer.com or on Twitter @Gigifehringer.