I am a child of the mid-1960’s born to parents who served
in World War II during their youth – my
father as a Navy gun control-man aboard the U.S.S. Minneapolis and my mother as
a Navy cadet nurse stationed in Oak Knoll Navy Hospital in Oakland, California.
For them, the very mention of the word anxiety was
unaffordable and unacceptable, not only because of war, but also because they
hailed from impoverished, struggling families in East Tennessee and Western
North Carolina - states still haunted by the Civil war and still steeped in a
kind of twisted, religious
fundamentalism.
I wouldn’t describe either of my parents as
“self-aware”, a term reserved for the industrialized, postmodern world into
which I was born. They lived their lives out of a somewhat blind sense of tough,
Puritanical, Christian duty and obligation in a universe that, for them, was
highly unpredictable. All emotions
were awkwardly and inconsistently expressed, swept under the rug completely,
criticized by other family members, or contorted into a kind of dark, inner
hunger, particularly in the case of my father.
In his late 50’s, my father, crippled by anxiety and
depression, spent time as a patient in a variety of psychiatric hospitals; was briefly
committed to a state mental hospital, and finally admitted into a V.A. nursing
home all before I reached the age of 18.
This had a profound effect on me and my family. Because
my parents had no tools to navigate their own emotions and identities, I really
didn’t either, in spite of the outside influence of culture, school, etc.,
which actually caused greater anxiety for me because it didn’t match up with my
life at home.
I had my first panic attack at the age of 17 in a
dark movie theater. I became dizzy and claustrophobic and my heart and thoughts
raced. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. To escape, I ran into the brightly lit women’s
restroom and rested my head against the cool metal door of one of the stalls. Looking
down, all I could see was my immediate environment, which, in this case,
happened to be a very ugly, brown tile bathroom floor. I worried that it might
cave beneath my feet. I told no one about the experience.
This severe attack subsided, only to be replaced by
a chronic, lower-grade version. I wondered if I was losing my mind like my
father. I thought this meant I was a bad
person who lacked trust in a loving and compassionate God. After all, my parents’
Christian worldview virtually demanded the suppression of all emotion. The
result was my father’s mental illness and, now, my own.
Strong negative emotions such as hate and anger in a
fundamentalist Christian world are understood not just to be sinful but to be,
somehow, unforgivable. However, even emotions such as fear, sadness and
self-pity can connote a lack of trust in the Divine. Combine that with the
ravages of World War II my parents saw, and the result is a nasty concoction.
But herein lay the real rub. Even to surrender to innocuous
emotions like happiness, peace and contentment meant that you were ignoring
your Christian duty to “suffer as Jesus suffered”; to focus solely on the happiness
of others to the exclusion of self. Life becomes a purely black-and-white world
floating amidst the “absurdity” of the real.
Still, I don’t blame Christianity for my personal
anxiety or that of the world. I believe the genuine teachings of Jesus are
gentle, forgiving, creative, and not easily understood by the average mind.
After all, the parables of Jesus are jam-packed with paradox.
However, it is still easier for people, especially
those who have experienced the trauma of war, to give into a dualistic,
all-or-nothing interpretation of Christianity to the exclusion of genuine
spirituality because to do so would mean to risk vulnerability. This is
dangerous, anxiety-producing, and pervasive in American culture and in spite of
progress such as the Civil Rights Movement, the sexual revolution, and the
existence of all great American art.
I am now in my mid-40s and have lived with anxiety
and depression since my youth. I have even been hospitalized. Though I still
fall into dualistic thinking and struggle to find some solid sense of self, I’m
gradually learning to let go of the notion that such a self exists.
In my living room hangs Pablo Picasso’s “La
Guernica”. I’ve come to personally view it as redemption not only for the
legacy of war that I, and the world, have inherited, but also the influence of
faulty religion. It’s curved asymmetric images reveal the chaos of war. Painted
in black and white, though, they also reveal what happens when we see the world
without color, through a dualistic limited lens.
