Fears to tears

>>Patricia Pearson examines her neuroses
and ours in A Brief History of Anxiety:
Yours & Mine

by JULIET WATERS

According to her lucid, intelligent and very funny book, A Brief History of Anxiety: Yours & Mine, here are some things that have caused Patricia Pearson obsessive attacks of dread: “Phone bills, ovarian cancer, black bears...unseemly heights, running out of gas, having the mole on my back that I can feel, but not see, secretly morph into malignant melanoma…. And cows. Also, but only occasionally, when I’m really over the edge with anxiety, the fear that the car I’m driving will simply explode.”

Here, on the other hand, are some stressful things that Pearson faced the week I interviewed her: Unexpected success.

This book, her fifth, received a rave review in The New York Times. (“They always ignore me,” she says with more wonder than bitterness. “I guess it’s the timing in America right now. With all their mortgages exploding.”) And unexpected grief. The day the review came out was also the day her father died suddenly in his sleep. Pearson has spent the week guiding her school age children through the funeral rituals.

A little over half a century ago, her grandfather, former prime minister Lester B. Pearson, received a Nobel Peace Prize for defusing the Suez Crisis. If there were some kind of weekly Nobel Poise Prize, the woman sitting in front of me would be a good nominee. Pearson seems nothing like the unhinged woman she describes in her book.

Still, the gallows humour that served her well as a true crime reporter in New York City surfaces in this anecdote from her week. Cheered up by a fake video on The Onion about certain countries being attacked by “concentric circles,” she e-mailed the link to her mother, unaware that The Onion had just invented a new fake story: “Daddy Put in Bye-Bye Box,” complete with a detailed crayon illustration of the recently buried “Bye-Bye box.” Fortunately, the family sense of humour seems to be genetic, but mostly Pearson chalks her recent equanimity up to the difference between fear and anxiety.

“Want some fear? Go to Iraq, or get yourself stranded on Mount Everest,” she writes. Fear, she believes, is our rational reaction to actual crisis, and most of us, according to reliable research—even neurotics—are programmed to use it intelligently.

Anxiety is something else, an objectless dread that paralyses us, and seems to be culturally created (28.8 per cent of U.S. citizens have suffered from anxiety, compared to 6.6 per cent of Mexicans). Anxiety arises, most probably, out of a delusion that we can, and should be in control of our fate and our environment.

More control, Pearson argues, is not what we need. “What we need is to bend to the tempest like pine and palm trees—flexible, adaptive, attuned, yet fully rooted in our principles. What we need, in essence, is to grow up.”

If this sounds like WASPish, pull-up-your-bootstraps philosophy, it is and it isn’t. Pearson is clear that the tendency to deny the existence and consequences of anxiety once caused her harm, and prevented her better understanding it. She started the book on the suggestion of an editor.

“It was like waves of epiphanies as I started reading up on anxiety,” she tells me. “I had never been given any kind of tutelage in this stuff. For years, I had anxiety and literally no knowledge of it. Totally misunderstood it, and completely bought into the idea that it was my biology. I have learned so much in the last two years that I can’t even remember how ignorant I was about my own condition. And the place it’s brought me to, which is as far as I think I can go with it now, is that I can’t conquer it. But when I feel anxiety now, I can see it as outside of myself.”

There’s a brief list of books that may actually help readers do the same. A Brief History of Anxiety is definitely on it.

A Brief History of Anxiety:
Yours & Mine by Patricia
Pearson, Random House
Canada, HC, 198PP, $29.95