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The Enchanting Mr. Rice Guy
Thursday, January 20th, 2022
Hereâs the last time I remember playing with my childhood imaginary friend, Mister Rice Guy. Iâm 8, and itâs my least favorite time of day: recess. Iâm friendless and alone at my new school, and so I bring him with me that day â normally he stays home. We walk the perimeter of the chain-link enclosed yard behind the school as kids around us scream and play. My classmates assume Iâm talking to myself, so they start mouthing my words, wreathing them with derisive laughter.
Until that day, my imaginary friend had been a source of comfort. That moment transformed him into a source of shame. Mister Rice Guy (whose name I am sure I took from misunderstanding the phrase âMister Nice Guyâ) disappeared.
Thirty-two years later, in the nadir of a global pandemic, he came back again. But more on that in a moment.
According to my parents, Mister Rice Guy first showed up when I was 5. I was an awkward only child with a need for an imaginary companion who understood me. I was very private about him. He never came to the dinner table, and I never told my parents what he looked like. He and I spent long hours locked in conversation, playing together on the floor of my green-carpeted bedroom. What did he look like? In later years, Iâve been embarrassed to admit I couldnât quite remember. What I do know is how he made me feel. Safe and warm. Seen, heard and protected.
Maybe you had a special friend in childhood who made you feel that way. Or more than one. The experience exists on a spectrum, stretching from conversations with a favorite toy or stuffed animal to personified imaginary entities like mine.
For the most part, children know these friends are âpretend.â Thatâs the point. Theyâre not a delusion, but rather a way to access feelings and qualities that our youthful selves know to be important, but which weâre not ready to claim as part of our essential identities. Theyâre our emotional backpacks, apart but close at hand, there when needed to deliver a store of strength or calm.
Experts say a childâs imaginary friend can be someone to consult when making a decision. They can make us feel better about our peer relationships, giving us insights on how to handle friendships and disagreements. And they offer the capacity to imagine new outcomes to difficult situations. Feeling trapped and confused, say, in a pandemic? Your imaginary friend might help you imagine a way out.
âThe kind of mind that can reason about the past and think about the future is the kind of mind that can come up with an alternative,â says Marjorie Taylor, a professor emerita of psychology at the University of Oregon. Taylor has studied childrenâs fantasy lives for decades. I called her up recently to ask if I was crazy, because suddenly Mister Rice Guy was back.
No, she said. I was not crazy. In fact, more adults could benefit from finding new ways to play.
In the shortest, darkest days of that first fearful winter, as COVID-19 mutations circled the globe, I sat at home, hushed and frightened and uncertain. From bleary days to long, insomniac nights, a heaviness assailed me in my solar plexus. It dragged me down and made me cry, on and off, for days at a time. And then suddenly, one night, all I could think of was Mister Rice Guy. I swore I could feel his presence in my bedroom.
Was I losing my mind? I looked around in the dark and felt like a fool. Why would my old companion be back in my life? Could he even recognize this sad, 40-year-old variation on the (also kind of sad) child he had comforted at the age of 8?
The next morning, I woke up, exhausted and confused, and took a hike for the first time in months. I drove to a hilly park with fresh green grass. At the outset, I wondered if Mister Rice Guy would tag along, but still it made no sense. Why would my old companion want a friend like me? I was weepy and depressed and old. If he were there, heâd want to play.
Suddenly I knew what I needed to do. I took off my pack, climbed a medium-size hill, waited until no one else was looking â and rolled down that hill. I collapsed at the bottom, giggly and dizzy and covered in burs. You cannot be sad after you roll down a hill. And I know for a fact that I didnât roll down that hill all by myself. I got a push from Mister Rice Guy.
After that, we spent a lot of time together. As the first pandemic winter yielded to its second spring, I left my apartment as often as I could, taking long walks where I paid special attention to bird and insect worlds. What were their days like? I imagined walking side by side with Mister Rice Guy on these explorations, which made them feel adventurous and fun. That line of ants streaming by a smeared banana â where was their nest? (We tried to follow the trail of ants for as far as we could.) How closely could we sneak up next to the hummingbirds on my street before they zoomed away? By then Iâd realized, to my delight, that I hadnât forgotten what my childhood friend looked like: He looked like no one, or like everyone who isnât me. In an era that seems all too ready to demonize the Other, here was a presence of pure Otherness, radiating the acceptance I hadnât been able to access on my own.Â
If someone saw me talking to myself, let them wonder. I felt no shame.
Iâm sure I am not alone in having invoked a childhood presence for my own comfort over the past year. More than one friend has told me they reached for their oldest, most cherished stuffed animal in recent times â rescuing them from closets or shelves, gently stroking their much-repaired coat and reconnecting with ancient feelings of safety and innocence.
I spent 32 years living without Mister Rice Guy, because I made friends and gained confidence out in the world. But I had forgotten how to play.
Weâve all observed the intense absorption of children at play. As a writer, Iâm envious of their ability to invent characters, storylines and games without effort. Imagination is a form of pleasure and escape. Itâs not quite like an adult daydream. To play is to live in the present, unremittingly, without distraction or self-judgment. Thereâs a sense of discovery and wonder.
Playfulness is a collective trait. âI can walk into any daycare anywhere in this country and see children pretending all day long,â says Taylor, who wrote the definitive book on pretend friends and has spent her career unraveling the mysteries of why we play. She believes the instinct for imaginary play is universal, and that imagination itself is fundamental to the human condition. And not just for humans. Taylor points to a handful of studies going back to the 1950s that suggest gorillas, chimpanzees and dolphins engage in imaginary play â among each other or with their human interlocutors.
The âwhyâ of it is less evident: Play may serve a profound evolutionary purpose that we still donât understand. But the capacity for imagination benefits us all our lives â whether itâs to propel us to the moon or to write the occasional poem. We also all have the capacity to think about things that donât exist, might have been or could be. Thinking about the past, imagining a future: These are the tools of fiction. And what is our daily self-talk if not the adult version of our childhood attempts to cope with these past and future notions?
Who can we be speaking to?
Imaginary friendships werenât even thought to be good for children until the 1990s, when an efflorescence of research began to suggest otherwise. Today, having fantasies of this nature is considered not just healthy, but an important rite of passage for some. Studies by Taylor and others suggest that up to 65 percent of us had an imaginary friend, or multiple friends, in childhood or adolescence. (Other studies suggest the number is much lower, around 30 percent).
Researchers have found that the presence of an imaginary friend â whether a wholly-invented figment of a childâs imagination or a favorite object like a stuffed animal that has a personality and âconversesâ with the child â tends to correlate with high levels of creativity and empathy. Some of us invented entire worlds with imaginary characters and storylines, called paracosms. In doing so, we gained a whole lot more than companionship.
The benefits also accrue later in life. Several recent studies have shown the experience of having an imaginary companion likely makes adolescents and adults more independent, resilient and prone to ask for help when they need it. And, yes, adults who used to have imaginary friends do engage in more self-talk than other people.
But why might I â or any of us â seek a reunion with our pretend playmates? The answer may lie in the disorienting circumstances of our new reality. My childhood world was small and turbulent and vulnerable. Adults were the force majeure, compelling where I went and what I did. Our COVID-19 lives today are similarly proscribed, attenuated and disordered by forces outside our control. Thereâs a deadly pandemic on, and not even the grown-ups know whatâs going to happen next. Our worlds are again defined by hard boundaries and closed doors. And just like in childhood, we survey our lives in the lonely hours of before-sleep or before-dawn, waiting for the point where we again have something to look forward to.
For me, spending time with Mister Rice Guy helped me realize how big my world truly is, no matter how small it can feel inside the daily closed loop of my pandemic bubble. The last time he and I played together when I was 8, his world was bounded by my green-carpeted bedroom and the fenced-in recess yard behind my school. When he came back to me, we enjoyed a leisurely ramble through the Sonoma County hills all day, hunted for ripe blackberries and compared the personalities of the different cows we ran into (and tried to run up to) on skinny ranchland trails.
After we took those first post-vaccination forays into the world, my fears started to ebb, and Mister Rice Guy stopped coming around. Iâm OK with that â it was a reunion, after all, and this time his departure isnât the sudden banishment of an ashamed 8-year-old girl. Heâs gone away for now. But if living is coping with uncertainty, he could very well be back.
Heâll be welcome. I sleep better these days knowing I have an extra friend who requires no social distancing, who sees me clearly with his every-colored eyes. And whoâll remind me when itâs time to play.
Tags: childhood, COVID-19, Dr. Marjorie Taylor, Imaginary friends, Julia Scott, pandemic, Paracosms, The power of play
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Duolingo: Extreme Sports Heroes
Thursday, March 11th, 2021
EPISODE PART 1:
Sibusiso and the Big Mountain
Sibusiso Vilane has stood at the summit of the worldâs tallest mountains. He is a mountaineering icon from South Africa, who has ascended Mt. Everest twice. He has reached the greatest heights in the world… but growing up, he never even thought about climbing a single mountain, until fate intervened and changed the direction of his life forever.
His first conquest of Everest put him in the history books as the first Black man from Africa to make it to the top. But the message he carried back to all South Africans was even more important to Sibusiso: one of equality of potential and ability, at a time when the country was still emerging from the painful legacy of apartheid.
EPISODE PART 2:
Bianca’s Big Wave
Bianca is a professional extreme surfer. She has surfed big waves all over the world. But there was always one wave that scared her the most: the Mavericks surf break, in California. Along the way, conquering Mavericks also became a battleground to fight for equal opportunities for women in surfing.
Today, thanks to the advocacy of Bianca and other female surfers, surf contests are starting to treat women equally to men — including them in all the major contests and awarding them the same prize money when they win. But the fight is far from over.
Tags: Bianca Valenti, big-wave surfing, Duolingo, extreme sports, Julia Scott, Mavericks, Mavericks surf contest, mountaineering, Mt. Everest, podcast, Sibusiso Vilane, South Africa
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The Daring Cities Podcast
Wednesday, October 7th, 2020
When it comes to solving the climate crisis, cities have an unprecedented opportunity. We already have the tools to cut greenhouse gas emissions from cities by close to 90 percent in the next 30 years. We just need to empower leaders and residents to adopt them. Cities will help chart the future course of life on Earth, and thousands of them are stepping up to fight climate change. Some are flat-out daring, finding ways to navigate major opposition as they go.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and a worldwide recession, the stakes for a green recovery couldn’t be higher. Join host Julia Scott as she visits with city leaders in seven daring cities, in countries as diverse as the Philippines, Japan, Argentina, and the USA.
STREAM EPISODES HERE
SUBSCRIBE via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Luminary.
The Daring Cities podcast was sponsored by the ICLEI â Local Governments for Sustainability.
Tags: Bill Peduto, Buenos Aires, COVID-19 recovery, Daring Cities, Green building, ICLEI, Julia Scott, Malmö, Nagano, Orlando, Pasig City, Pittsburgh, podcast, Sustainable Cities, Turku, UN, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Urban planning podcast
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Duolingo: Two Unexpected Entrepreneurs
Thursday, August 20th, 2020
EPISODE PART 1:
She Can Fix It
Stephanie Lopez is a woman in a manâs profession, something some men have never let her forget.
Stephanie, a mother of two, owns Woosters Garage in Weston, a small town in central Wisconsin. She named her garage after her great-great grandfather Glen Wooster, the first in a long family line of men â including her grandfather and father â who love fixing cars⊠a passion she inherited.
Today, Stephanie Lopez is proud to run her own garage. But her road there was bumpy, winding and full of unexpected barriers.
EPISODE PART 2:
Silicon Valleyâs Wizard of Jobs
Rahim Fazal seemed destined for a thriving career in the tech industry when the web company he co-founded as a teenager made him a millionaire overnight.
Rahim is 38 today. His dreams of making it in Silicon Valley eventually did come true⊠But along the way, he noticed that not everybody was equally welcome there. The troubling question of who gets to belong in the heart of the tech world â and who doesnât â eventually led Rahim to take the biggest leap of his career.
Tags: Duolingo, Entrepreneurs, inspiring, Joel Scott, Julia Scott, podcast, Rahim Fazal, Silicon Valley, Stephanie Lopez, SV Academy, Woosters Garage
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Four Bay Area Cities Have Used Tear Gas. Here’s How It Makes COVID-19 Worse
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2020
As demonstrations against police brutality roil the country for a second week, protesters across the Bay Area continue to put their bodies on the line, weighing the risk of injury or exposure to the coronavirus against continuing to tolerate the status quo.
The risk of personal harm now extends to inhaling tear gas, which four Bay Area cities have deployed multiple times since Friday â in Oakland, Walnut Creek, San Jose and Santa Rosa.
It’s a combustible â and controversial â choice in light of the known respiratory complications of COVID-19, according to two experts who spoke with KQED.
“If somebody has COVID-19 and they get tear gassed, they’re going to be coughing more. They’re going to be spitting more. They’re going to be shouting more in pain … so that’s one risk,” said Peter Chin-Hong, a professor and specialist in infectious diseases at the UCSF School of Medicine.
The other risk is that tear gas could degrade the lungs and make a protester more susceptible to coronavirus infection down the line, he added.
It’s almost like you’re getting an asthma attack,” he said.
Chin-Hong published a strongly worded petition this week on behalf of fellow infectious disease, public health and medical professionals. It makes a point of affirming the ongoing demonstrations against systemic racism and police oppression, while offering pointed public health guidance to law enforcement and government officials trying to handle protests.
Among the pieces of advice: Stop using tear gas immediately. Also, stop detaining protesters in enclosed spaces like police vans and jail cells, which are likely to increase COVID-19 transmission.
Civil rights advocates are likewise concerned about the spread of the coronavirus in jails, following hundreds of arrests in the Bay Area since demonstrations began on Friday. In Alameda County, for example, some protesters were sent to Santa Rita Jail in Dublin.
“We have massive concerns for people getting exposed inside the jail who are protesting and getting booked inside,” said Carey Lamprecht, a legal worker with the National Lawyers Guild.
Protesters who have been tear gassed may not be able to continue wearing their masks, increasing their risk of exposure to COVID-19, said Art Reingold, professor and head of epidemiology and biostatistics at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health.
“It’s obviously a thorny conundrum. If you want to be out there and protest and stay safe â these are hard things to balance. If you’re going to be there, be sure of wearing a mask,” he said.
But don’t continue to wear a tear-gassed, wet mask, Reingold said, since tear gas is already harmful at that point and the mask may no longer serve as protection.
“In general we think that when masks become wet, that they are not as good at preventing the spread of virus,” he said.
Oakland City Council President Rebecca Kaplan has been sorting through the complaints her office has received about the conduct of police officers who tear gassed young protesters on Friday, Saturday and Monday nights. She strongly opposes the use of tear gas under the circumstances.
“They say the point is to try to protect the community from things getting out of hand. But tear gas does the opposite,” Kaplan said. “When demonstrators are behaving peacefully, deploying a harsh munition like this can really hurt people, especially in a pandemic. It also pushes the crowd to places of greater danger.”
Kaplan said she has asked for “clarity” about how police decided tear gas was justified, given Oakland’s policy limiting its use.
KQED asked several cities to explain their use of tear gas or share their policy. An Oakland Police Department spokesperson said they would look into KQED’s questions. A San Jose Police Department representative said the agency had no details to share “at this time.” The San Francisco Police Department said its officers did not use tear gas over the weekend or on Monday night.
Tags: Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, Julia Scott, KQED, Oakland, Tear Gas
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Under One Roof: How COVID-19 Turned My Apartment Building Into a Community
Thursday, April 16th, 2020
I live in a tall condo building with hundreds of neighbours in Oakland, California. The San Francisco Bay Area has been under lockdown for five weeks now, though many of us have already lost count.
These are long days. Sometimes I forget to eat. I sit in front of my laptop at my kitchen table â which is also my dining room table â and mark time by counting the number of delivery vans in the driveway from Amazon. Everyone in my building is ordering in and no one is venturing out.
And I’ve started to wonder: how are we all coping? How has the coronavirus changed our lives so far, and how will it change us as a building? As neighbours?
We live solitary lives behind our 119 doors. And yet we’ve never had more in common. The threat we face from outside is invisible, terrifying and real. And all of a sudden, we’ve come to depend on each other to stay healthy. One person’s COVID-19 exposure could endanger others in proximity. We all need to protect each other at the same time.
Possibly no one in the building understands the threat better than Katie Stephenson. She’s a pediatrics resident at a local hospital, and she lives on the second floor. She regularly works 12-hour shifts at the hospital, where she sees children who have been admitted because their parents are afraid they might have COVID-19.
‘I just assume that I’ve been exposed’
When she comes home from work, the first thing she does is strip off her scrubs and take a long shower with a lot of soap. “Because it’s not only just the germs, but it’s also the sweat and everything from being in the hospital and trying to sleep on the little cots there, and being exposed to all the coughing,” she says.
Katie is not just trying to stay clean. She’s trying to protect our neighbours from the coronavirus â since she thinks it’s only a matter of time before she becomes infected herself.
I just assume that I’ve been exposed, or that I’ll be exposed again. So my mission is just to keep my germs confined to my little space and not let them get out,” she shrugs.
Kate Stephenson at work at Oakland Medical Center.
The prospect of infection doesn’t scare her. But she knows she could infect our neighbour Judy Rosenberg, a woman in her 70s who lives just two doors down. Judy is an improvisational pianist who keeps a concert piano in her living room. She doesn’t find herself wanting to play that much these days, though.
“I just feel an overriding sadness, and I have felt depression in my life. The amount of deaths per day is just staggering to me,” she says. “I’m in my early 70s and nothing like this has ever happened to my generation. Even 9/11 was horrible ⊠but it was an event; it came and it went.
“This is of a different character, and this has a quality of war to it,” she adds.
Judy’s days revolve around not getting sick; the outcome would likely be far worse for her than for Katie. She still goes out every day with a mask on for walks and groceries, but she’s shut in the rest of the day, emailing friends and reading spy novels to pass the time. She tries not to watch the news.
Katie and Judy’s lives have little in common, but it struck me that â now more than ever â what we do to protect each other makes a stark difference â maybe even between life and death.
Our land-based cruise ship
Gina Belleci and her girlfriend Jessica Holt, my neighbours on the sixth floor, made their unit into a shared office space after the lockdown. They settled into a routine, dropping food off for Gina’s mom once a week to keep her from being exposed in the grocery aisles. They also took care of their neighbours, shopping for an elderly friend on the eighth floor who really should not leave the building.
But as the news worsened and the disease’s virulence became more widely understood, they made the difficult decision to clear out of our building and go live with Gina’s mom. They were worried that living with 180 people gave them more potential exposure to COVID-19, and they feared transmitting it to Gina’s mom on those weekly visits.
“I either need to choose being with my mom, or we need to really commit to this land-based cruise ship we live on, which is so big and has so many people coming in and out. And quite frankly, I don’t know that anything’s being cleaned above and beyond,” says Gina.
“Land-based cruise ship.” I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but there is a concern here about sanitation. Our building’s maintenance man has gone home, and there is no cleaning going on. All of the building’s common touch points could now be vectors for infection. Elevator buttons. Door knobs. I’ve taken to wearing gloves just to go downstairs. When people see me inside an elevator they’re waiting for, they give a tight smile and wait for the next one. Even the mailroom has started to feel a little snug.
But a lot of nice little things have happened in my building, too. Several neighbours left notes on the bulletin board in the lobby, offering to help anyone who needs it. On
e person organized the entire seventh floor into a group text, so that when someone’s leaving for a grocery run, they can take requests and minimize the number of trips from the building.
We’re also connecting in new ways. My sixth-floor neighbour Guillaume Chartier, a fellow Montrealer, dropped off a slice of homemade lemon meringue pie after I interviewed him for this story. I had my first real conversation with my third-floor neighbour Ernesto Victoria, who has lived above me for five years but with whom I’ve mostly exchanged only pleasantries.
And after a few people started meeting on the roof to watch the sunset, it turned into a socially-distant Friday happy hour where everyone brings their own drink and stands at least two metres apart.
This pandemic has changed our world, but it has also changed our building. I’ve met more neighbours in the last week than I’ve gotten to know in the past five years. I already feel better knowing I have so many people to talk to who are facing the same situation â the same questions â as I am. We may all be behind our doors for now, but we really are in this together.
Tags: CBC, Coronavirus, COVID-19, Julia Scott, The Current
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The Panic Button
Tuesday, October 1st, 2019
When I think about how we come to fear, I think about a photograph my parents took of me as an 11-year-old. Iâm in their bedroom, perched on the edge of their bed. Itâs plenty warm in the house, but Iâm dressed for subzero temperatures. I have on layers of clothes underneath my wool winter coat. I wear a bright pink ear-warmer headband above my ponytail and glasses, through which I stare out at the camera with a baleful expression. I am clutching a fire extinguisher.
I remember that my parents thought I looked adorable in my getup as I prepared myself for a notable first: They were leaving me alone, without a babysitter, to go out with their friends for the night.
They naturally assumed I would eat the dinner theyâd prepared, watch some TV and go to bed. I naturally assumed that something would cause the house to catch fire and, despite my attempt at heroics with the fire extinguisher, I would end up in the snow outside, watching it burn.
I spent much of that evening on their bed, waiting for them to come home, the fire extinguisher propped up on a pillow next to me. Every so often Iâd peer into the snowy street to see whether any strangers were approaching our front steps. I scurried upstairs and downstairs, my heart pounding, as I listened for sounds that seemed out of place â anything that could be construed as the first signs of a burglar who, I was sure, would choose this exact evening to try to break in. Whenever the refrigerator switched on or a truck rattled by, I jumped.
To say I was a needlessly fearful child is accurate, but it also diminishes the reality of my dread. I was certain that something bad would happen â soon â to me or to the people I loved. When my parents left me at home, Iâd tell myself terrible stories that initially seemed plausible, then seemed inevitable, and then didnât seem like stories at all â panic-inducing scenarios of my parents being assaulted on the street or getting into a car accident. The feelings produced by these fake storylines felt real. I was scared, and therefore I had reason to be. That was the feedback loop.
My mother would try to help me see my fictions for what they were by offering an alternative ending. She would stop what she was doing, sit me down and detail how safely their evening would play out, from dinner at the restaurant to the play they would see afterwards. She would never, to my frustration, commit to a curfew.
Frequently, she reassured me by pointing out the little doorbell installed on the left side of her bed. It was round and white to blend in with the rest of the wall and positioned about a foot above the telephone. The panic button, she called it. One push and it called the alarm company. The police would come to the house. Only use it in an absolute emergency.
This only confirmed what I had suspected: I had legitimate reasons to panic. I timed how long it would take me to run down the hallway from my bedroom and push the panic button. Sometimes at night I would creep toward my parentsâ room, ease the door open, and tiptoe over to the bed to make sure they were still breathing.
The more we know about the world, the more there is to fear. I wish we talked about it more, but it seems that fear is the final taboo. We like to think we should be over our fears by adulthood â that we should be better, more perfect, more evolved. The opposite is true for me, and Iâm convinced Iâm not alone.
In my opinion, most adults carry around deep, sloshing cisterns of confusion, pain and fear. We move slowly and carefully, lest we spill a drop and expose ourselves. Our fears are among the few things that unite us, yet we suffer them quietly and alone.
âAs far back as I can remember, every minute of life has been an emergency in which I was paralyzed with fear,â writes poet and essayist Mary Ruefle in Madness, Rack, and Honey.
Yet why is it that all we hear are stories about people who overcame their fears? Of public speaking. Of snakes. Of air travel. Of failure. Even of death. We celebrate these achievements. We talk about âconqueringâ our fears as if they are a cancer â and as if there were a cure.
Until recently, all that talk of fear-squashing sounded pretty good to me. At 38, I still have much in common with the child edging toward the panic button. Many nights, I close my eyes and wonder whether this will be it. I live in Oakland, California, so my specific and immediate concern is whether tonight will be the night my apartment building will collapse on top of me. The Hayward Fault runs less than three miles from my home and is notoriously overdue for âThe Big One.â
With the recent string of earthquakes in Southern California, itâs become even easier to imagine myself buried under rubble, suffocating, my back broken, unable to call for help. In other, more optimistic scenarios, I emerge from the building into the fresh hellscape of my neighborhood, bleeding and starting to walk toward the hospital.
When I drive across the bridge to San Francisco I am frequently seized by fear. Rather than admire the view, I think about an earthquake buckling the concrete and ripping the steel girders in two, sending my car straight to the bottom of the bay. I try to strategize: Should I bail out of the car while itâs falling? How long would I survive once the car hit the water?
Itâs not just earthquakes that keep me up at night. I canât stop thinking about all the potential ways catastrophic climate change will end life as we know it. But I may not be around long enough to witness that . . . because I also semiregularly convince myself I have a new terminal health condition. I wake up after a night of Googling and my search history is still open: âEarly Stage Ovarian Cancer â Three Signs to Look Out For.â âWhen to Get Tested for Alzheimerâs.â
I am a treat at parties.
Just kidding â I donât tell anyone I have these thoughts.
Whatâs worse, my thoughts no longer just poison my mind. Iâve started clenching my jaw in my sleep and had to get a tooth repaired. And this spring, I experienced my first panic attack in 15 years. It was such a nonsequitur that I didnât even understand what was happening until later. One moment it was a beautiful Saturday, the next I was crumpled over on a bus-stop bench, nauseated, breathless and confused. How odd, I remember thinking. Why canât I make this stop?
When I have a problem, I usually poll my friends. So I put a message on Facebook, asking them to volunteer some stories about their fears. Implicit in my asking was a hope that they would also tell me how they overcame them. Something I could pilfer and apply to my own life.
Clearly, I didnât understand fear.
One of the people I talked to for this story â weâll call her Morgan â had a terrible fear of heights. She would go to theme parks with her friends and watch people screaming with joy on the roller coasters, knowing how ill it would make her feel to climb up and strap herself in. Sheâd force herself to do it anyway. One day, when she was 19, it dawned on her that she could conquer her fear â and impress her motorcycle-loving boyfriend â by learning to fly propeller planes. She found a flying school at a local airport and signed up for 10 lessons on the spot.
âI set out to prove to myself that I could do something that scared the living shit out of me,â she says. âIt was stupid and bizarre and harsh.â
Flying was more satisfying than sheâd projected. With her instructor beside her in the cockpit, Morgan could force her attention onto the intellectual aspects of gauges and weather and how everything worked. She learned swiftly and built confidence. When her lessons were complete, she even let her instructor persuade her to fly solo. Morgan felt certain sheâd be cured.
The day of her solo flight, Morgan tried to stay calm by telling herself the plane was just a machine â a car you drive in the sky. Taking off, she felt the fuselage give a tiny shudder and then she was airborne.
It was magic. She felt like Amelia Earhart. She was the one who had pulled that piece of metal off the ground and was circling in the sky.
Then she realized that she had to land. She tried to squeeze down her mounting panic by recalling her training. Rather than let herself think about crashing, she checked off every step, one by one. In the end, she made a perfect landing.
But Morgan was disinclined to celebrate. The moment she cut the engine, she knew she would never fly a plane again. Her fear of heights had returned in full force. Four decades later, she has come to accept that it will never go away.
People spend their days quietly coping with fear. âWhen an elevator goes up, my palms start to sweat. I canât control it. I know itâs totally irrational,â says one man I know who developed some new fears in midlife but doesnât tell people about them. Letâs call him Roger. He says going above the 20th floor is guaranteed to induce a panic attack.
Roger lives in a town with mercifully few high-rises. When he travels, he always requests a hotel room as low to the ground as possible. He also hates flying. He would rather drive eight hours than take a one-hour flight. He doesnât know how these fears got started; they just happened. Today he copes with Xanax.
Another friend â Iâll call her Claire â traces her fear of heights to a trip to Italy she took three years ago. She was driving up a winding mountain road toward a cliff town to take in the view. After a lifetime of happily climbing to the tops of European castles, standing at the stomach-churning edges of canyons and exploring Californiaâs mountains by car, something changed. The road was practically cantilevered over the sea. Every time she hit another switchback, it felt like she was about to tip over the edge.
Soon after that, she started to suffer panic attacks on mountain roads. Her palms and feet got clammy and she worried that she wouldnât be able to hold on to the wheel or hit the brakes in time to save herself.
Then the claustrophobia set in. A year later, while hosting a party at her house, Claire accidentally locked herself in her bathroom. She had to remove the handle and jimmy open the door. She started avoiding bathrooms at cafĂ©s, especially the ones with heavy deadbolts. On airplanes she asks a flight attendant to please watch the door â she canât bear to lock it.
Claire went to a psychologist who prescribed exposure therapy to help her fight her fears. No way was that going to happen, she says, so she, too, uses antianxiety medications. âIâm not over the anxieties, but my response to them is much more muted,â she explains. âAs a woman, especially, I donât want to lose my independence because of fear.â
I started out writing about âhow we come to fear,â but I actually think itâs more accurate to say that our fears come to us. And if we canât forestall them, what hope do we have for resisting their influence?
Security expert Gavin de Becker says thatâs the wrong question. His book, The Gift of Fear â published in 1997 and still the most popular fear-advice book in a crowded marketplace â argues that fear plays an innate role in keeping us alive. In his professional experience helping people assess threats from co-workers, ex-partners and stalkers, de Becker believes tahat when it comes to predicting violent behavior in particular, fear sends us helpful survival signals that we too often choose to ignore. Instead, we should embrace the fear as a kind of intuition, a guide to predicting that something bad will happen.
But hereâs the catch: The helpful kind of fear, he says, is short-lived and rare. And it really only helps us avoid unexpected dangers like an assault, not the things some of us have feared for years, like earthquakes or heights or being trapped in enclosed spaces.
âReal fear is a signal intended to be very brief, a mere servant of intuition,â he writes. âBut though few would argue [with the notion] that extended, unanswered fear is destructive, millions choose to live there.â
De Becker distinguishes between useful fear (which manifests when weâre threatened) and useless fear. He points out that in a life-threatening crisis, fear is often the last thing we feel. Claire can attest to this. She has been held up at gunpoint, and sheâs been in car accidents. She stays calm and enters a state she calls âtaking-care-of-business mode.â Iâve had similar experiences after car accidents. The terrible thing has happened. You accept it immediately and launch into problem-solving. Fear is absent.
âThe very fact that you fear something is solid evidence that it is not happening,â de Becker notes in a neat turn of phrase. âIf it does happen, we stop fearing it and start to respond to it.â
So, whatâs happening to me when I startle awake at night, trembling, my heart pounding so hard that I mistake the sensation for my bed shaking in an earthquake?
According to de Becker, thatâs not authentic fear. Itâs worry. âWorry is the fear we manufacture,â he says.
When I read those lines, I frowned at the word âmanufacture.â I doubt the people I interviewed would say theyâve manufactured the burden of their fears.
But de Becker insists that remaining in a state of fear â like a car alarm that wonât shut off â is a choice, and it is more dangerous than we think, because it often leads to panic. It could even cause more harm than the fear itself.
Too bad fear and worry feel the exact same way in our bodies â like an existential threat.
This makes perfect sense on a physiological level, says journalist Jaimal Yogis, author of The Fear Project. That shot of cortisol that makes me gasp at night is a symptom of the classic fight-or-flight response that Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon first characterized in 1915. Weâve all experienced the rest of them: dilated pupils, tensed muscles, elevated heart rate.
These symptoms are governed by the amygdala, which has been protecting us since early hominids faced down saber-toothed cats and giant hyenas. Unfortunately, our amygdalas have not evolved with the times. I can set mine off reading a scary headline on my smartphone.
âBy the time you can say âIâm afraid,â your body is already well into the stress process,â Yogis writes. We have no medium setting built into our bodies for medium-sized scares. Itâs just an on/off switch. Thereâs no going back once youâve hit the panic button.
Over time, chronic anxiety can translate into devastating physical disorders like pulmonary disease and cardiovascular problems. It can disrupt the central nervous and endocrine systems, flooding the body with stress hormones like cortisol, which in turn contribute to all manner of issues with sleep, weight gain, diabetes and, yes, even teeth-clenching at night.
What of this idea, then, that we can choose a better way? De Becker offers three behavioral tips that underpin his philosophy of grappling with dreaded outcomes.
1) When you feel fear, listen.
2) When you donât feel fear, donât manufacture it.
3) If you feel yourself creating worry, explore and discover why.
âWorry will almost always buckle under a vigorous interrogation,â he writes triumphantly, and you can almost see the sheriffâs badge gleaming on his chest.
But the problem with all our fears is that they tell good stories. The plots may vary, but the core message is unsettling. Itâs about uncertainty, about our profound lack of control over our lives, on this planet, in this universe. Objectively speaking, potential disasters are everywhere â epidemics, asteroids, drunk drivers. They could strike us down at any time. Our nervous systems keep us aroused, sniffing the air for the next threat. And when you see it that way, it makes sense to stay vigilant for all of them.
âAnxiety, unlike real fear, is always caused by uncertainty,â says de Becker. When we canât predict something, we canât prepare for it. Weâre forced to admit thereâs nothing we can do. Welcome to the human condition.
Sometimes, our fears also depend greatly on context. The Chapman University Survey of American Fears offers a fascinating snapshot of just how much our fears and anxieties can change over time based on the media zeitgeist â and which ones abide, year after year.
In 2016, for instance, three of the 10 most prominent fears Americans cited were terrorism, gun control and Obamacare â all major themes of the presidential campaign.
In 2017, according to the survey, Americans widely feared getting into a nuclear confrontation with North Korea â at a time when the Trump administrationâs nuclear brinkmanship and âfire and furyâ threats were constantly in the news.
In 2018, for the first time, five of the top 10 fears were about destruction of our environment: contaminated drinking water; the pollution of oceans, lakes and rivers; bad air; the mass extinction of flora and fauna; and global warming. At least now I know I have company.
What I find most interesting, however, are the three universal fears that climb to the top of the chart every year and sit there, unmoving, like Danteâs shrieking harpies perched in the tortured wood. Two are closely connected: the twin fears of a loved one becoming seriously ill and of a loved one dying.
The third is the consistent number one thing we Americans fear: the behavior of corrupt government officials. Regardless of party affiliation, it seems people most fear government malfeasance.
That may seem odd, but to the worrier, all fears have their own logic. Mine are no exception. The Hayward Fault will definitely erupt . . . sometime. The climate crisis is here, and itâs going to get worse. And everyone dies of something, whether itâs cancer or a wrong turn off a steep mountain road.
How are we supposed to handle ourselves in the meantime? This is as much a question about living, Iâve come to realize, as it is about coping with lifeâs less appealing features: uncertainty and lack of control.
For me, catastrophizing â thinking about the worst possible thing that could happen and letting my mind deal with the consequences â offers a kind of perverse comfort, the promise of tussling with my fears and shoring up my resilience to suffering. The trouble is, I never actually escape the fear loop. Iâm never really reassured. And this minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour anxiety drip becomes its own eternal wellspring. Anyone who has a history of panic attacks will tell you that the fear of having one can be enough to set the next one off.
âIn terms of fear of heights or flying, what I actually fear is the feeling of panic, of being trapped and unable to get away, and how Iâll act and feel. Not so much crashing. So that you begin to fear the fear,â says Roger, the man who avoids flights and elevators. Fear will just metabolize itself after a while.
I sometimes think about my young self and wonder what happened to me. Why wasnât I more resilient? Did my parents not cultivate my independence? Iâve started wondering about how much our early development and even our personalities shape our viewpoint when it comes to risk and fear. When I was 11 and facing a night alone, I perceived those parentless hours as a harrowing ordeal. But some other kid might have turned them into an escapade, watching off-limits TV channels and gorging on junk food all night.
I am acquainted with people who go through life assuming that everything will be OK. And even when it wonât, they see no point in worrying about it, because thereâs nothing they can do to prevent bad things from happening. My grandmother, for instance, had a favorite expression: âWhat is, is.â She held tight to those words amid several life-changing setbacks, and lived to age 96. I envied her disposition, but I will never be like her. My version of resilience involves planning for the worst, even though I know itâs an endless iteration.
So Iâve been looking for a third way â a middle path. When someone recommended I read The Places That Scare You, a book of Tibetan Buddhist teachings by Pema Chödrön, I resisted at first, even though I have my own flailing meditation practice. I worried that she would tell me that fear is an illusion or something equally trite.
But unlike Gavin de Becker, Chödrön doesnât claim we can ditch our long-term fears. She says theyâre part of the human condition. Chödrön describes fear as something we learn early and often â itâs a product of circumstances that âharden usâ until we become resentful and afraid, she says.
We can ease fearâs grip by opening ourselves up, over time, to what hides beneath: tenderness and vulnerability. She says these two qualities could take us a lot further in life, but most of us have bricked them off and poured concrete over the wall for good measure.
âTapping into that shaky and tender place has a transformative effect,â she writes. âBeing compassionate enough to accommodate our own fears takes courage, of course, and it definitely feels counterintuitive. But itâs what we need to do.â
Rather than waiting for our fears to overtake us on their schedule, she suggests we acknowledge their shrieks and look up at the branches where they perch in our lives every day. That we get to know them.
Weâd rather do almost anything else. I know I would. I would rather numb myself watching YouTube far into the early morning hours than spend another night facing whichever fear asserts itself.
Chödrön says that tendency only makes things worse. âOpenness doesnât come from resisting our fears but in getting to know them well,â she writes.
I am trying. Sometimes when Iâm fearful now, I let myself acknowledge how it feels â Iâm scared. This is scary.
Other times, I try to bring some of my reporterâs persona to the moment and become curious â an approach Chödrön mentions in the book. Asking âWhatâs really happening here?â and âWhatâs under this feeling of panic?â can yield results. Itâs possible my presumption that I have a terminal disease has something to do with my deeper fear of failing at life, of not having mattered at all. Maybe my horror of earthquakes is tied to a distasteful reality Iâd rather avoid: the impermanence of this life Iâve built, and having it taken away from me.
I no longer shake my head at that little girl who sat on the edge of her parentsâ bed, sweating in too-much clothing, eyeing the panic button. She had a certain wisdom. Deep down, she sensed a truth her parents couldnât refute: Life is uncertain and few things are within our control.
Fear seemed like the best way to handle that news at the time. Iâm hoping itâs not too late to learn another way.
I also regularly give in to â and Iâm not sure Chödrön would approve of this â the exigencies my fears demand. Last year, I purchased two heavy, fully stocked earthquake-emergency backpacks. I stashed them in my car and my apartment. I bought two more for my parents for Christmas. (They were confused.) I also treated myself to a shiny new fire extinguisher, even though my old one was not expired.
The friends I talked to all choose to be out in the world despite their fears. But their lifestyles are limited, and the doâs and donâts are a process to be managed, constantly. Claire still likes to explore steep mountain roads, but only those with a barrier. She feels sick when sheâs obliged to drive over a long bridge, but she can handle it if someone else, like a bus driver, is at the wheel.
Morgan attributes her fear of heights to a childhood wound that never healed. Some things she simply wonât do, like roller coasters and downhill skiing. But sheâll climb a mountain for the beauty. Itâs hard to do â sometimes really hard â but thereâs simply no other way to enjoy the vista. When I asked her how she overcomes her fear, she gently corrected me.
âI have found of myself that a surrender practice is the best. Itâs not a conquering, or a getting over, or a getting away from,â she said. âAnd climbing a mountain is another form of that surrender practice.â
We can keep ducking our fears, but at a certain point they prevent us from seeing the view. I could leave Oakland, but I love my tranquil apartment, my neighborhood, the white-blossom magnolia tree in the courtyard, and the patio where I can contemplate its flowering while I meditate. So I choose this.
âWhat has life taught me? I am much less afraid than I ever was in my youth â of everything. That is a fact. At the same time, I feel more afraid than ever. And the two, I can assure you, are not opposed but inextricably linked,â writes Mary Ruefle.
Bad things will happen. To me and to the people I love. To the planet, and the creatures on it that donât have a voice. I know this to be true. But something good could happen, too: the type of alternative ending my mother tried to teach me to construct. With all my planning and preparing for the worst, I have little space to imagine an actual future. The version of the story in which I go on living â not because of my fears, but despite them.
Tags: Chapman University Survey of American Fears, climate crisis, Fear, Gavin de Becker, Julia Scott, Mary Ruefle, Notre Dame Magazine, Pema Chodron, The Gift of Fear, uncertainty
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Beyond #MeToo: Do Hormones Make the Man?
Friday, January 26th, 2018
Expressing Masculinity: It’s Complicated
Deep down, men and women have more in common than they differ — like 22 out of 23 pairs of chromosomes. But there’s one thing men have more of: testosterone. Conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan recently argued that higher levels of testosterone underscore natural sexual differences.
But when issues of gender identity, sexuality and personal choices are added to the mix, the question of expressing masculinities becomes even more complicated.
Julia Scott talked to two people who are exploring their manhood today with a little help from testosterone.
One is Eric Trefelner, a physician living on Montara, Calif. who recently experimented with injecting testosterone to bulk up for his workouts. But along the way, he started experiencing sensations he never expected to feel.
“I had more energy. I felt more powerful. I felt more sexual. I felt more ability to take risks,” Trefelner said.
Heâd always identified as a man, but he suddenly felt a sense of communion with men at the gym — a form of acceptance heâd missed out on as a kid.
“I used to always have these dreams where I was near men, they were in a group distant from me. I would feel so sad and wake up crying because I was separated from the world of men. … And all of a sudden I was feeling like, this is what it means to be a man!”
Was Trefelner discovering something that had lived inside him all along? Or was it a new reality? If was just the hormones, would he lose access to the special feeling if he stopped injecting?
Medical science had a specific answer to this question when testosterone was synthesized in 1935 and marketed as a male-enhancing sex hormone for straight men.
Meanwhile, gay men were made to take it to reverse their so-called “endocrine disturbance,” a completely made-up idea that if they took a “manly” hormone they would be less turned on by men (Though doctors noticed pretty quickly that it actually tended to enhance their attraction to other men).
So not only can you be a man without feeling like one, you can feel like a man without beginning life as one.
Addison Beaux, a writer who lives in Palo Alto, said that even as a 5-year-old, he identified as a boy and asked everyone to call him Bob.
Addison Beaux, a writer living in Palo Alto, California. (Addison Beaux)
But it wasn’t until he turned 40 that Beaux decided to make a physical, surgical transition to a male appearance. But taking testosterone was a less obvious decision, and Beaux gave it a lot of thought before deciding to do it. That’s because, unlike Trefelner, he wasnât shocked to feel like a man. He never perceived himself as anything but.
“As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been masculine more from the inside, so I’ve always felt that way and I still feel that way. Hormones do not necessarily make the man.”
The hormones were just the finishing touch. Beauxâs gender transition has taken a lifetime — and itâs still in process.
This story was part of a series on KQEDâs The California Report, Beyond #MeToo: Sex, Abuse and Power Through a California Lens .
Tags: #MeToo, KQED, The California Report
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Beyond #MeToo: Teaching Boys About Consent
Wednesday, January 24th, 2018
Coaching Boys Into Men
When is the right time to start teaching young boys about consent, boundaries and respect toward women?
A nationwide program called Coaching Boys Into Men trains school coaches to work with boys as young as 11, who are on their school’s athletic teams. Boys trust their coaches, and the conversations that ensue are designed to plant seeds that will help prevent abuse — and give young men the tools to speak up when they see something that’s not right.
Student athletes are often the leaders at their schools, and they can set the tone for the other students.
At Petaluma Junior High School, former student Danny Marzo and Athletic Director Zach Dee told us about how the program has led to changes on a personal level in the school culture overall.
This story was part of a series on KQED’s The California Report, Beyond #MeToo: Sex, Abuse and Power Through a California Lens .
Tags: #MeToo, Julia Scott, KQED, The California Report
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Heavyweight episode: “Julia”
Tuesday, November 8th, 2016
What happens when you go back and open the door to a time in your childhood that you tried to forget? Heavyweight host Jonathan Goldstein and I found out together.
Tags: bullies, bullying, Gimlet Media, Heavyweight, Jonathan Goldstein, Julia Scott, Montreal, podcast
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