anxiety Archives

Who turned off the juice?

Beloved reader, I spent 90 minutes on hold with Con Edison yesterday, getting my power turned back on after a billing contretemps.

The whole 90 minutes, my brain’s shrieking, “You’re having a panic attack!”

And maybe I was.

I could rattle off my diagnoses, but the simplest way to state it is that the ordinary setbacks of life fill me with dread. Always have. For over a decade, I self-medicated daily. And nightly. And afternoonly. In 1993, with help from others, I changed my life’s trajectory. But removing the booze didn’t make me “normal.” Step work healed some old wounds, but I’m still deeply anxious on my best days. And this was not shaping up to be one of them.

Look, if recovering from alcoholism during the Clinton years didn’t magically cure me of the rest of my problems, you can imagine what it feels like, being me during these dark days of fascist overreach. And, hey, maybe you don’t need to imagine. Maybe every blank unholy news day feels scary, wrong, and depressing to you, too. No need to apologize. Some days, just showing up takes courage.

Even the positive things, like the kick-ass job my daughter did applying to colleges, come with deluxe boxed sets of anxiety for folks like me. Then factor in an IRS audit, medical debt, and various friend and family traumas unrelated to the ongoing assault on decency.

Got all that?

Now, take away my electricity (and therefore my internet access), sit me down in the dark beside an iPhone with a low battery (Will it die before I finish this call? I can’t charge it, I have no electricity!), and tell me to get on the phone with the utility company that just shut off my power.

You may expect me to show up, but not to glide serenely through.

Look, I wasn’t abducted by ICE or fired without cause after years of dedicated civic service. But, for Mrs Zeldman’s little boy, loss of light and power and 90 minutes of antipatterns are grounds enough for a panic attack. (Besides, nobody tells you it will take 90 minutes to speak for 60 seconds to a human being who’ll take your debit card number over the phone. It might have taken longer. In another timeline, I might still be on hold.)

Yes, they have a “pay your bill online” website. No, it doesn’t work on my phone. Yes, it semi-works on my desktop. But a desktop needs electricity to run and to access the web. And they had cut off my electricity. It was call them or stay without power.

(Footnote: Later, when everything was resolved, I discovered that their website also doesn’t work. I use Google’s Auth app for two-factor ID, which signs me in. But when I try to see my bill, the Con Ed website asks me to sign in again, and rejects the two-factor ID. Instead it needs to send a different code to my cell phone. Why a different code? Why not the Auth code? I assume because the developers worked in siloes and were forbidden to speak to each other when creating the website. So I give it permission to send the code to my phone, and then it never sends it. I tried four times. And yes, they had my correct phone number on file. It also says, if it keeps failing to send a code to my phone (so they obviously know they have a problem), I can have it send a code to my email address instead. Except that there is no affordance to do so. It’s like if I said you could win a prize by touching this sentence. Heckuva UX, Brownie. It’s almost like they want you to have to call their overworked, underpaid, understaffed support staff. Because you can’t use their site. To rub it in, every five minutes the bot that thanks you for being a customer is interrupted by a bot that tells you to use their website to pay your bill online, which, as I just explained, you can’t. But I digress.)

As the Muzak ground on, during the better moments when I was able to focus on breathing, I pushed down the panic by telling myself I’d take a personal day as soon as the call ended and my lights came back on. Why take a personal day? I love my job. But I honestly didn’t think I’d be able to put in a day’s work after 5400 seconds of “your call is important to us, please stay on the line.” I reckoned I’d be wrecked.

But here’s the thing, and it’s why I bothered tell you this: the instant the lights came back on, I was fine. Utterly, totally, calmly, and completely.

More than that: when the modem connected and told the router the news, I pounced on my desk and got back to work, a happy cog. As if I hadn’t just spent 90 minutes in the stench of my own fear and gloom.

Am I becoming slightly more resilient with age?

I DREAMED I’d boarded a ship that was slowly making its way to an exotic vacation locale, somewhere on the other side of the world. I’d bought a giant new steamer trunk for the voyage. I thought I’d have a cabin to myself, but, below decks, the ship was like a passenger train, with row upon row of seats. Voyagers had to sleep sitting up in these seats, and we had to hunt for a vacant seat. At first, I had a row of seats to myself, but I realized that the remaining seats would soon be filled, and perhaps by a group of noisy, aggressive people who knew each other. I’d be the odd one out. So I moved into an occupied row, next to a Japanese passenger who was already half-asleep, his hat pulled halfway down over his eyes, and was traveling by himself, like me. My arrival woke him, slightly, and he nodded to acknowledge me, then closed his eyes again. I realized, as I settled in beside him, each of us slouching away from the other for privacy, that I did not have my trunk with me, and did not know where it was being held. I couldn’t even be sure that it had made it onto the ship.

The ship docked at an American city for a quick break. It was a quaint old town, with buildings that seemed to date back hundreds of years, including a picturesque ruin or two. The dock was filled with similarly set-up cruise ships; this was obviously a major rest stop for the seaborne travel industry. The dock was infinite, an endless perspective of identical cruise ships, each disgorging thousands of passengers who merged into an oncoming throng. So many were coming that they raised the dust before them. I wondered how the quaint old town could possibly accommodate so many travelers.

I had wandered into the city for many blocks when I realized I didn’t have my wallet with me—it was packed in the trunk, presumably back on the ship. I came to this sudden understanding while trying to complete a trivial purchase at the register of a small store.

“I came on a ship, my wallet’s on board, perhaps we could call the ship and have them read you my credit card number?” I suggested to the frowning cashier.

“Which ship?”

I didn’t know.

“Where’s she headed?”

I suddenly didn’t know that, either.

“Look, I’m on a three-week cruise,” I said. “I don’t remember where I’m going. I don’t know why my family’s not with me.”

The embarrassing admission did little to improve my standing with the cashier.

Cross-fade.

I had given up and was trudging back to the ship when I realized I did not know where it was docked. I asked townspeople where the dock was located, but they frowned at me as if I were mentally ill or horribly disfigured, and scurried quickly away.

So I wandered, through blocks that resembled Dresden after the Allied bombardment, with no adults to be seen—only underfed, half-naked children, who darted past like hurrying ghosts, presumably scouring the bombed-out buildings for scraps of food or dry places to shelter.

Dissolve.

After hours of walking at random, I began to pass buildings that looked vaguely familiar, and thought that I must be approaching the dock again. I could hear distant gulls, their cries half-muted and oddly modulated as they echoed off the broken buildings of the old city.

If I came out upon the dock, would I remember which ship I’d been traveling on?

What was my name? Could my luggage identify me if I knew where the crew had stowed it? Could I describe my luggage to help them search for it? No, it was new and I was unfamiliar with its design. I couldn’t even remember what I’d packed, except for a faint impression that I’d stowed the contents in many small boxes inside the trunk.

But to even reach that impasse of being unable to describe my luggage, I’d have to first identify my ship, and they all looked the same. My ship might already have left. And I didn’t even know its destination.

7 June 2021