Fever Dreams

My anxiety climbs in strange ways.

For example, during everything that’s happened so far with the Coronavirus, and despite the fact that I’m in my late 50s, I’ve never really feared for myself, at least not that I’ve been consciously aware of.

My disquiet expresses itself mainly at the micro level. When I’m anxious, I obsess much more about the break-up of my family or my relationships with my siblings or the limited level of my social life–or even about the state of my writing–than I do about any impending apocalypse. But that doesn’t mean those closer interactions are actually causing my distress.

This occurs, I think, because growing up, the greatest sources of turmoil were always the ones closest to me: my parents’ fraught relationship, the long-running cover and overt warfare among my brothers and me, the drama of schoolyard frenemyships and unrequited adolescent crushes. Oh, I was always…