When I was 20, it once took me 2,5 days to get dressed and go out to buy something to eat. I was paralyzed with anxiety, buttoning my blouse for hours, eyeing the distance from my foot to a shoe but unable to bridge it. Today I know this is called anxiety and what causes it but back then all I knew is that I wanted not to be that way.
Stuck at home and unable to leave, I’d turn on the TV, and there I saw people who had what I so wanted. These were characters in Latin American soaps, and they clearly relished human contact. They chattered up a storm, emoting like little factories that manufactured feelings, and displayed these wares openly. I realized that I needed to find these people and learn how they did it. Of course, to figure out such a complicated phenomenon you needed to study it scientifically. This is how the idea of getting a PhD in Hispanic Studies was born. It couldn’t have begun to occur to me that it would end up meaning I’d do literary criticism.
This was, of course, an utterly naive, childish plan. But it worked. In my studies, I discovered that one can’t redo one’s nervous system to become emotionally less heavy than one’s Slavic physiology allows. But you can imitate the behaviors that a more easily triggered nervous system produces. And the results of the imitation are almost as good as the real thing. Today, nobody who didn’t meet me back then believes my stories of clinical shyness. This was a crushing issue and I solved it. Not through medication or even therapy but by way of an inventive plan that enriched me intellectually and ultimately gave me a good income.
It’s also a very weird story that I rarely share because every aspect of it sounds very nuts.
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