L’appel du vide

L’appel du vide

by Telaina Eriksen

Porte-Fenetre a Collioure by Matisse

I look to the headlines
I look to the screen
And I could not find
One breath of peace
-May Erlewine, “The Land of the Free”

                                                                

This morning, I walked outside with my dog Cordelia. I wasn’t fully awake, but I noticed the quality of light had changed. February in Michigan is traditionally bitter, as if winter has gathered up all of her vitriol and deposited it in the shortest month of the year. But today, the sun was trying. The wind was cold, but the snow and ice beneath my heavy boots was breaking up, a dissonant tuning before a spring overture many weeks away.
        The Michigan air was cold and clear, and I could hear the drone of freeway traffic in the distance. Cordelia sniffed at the base of a tree where a squirrel had disappeared a few minutes ago. I looked through the trees, hoping for a glimpse of the mother and daughter white-tailed deer that have been my curious friends since fall. I’ve seen them several times this winter, pawing for acorns and eating bark off our smaller trees.
        I have been profoundly grateful lately for the moments when my mind stops and I focus on only where I am, what I’m doing, and what is going on around me.

                                                                

        I bought Cordelia, a little Shetland sheepdog, from a farmer near my nephew’s farm. Cordelia flinched at every sound, had worms, was sleeping in a barn with 12 other dogs, fighting for her cheap kibble. She was terrified of being touched by anyone and would run and hide. If cornered, she would cower. I knew I should “adopt not shop,” but this six-month-old puppy needed a home, and she needed a quiet home without loud voices or young children. I knew Cordelia was going to be a lot of work, but I understood her immediately. I’ve been terrified of everything my entire life as well.
        I also wanted another Shetland sheepdog. My previous dog, Sprite, who was also a Sheltie, had died the month before I got Cordelia. I had Sprite for ten years. I inherited Sprite after my sister Tonya committed suicide. A breed of a dog shouldn’t necessarily be a point of connection to your dead sister, but we all have left what we have left.

                                                                

Am I hard-wired for anxiety? Or has it been built link by link, experience by experience, by my strange and eventful life?

                                                                

Forty-six years ago, I had a tonsillectomy. About 33 child patients out of every 16,000 tonsillectomies have a curved internal carotid artery, placing this crucial artery in an atypical position in their anatomy, a place where doctors never suspect it would be. I had my tonsillectomy in the 1970s, at a rural hospital in southern Michigan, and the doctor either nicked the carotid artery during my surgery, or it collapsed after the mucosa that had helped support it had been removed in the course of the tonsillectomy. The carotid artery travels up through your neck, by your throat and nose, and goes from there straight up to your brain, and it carries a lot of blood.
        During the multiple hemorrhages I had while the doctors were trying to figure out what was wrong with me, I would open up my mouth and blood would pour out. Blood would spout out of my nose. I would hack up huge clots from the back of my throat where blood meant for my brain had pooled. During one hemorrhage, my terrified, intelligent but uneducated father (he had dropped out of school in the 8th grade) looked at me and said, “Stop it. Stop bleeding.” I was so used to doing what my father said that this particular hemorrhage eased after he demanded it do so. At the time my obedience (and the obedience of my body) didn’t seem remarkable, but now I realize it was.
         I missed 40 or 50 days of third grade and almost died multiple times until a surgeon at the University of Michigan Mott’s Children’s Hospital saved my life by repairing my curved and strangely situated carotid artery.
        I had a birthday/homecoming party when I was finally released from the hospital, but the police came during the party and arrested both of my brothers. Was it during it? Or shortly after? And wasn’t it just a few days after that that my dog, Lassie, was killed by a car? The timeline feels close to me—each event popping up—being released from the hospital (my neck now looking like a first-year med student’s poor attempt at an autopsy), a party to celebrate me and my birthday, the police coming for my brothers, my dog dying.
        My brothers had broken into a train and had stolen some stuff when I was in the hospital. Or maybe one of my brothers broke into the train and my other brother hid the stuff he stole? We don’t talk about it, so I don’t remember exactly, and it was so many years ago. My mother told me they were just so upset that I was in the hospital dying, that they lost their good sense.
        A nine-year-old’s interpretation of this statement—it’s your fault your brothers did this and are now going to jail. And go to jail they did. Because they had jobs, and this was their first offense, they avoided a straight-time sentence, but went to jail every weekend for what felt like forever.
        Another lesson from this series of events: when something special is planned for me, bad things result.

                                                                

It’s funny to think about now, but I had no idea I had anxiety until I was almost 40. I thought it was natural. I thought dread, racing thoughts, planning for worst-case-scenarios, and constant worry were just how everyone felt. All the time.

                                                                

There are multiple theories about why Americans are experiencing more anxiety—our smart phones, streaming services, social media, a global economy, catastrophic global events, senseless violence, and a global news network to report them all to us. Other theories include capitalism, our sedentary lifestyles, and the fact we live most of our lives inside now. That one really resonates with me. We’re not meant to be inside so much. It was part of the reason I bought Cordelia less than a month after Sprite died. A dog forces you outside, even when the weather is bad. Even when you’re tired. Even when you don’t want to go outside, your dog wants to. And I have never been able to bear the look of disappointment on her little face if we don’t go outside at our normal times.
        I have seen amazing things because of Cordelia—things I never would have seen if she didn’t force me outside several times a day. I’ve seen a pileated woodpecker, as big as a crow, tearing huge strips off of a dead tree, looking for insects, and in the process making a nice hidey-hole for a duck, bat, or owl. I’ve seen countless white-tailed deer, skunks, squirrels (black, brown, silver, gray, and even one brown one with a silver-gray tail), possums, raccoons, and rabbits. I’ve seen white clouds moving briskly in a black-night sky, red sunsets, and pink sunrises. I’ve seen a marsh hawk swoop down and grab a mouse not 20 feet away from us. I’ve seen hawks and owls ponder if Cordelia is too big for them, and thankfully (so far) the answer has always been yes. I’ve heard sassy blue jays in raucous territory disputes. I’ve seen moons that looked photoshopped, waxing, waning, full, hidden, partially cloud-covered, clear, and bright. I’ve seen a homeless man riding his bicycle with a boom box bungie-corded to the back, Metallica echoing down our quiet street at 10 o’clock at night, while his old Converse sneakers pedaled furiously to a rhythm I could not discern.
        I’ve seen a single white rose blooming in November. In Michigan. It sounds implausible, but it’s true.

                                                                

I was an earnest mother. Even through anxiety and depression and grief and loss, there was not a day I did not get out of bed. Every day, I packed my children’s lunches and, in their younger years, checked their backpacks. I drove them to school. I took them to haircuts, doctor’s appointments, extracurricular activities, church, the orthodontist, music lessons, and playdates. I went to therapy, striving not to pass down my anxiety, my anger, my regret, my patterns of behavior. I held my functioning in front of me, like a shield. I was going to be a successful parent. I wasn’t going to fail.
        I read to them before bed. Each night I would braid my daughter’s long hair so it wouldn’t tangle in her sleep. I made dinner 80 or 90 percent of the time. We sat down at the table, even if it was Stouffer’s mac and cheese and frozen garlic bread and a bag of Dole prepackaged salad, and we ate and talked about our days. I read parenting books, child development books, psychology books.
        I know my anxiety leaked out. I know I was desperate for them to succeed and be happy and excel, and I compared myself to other mothers, and them to other children. I used responsibility, that character trait that had been thrust upon me as a child, to strap mothering on like a heavy backpack, and I carried it, never dropping it, for 22 years. I didn’t stop to think I might need rest. Or to take care of myself. Or to think that maybe my children shouldn’t be the reason that I was living. Instead, I thought if I just tried hard enough, none of the worst-case scenarios that played themselves over and over again in my mind would ever happen.
        If you are an adult, living in this world, reading this, you already know that all of my efforts, all of my worry, all of my earnestness, and all of my devotion, did not protect my children.

                                                                

I began seeing my current therapist after my 25-year-old daughter had a psychotic break and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. My husband and I had already journeyed with my daughter through autism spectrum disorder, depression, anxiety, anemia, and celiac disease. When she texted her father to stop moving her dish brush in her apartment, when she punctured my husband’s tires and changed phone numbers to stop him from “tracking” her, my husband and I didn’t know what was happening.
        I took her to a doctor’s appointment and then for lab tests, and she started sobbing and told me she “couldn’t do this anymore.” I asked her question after question, and finally she revealed her psychosis—her father was poisoning her, and he was a crime boss. I felt like I was being punched in the face with this delusional reality she’d been experiencing for months. I don’t know how I managed to drive her to the ER. Or call my husband to come home from work. I don’t remember. I remember that I felt responsible—responsible because I hadn’t understood she was experiencing psychosis, responsible that my obviously flawed genetics had led to this, and responsible because good mothers obviously do not have children with schizophrenia.
        My anxiety reached its zenith at this point. What kind of person was I that my child had schizophrenia? And if this could happen to my daughter, what other horrors did the passing of time hold for me?

                                                                

Cordelia is still anxious and nervous. She will be five in June and has matured into a striking, athletic dog. She doesn’t like anyone but me. She will tolerate my sister Tara and my husband as “dog sitters” when I am out of town. She flinches when anything falls, and she scurries away from sudden noises. She has both a herding dog’s natural shyness and skittishness, combined with little-dog anxiousness.
        Even given all of her neuroses, she has appointed herself my protector. She doesn’t like anyone to touch me or have loud voices around me (singing is particularly suspicious). If she hears a door slam or anyone talking outside, she will bark until I open the door and either let the person in or show her no one is there. When we’re alone and the house is quiet, she will roll over on her back and let me rub her belly, and then she becomes limp and heavy with sleep in her faux fur bed. Her constant vigilance exhausts her.

                                                                

My daughter called me from the psychiatric hospital and asked me to please run her dishwasher and take the trash out at her apartment so it wouldn’t smell when she got back. I let myself into her apartment, and while I was cleaning her kitchen counters and loading the dishwasher, I found a small piece of notebook paper that said, “I’m probably going to end up killing my parents, and then myself.”
        That night I drank a half a bottle of wine, took 30 milligrams of melatonin and two Motrin PMs, just to try to get a few hours of sleep.

                                                                

Today when I took Cordelia out, everything had frozen again, so yesterday’s melty soft snow was now slick ice. Cordelia struggled to poop, her little feet spreading out like a duck’s as she tried to squat. After she finished, she wanted to walk more, sniffing, and smelling. I took slow deep breaths while she interrogated bases of trees and bushes, skittering on the ice, but seeming to enjoy this, our quiet time in the morning. Above us, a lone Canadian goose honked, flying north, perhaps trying to catch up with its gaggle. I thought about how scary it would be to lose your family and friends on a long journey. Was the goose above me scared, or did it know exactly what it was doing? I just need to fly a little faster and I will catch right up. Or, where did they go? Where did they go? I’m all alone.

                                                                

I read that the French have a saying–L’appel du vide, the call of the void. It’s that urge that many of us have had to step or jump off a cliff or building when we’re up high, or to suddenly swerve our cars into the oncoming path of a semi or train while we’re driving. Some studies say that half of all people have experienced “high place phenomenon.” According to livescience.com, people experience the call of the void as kind of a built-in safety measure. People hear the call and their brain responds, yes, you could jump but you’re not going to, and we better move back from this edge, just to be safe. However, people who are depressed or anxious seem to experience l’appel du vide more frequently. (High place phenomena has not been studied a lot, so the sample sizes aren’t large enough for sweeping assumptions.) But the call of the void is so common it isn’t considered psychopathology.
        Reading that people with depression and anxiety might experience l’appel du vide more frequently reminded me of Stephen King’s novel Firestarter, which I was obsessed with as a teenager. Andy, Charlie’s dad, has the ability to “push” people, influence them with his thoughts. In most people this influence was straightforward, but in some people, people with troubled minds, his push would ricochet around in their brains, until they couldn’t bear it anymore and would self-destruct. Maybe l’appel du vide is like that, too. In some people, the call of the void starts to ricochet.

                                                                

When I was in my 30s, my sister Tonya and I were on a road trip together, sharing cheap hotel rooms as we drove around the Black Hills, to Devil’s Tower, Mt. Rushmore, and Crazy Horse, caravanning with some of her coworkers. One night, when our conversation turned more serious, she told me that when she was an undergrad at Michigan State University, she would sometimes take the stairs up to the top of Hubbard Hall and look down over the edge of the roof for a long time. Hubbard Hall is the tallest building in East Lansing and offers picturesque views of the rest of campus, as well as unencumbered sunset viewing. But Tonya didn’t walk up those stairs for the views. She was thinking about jumping from the roof. I didn’t know enough to ask her to describe what she was feeling at that time—was it depression even then? Wanting the pain of life to be over? Or did she want to be free in the air, just once in her life, even knowing the consequences of that freedom?
        So, you see, I knew my sister had contemplated suicide before she committed suicide. But I hope you understand this—when someone has resisted l’appel du vide over and over again throughout their lives—you think they will continue to resist it forever.

                                                                

Many things I have read recommend meditation for anxiety. I’ve been meditating off and on for two or three years now. In the summer of 2021, before my daughter was hospitalized, when I knew something was wrong but not how much was wrong, as I was meditating, my eyes closed, I had one of those rare moments when you’re just existing, no thoughts, not dwelling on your identity, your pain, your past or future. I began to cry, like something was breaking up inside me from a hard and relentless freeze, and I heard a voice? I had a thought? It was clear, like someone speaking to me. The voice/thought was this: Tonya would never want you to feel guilty and responsible for her death. She only wanted you to be happy, and she would never want to cause you pain. Why are you carrying so much guilt about a decision she made?
        That thought changed my life and allowed me to release so much guilt and pain surrounding my sister’s death. (Could I have done something to stop her from taking those pills?) Maybe the universe knew I could never endure my daughter’s serious mental illness and carry the burden of my sister’s suicide at the same time.

                                                                

February 13th, a Lansing man walked into Michigan State University’s Berkey Hall, a building where I have taught at least 14 or 15 classes, and where I attended English classes myself when I was an MSU student. He killed two students and wounded five others, and then walked over to the MSU Union, where I’ve used the bathroom, had coffee and ice cream, met students to go over portfolios, and even attended one of my best friend’s wedding receptions, and he killed another student. At one point in time, he was .3 miles from our home as he crossed from campus to East Lansing, and back into Lansing, where a man saw him walking by on his security cameras and called the police. As the police approached him, the gunman shot and killed himself.
        For over four hours, we received text messages to shelter in place in our homes. Sirens wailed and helicopters flew over our house as hundreds of police officers tried to secure a campus which spans 5,000 contiguous acres and enrolls almost 40,000 undergraduate students. I couldn’t take Cordelia on her before-bedtime walk and was even scared to let her out in the yard, fearing everything from the gunman himself to police officers or vigilantes thinking they saw him and firing at anything that moved.
        I lay in bed that night with my husband, unable to fall asleep. I thought of our son, in Chicago, who graduated from college just last year. I thought of our daughter on the farm in Ohio where she is receiving treatment for her schizophrenia. I imagined a gunman opening fire on the L’s Red Line, which my son uses almost every day. I imagined a gunman walking up the farm’s unsecured driveway, killing the cattle in the fields, and then making his way to my daughter’s cottage and opening fire. I thought of the parents who got the phone calls that their child had been in class or at the school’s union, and was now dead, or critically wounded. How would those parents get up tomorrow? How would they go on?
         My breath was quick and shallow. My head throbbed. My heart raced. I couldn’t figure out if it was my body telling my mind or my mind telling my body that there was danger all around me.

                                                                

For many people, there is no successful long-term medical intervention for anxiety because medications help the symptoms of anxiety, not the anxiety itself. There are some anti-depressants which can help, but they also have side effects like weight gain and decreased sexual drive or functioning. The benzos (Xanax, Ativan, etc.) should only be used for short periods of time and can be addictive. Marijuana helps many people manage their anxiety, but unfortunately, for some people (like me) it makes them more anxious.
        The long-term pillars of coping with anxiety are therapy (desensitization and learning skills and modes of thinking to re-channel anxious thoughts), nutrition, exercise, and breathwork or meditation. None of these pillars are quick and easy fixes. I can attest to that. But I can also attest to their effectiveness if you keep using them year after year after year.
        Anxiety is both rational and irrational. You can’t think your way out of it. Is the world a dangerous place? Yes. Do bad things happen? Every day. Is the world a joyous place? Yes. Do wonderful things happen? Every day.
        Things like yoga, meditation, exercise, and breath work help because those things connect you to your body, and to the present moment. Being connected to the present moment, I have some sort of foothold (toehold?) on my anxiety.
        I don’t drink coffee anymore.
        I avoid daily news and instead listen to weekly roundups. When I plug into the 24-hour news cycle for some event (like the MSU shooting), I can feel my chest tighten, and the racing thoughts start.
        I let some friendships and relationships go that were too taxing.
        I go to individual therapy, couples counseling with my husband, and family therapy with my daughter.
        I meditate daily wearing a Bluetooth sleep mask. Yoga Nidrā has been most helpful. I especially like Jeremy Wolf’s meditations. His website says, “At the deepest level of Yoga Nidrā, awareness of the external world, one’s body and all of the mental stories that comprise one’s sense of self is completely absent. The mind becomes still and quiet, as one rests in the silent space of awareness. Here one can recognize their essential nature as the very source of peace, limitless and free.”
         Anxiety offers me the illusion of control—if I worry about something, I’m expecting it to happen, and if I’m expecting it to happen, I can somehow prepare for it physically, emotionally, even spiritually. The ironic part is that I never imagined at almost nine years old that my “routine” surgery would leave me literally scarred for life. Or that my brothers would rob a train while I was in the hospital. I never had anxiety that my sister might kill herself. I never imagined that my daughter would be diagnosed with schizophrenia. And I did not expect February 13th would be different from any other day at Michigan State University.
        Even things that I had imagined, like my parents dying, happened so differently and strangely that my anxiety in no way prepared me for those events. Hence the illusion of control. My level of anxiety offers few benefits to me. It’s just suffering. And I don’t want to suffer anymore.

                                                                

Another ice storm last night. Local schools were canceled. The victims of the shooting are still in the hospital. Students are back on Michigan State’s campus, doing the best that they can to heal and recover from being barricaded in their rooms, processing that they were just at Berkey earlier that fateful day, or they had just walked out of the Union 15 minutes before the shooter stepped in, or the students who died or were injured were familiar faces in their classes.

                                                                

Cordelia had to go to the vet and get her teeth cleaned today, and I felt anxious about her going under, her little body anesthetized as our vet cleaned her teeth and gum line, and looked for cracks, breaks, and infections. The vet tech warned Cordelia might be lethargic or woozy after the procedure, but instead she ran loops in the yard, stopping only to sniff at the place the skunks scurry under the fence. She skidded on the ice but still her joy to be out of a strange, scary environment and back with me, and back outside, was palpable.
        The sleet was still coming down when I called for Cordelia to come in. I checked in with myself. I was okay. Breath even. Hands steady.
        Cordelia stepped into the mudroom, shaking the ice and water out of her fur. I reached for an old towel to dry her off, enjoying the softness of her fur, her relief to be home (and my relief to have her home), the happiness in her eyes.

                                                                

An alternate theory about l’appel du vide—maybe it’s not really about the desire to fling yourself into the void. Maybe that feeling is the stark reminder, that each day is the void. Our death urge when we are up high only echoes our true reality every day. We step off into a black, vast unknown every morning, and pray to arrive safely back on the ground each night.