Ride It Out
Robin Romm
I come from a long line of worriers. It’s in my blood. My grandfather Sam fretted ceaselessly—about money, security, status, the future of his only granddaughter. When I quit my government job (with its regular hours, pay raises, and benefits) to pursue a creative writing degree, Sam, who’d lived through the Depression, clutched at his balding head and wailed. When I broke up with my Jewish boyfriend before he went to law school, Sam nearly collapsed in grief. When I decided to buy a one-hundred-year-old house, he howled, “What about the roof? What will you do about the roof?”
In truth, that stressed me out, too. I didn’t want to end up like Sam, though—who, despite all his worry (meant, presumably, to keep crisis at bay), was never able to find peace. So I always did my best to push my anxieties aside. But a few years ago, after my mother died and I lost a big job, anxiety nearly overwhelmed me. I tried exercise, relaxation tapes, therapy, time with my dog, time with friends, time with Xanax. They helped, but on my worst days, I found myself clinging to the life raft of worry.
Then I was accepted to an artist’s residency that happened to be at a dude ranch in Wyoming. I had gone horseback riding a few times as a kid, though never with any seriousness. (“Horses!” I can imagine Sam screeching, shaking his head so hard bits of spittle would fly. “You would have to be out of your mind!”) But after two weeks of watching the horses and wishing the artists were allowed to ride them, I managed to beg my way onto one. Never mind that it was only a trail ride and I had terrible form (I slumped in the saddle and threw my weight around awkwardly)—I felt something stirring in my gut. On horseback, the stronghold of my worries loosened, because I was moving so fast I couldn’t think. I could only feel: the animal running, the sky touching my face, the wind in my hair. It felt like a release. It felt right.
When I returned home to Oregon after the residency, I found a barn and a trainer (upbeat, not at all anxious), and before long, I was cantering bareback and learning to train troubled horses. My favorite is a retired Thoroughbred named Jake, a chestnut gelding with liquid Disney eyes. Jake can move fast, and when he does, I feel myself slide into myself, like a penny into a slot. I lean in and that horse keeps going, faster and faster, until he’s practically flying and I am totally unthinking. I am simply there.
“You are going to break your neck!” I can hear Sam warn. But I can’t worry about that. Worry isn’t safe. In fact, at the barn, where horses spook at the first signs of trouble, worry shows itself for what it is: a liability. Horses value calm above all other virtues. I’m new to their world, but it turns out I share their values.
A Circle of Arms
Tracy Young
After our mother died, my younger sisters and I began what would become a tradition: an annual get-together, just the four of us, no spouses, no kids. It would be a chance, although no one ever came out and said as much, to talk about what had happened. And we did, haltingly, spiking the conversation with the edgy jokes that are our family vernacular. But the conversation was less important than the gathering itself, the warm huddle of beings who had known one another their entire lives. Eventually, our reunions became less an observance and more an adventure. We started taking trips—most recently to a spa in Vermont, where we also celebrated my sister Susie’s birthday.
It was a happy occasion and we indulged ourselves accordingly, springing for exotic forms of massage, hiking in the woods, and eating our favorite candy. In real life, we were all middle-aged women; here we were just, well, sisters. Laughing, goofing on waiters, dishing about old friends, until the conversation turned, inevitably, to each of our unhappy adolescences.
I was telling my sisters about a time—I must have been around twenty, living at home between reckless bouts of the sixties—when I was freaking out over something. What? I have no clear recollection except that of feeling lost. But I do remember trailing my mother into the bathroom and sitting on the toilet seat to watch her as she put on her lipstick with her little collapsible brush, preparing to go out for the evening. I felt about four years old. And I remember wishing—the voice so loud in my head I was sure she could hear it—that she would come over and put her arms around me. I didn’t say so. Our family was not expressive in that way. And at that particular moment, either I didn’t think my mother would understand or I didn’t want to tell her what was wrong. I wanted something words could not express. I just wanted a hug.
“Oh my God,” said Susie. “That’s exactly what Robin said to me.” Robin, her daughter, was now about the age I’d been back then and had been fighting her own demons—until somehow she seemed to right herself, like a small skiff in a big sea. “She said that when she was in trouble, what she really needed was for me to give her a hug,” Susie said. “And I had no idea.”
“Well,” I said, “at least you know now.”
There was more to say. About missed opportunities and our strange broken legacy. But instead we ate some strawberry Twizzlers and started a hilarious pantomime, a sign language for freaking out (fingers clenched as if holding onto a cliff—the fewer the fingers, the more dire the freak-out) and a sign (arms encircled, then a little wave) that meant, I’m sending you a hug.
During the eight thousand years I spent in therapy learning to express the feelings that were forbidden in my family, there were days when I sat on the couch shredding Kleenex while my therapist looked at me with compassion and I wished I could crawl into her lap. At times like these, it struck me that psychotherapy was too much work and too little comfort. Naming my most primitive feelings seemed a gratingly cerebral approach to what were almost physical sensations. Words, no matter how well-intentioned, bounced off me like hail.
None of which is to say that I harbor many illusions that a hug could have changed my life. Or anyone’s. (I grew up near a large Italian clan to whose house I would flee when I craved the noise and heat of another kind of family, where the mother, a former masseuse, was a hugger without peer. They all turned out to be crazy as bedbugs.) But in the moment, I have no doubt, a hug can ground you. Pull you back from the edge. Or out of your head. Into a circle of arms and the sturdy comforts of the present.
“Language is a skin,” wrote Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse. And so is skin a language. It speaks when words fail us and communicates to parts of ourselves that are beyond the reach of words. The simple fact is that we are, first and foremost, mammals. We thrive on touch. Grooming is part of our social behavior, which may explain the relationship we have with our hairdressers. (A friend once asked her shrink, “Is it a love problem or a hair problem?” “I think it’s a hair problem,” he said.)
I’m still easily put off by indiscriminate hugging. But I can be moved to tears watching baseball, when the batter rounds third, races down the baseline, and the entire dugout charges out to embrace him. Granted, it’s an occasion of triumph, not tragedy. But the message is the same. You’re one of us! it says. You’re home.
Copyright © 2017 by Hearst Communications, Inc.
