By Mark Shrayber
“Why are you breathing like that?” the yoga instructor asks me. “Do you need to step outside? Because that’s okay! Anything that will make you feel comfortable is okay!” She’s leaning over me as I hyperventilate through the gentle movement of lying on my back and doing absolutely nothing. I came here to relax, and five minutes into the class, I’m having an anxiety attack.
This is not the first time I’ve tried yoga, and it’s probably not the last time that I’ll consider picking it up. Everyone loves it: my friends, my colleagues, even my partner, who is also on his back next to me, his eyes closed in an effort to look relaxed. The rest of his face wears an expression of abject horror at my disruption of everyone’s meditation.
Being an anxious person is difficult in general, but it’s especially difficult when everyone around you is laid-back and you live in a city known for its relaxed attitude and casual atmosphere. No one else I know in SF – and I’ve been neurotic enough to poll others – feels like the bottom has dropped out when they’re late or sits on a stopped Muni with their eyes shut tight, imagining they’re pushing the train forward through sheer force of will. (If anyone’s wondering, airplanes are even worse.)
I’ve tried everything to curb my anxiety, from homeopathic remedies (no effect) to hypnotherapy (no effect) to psychotropic medications (involving mostly unpleasant side effects). My therapist suggests that my anxiety comes from a deep primal place; I think it comes from growing up with parents who taught only by worst-case scenario.
My family immigrated to America when I was seven, and my mother took over instructing us about a city she knew nothing about except the fact that it was foreign and vaguely dangerous. “This is Haight,” my mother would say in her thick Russian accent every time we’d drive through the neighborhood. As soon as we’d pass by the McDonald’s on Waller Street, a switch would be flipped and she’d start the same lecture. “Haight rhyme with word ‘hate’ because this where all murders live. Bad children who don’t listen parents live here on street and train to be homeless.”
She had a similar speech for almost every neighborhood. “This is Bayview. Get down on floor when I tell you so you not get shot.” Or “In Castro everyone has sex disease. You never visit.” Only the Sunset – and even then, only the Outer Sunset – was safe.
As an adult I remember these words of advice and still feel a tinge of anxiety as I enter forbidden zones of the city. I still worry as I get on a bus – “Bus very easy place to kidnap child and sell organs” – or take a walk along the beach. And every time I try to relax, I think of all the horrible things that could possibly be happening inside my body. “Pain in chest?” my mother asked when I was nine, after forcing me to run around the block three times to lose weight. “Is probably heart attack. Let’s go home.”
This type of anxiety does not lend itself well to life in San Francisco. Here people take their time walking and stop on the street to inhale the smell of coffee (and kind bud). Everyone understands that public transit is slow. When you’re sick, you take a sick day – something that would never fly in my mother’s book. “If you well enough to pick up phone, you well enough go work eight hours.”
I’ve visited New York, the spiritual home of every neurotic. There crowds of people can literally lift you off the street if you do not walk fast enough. No one obeys traffic laws, and one time a woman in a hurry pushed me out of her way as she charged into the American Girl Store (which I was just leaving after finding their selection of Molly items to be lacking). As I boarded the subway during one of my visits, I saw a sea of clenched jaws and people calculating how late they were to a meeting, a date, or a dinner with friends. In the second before a large woman sat on me in an effort to take my seat, I felt like I was being understood, that everyone on this train was just as anxious as I was. Then, I felt only a stranger on my lap and thought about going home.
Visiting a place where anxiety is the norm was refreshing, but I live in San Francisco for a reason. It’s good for me, and it’s a challenge. Living in a place where I can panic through a yoga class on any night of the week less than three minutes from my house may be stressful, but it’s also likely the reason I won’t have an ulcer by the time I hit 30 (four months to go!) or suffer a coronary by the time I’m 35. And if that means I have to do breathing exercises on the N or force myself through another mindful meditation, so be it. Perhaps I can learn to embrace the calmer side of myself while allowing my neurotic flag (its color is a vivid orange) to fly. And if that doesn’t work, I’ve got Valium.