An Anxious Legacy (Updated with Franklin Draft)

Franklin Outline: “An Anxious Legacy”

Complication: Anxiety controls Matt

Development:

1. Matt stresses maniacally
2. Grandpa stresses maniacally
3. Matt experiences attack

Resolution: Matt accepts anxiety

     It is hard to describe an anxiety attack to someone who has never had one before, but I know when I pulled out of the driveway that morning I never saw it coming. It is difficult to put into words the feeling of utter hopelessness that comes over you or the physical torment that the mind is able to produce and which I myself have yet to comprehend completely.

     I guess I remember putting the keys into the ignition and backing out of the driveway on that summer morning, but it was in the gas station parking lot on the corner of Grand and Schaffer that I regained consciousness. I was shaking and sobbing hysterically on the curb next to my car and the hum of my still-running engine made me dizzy. The word “Dad” illuminated the screen of my phone which I was holding in my right hand and his voice called out to me from the speaker. I struggled to regain my breath and managed to spatter out a weak: “I’m okay.”

     There's a certain irony in diagnosing yourself a hypochondriac, which is just one of the decisions I made the night before as I shook in terror over two swollen lymph nodes in my groin. I was having pain urinating and had scheduled a doctor's appointment for the next morning to do some tests. Ever since the moment I came out to my parents two years ago, I have harbored anxiety that being gay has predestined me for something awful. Against all the reason in the world, I nearly cried three months earlier as the nurse pricked my finger to draw blood for an HIV test at a routine physical. I had now convinced myself that the test was a false negative and tomorrow I was going to the doctor's to receive my true fate. I pulled the blankets over my face to keep everything out and I examined the crisscross pattern until I dizzied myself to sleep.

     Doctors offices have always made me nauseous and I remember cringing as a child as I accompanied my grandfather to my great-aunt Caro's numerous appointments. He would sit and sweat and shift his eyes upwards, examining the sterile lights nervously, as my aunt verbally abused the office staff.

“Can you believe she said ‘fuck you’ to the nurse?” he exclaimed one evening to my grandmother who cooked and rolled her eyes, almost laughing from his exasperation.

“That doctor is a cabrón! And a racist! They treat me bad there because I’m a Mexican,” said my fair-skinned and light-eyed aunt who lifted her hands to further her point.

     I picture my grandfather in his seat at the corner of the sturdy, wooden table in my grandparents’ kitchen piling salsa picante onto whatever he was eating and worrying about the past, the present, and the unforeseeable. If you couldn’t tell he was a ball of nerves from the way he would rub his eyebrows, he would be happy to let you know what was ailing him today, whether it be the Dodgers or the weather or the remote possibility of something going terribly wrong.

     My grandmother always told me that my grandfather’s life changed the day that I was born and that she fell in love with him again after almost 35 years of marriage. It is true that his grandchildren were the apples of his eye and he would show his love for us by worrying about us incessantly at every moment of every day.

Whether it was big dogs, the beach, playground equipment, or sub-70 degree temperatures, everything was out to get us.

“Here comes old ‘No-jacket Matthew’ they call him” he would always say as I would enter their house regardless of the month. Unless it was the dead of summer, I was always exposing myself to the perils of the arctic Southern California climate.

“Mijo, if you love me, just put on a jacket before you walk in our house,” my grandmother would tell me. “I don’t care if you weren’t wearing it all day, just put it on or I will hear about it all week,” and we would chuckle as she did impressions of him in Spanglish.

     I remember when my grandpa got sick and I would go over during the summer to help take care of him and my grandma would look at me over the breakfast table with tired eyes and say: “You are going to look just like your grandfather one day, baby.”

     Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I find myself pacing around my house checking locks on windows and doors and unplugging lamps so the house doesn't burn down while I sleep. I think of my grandpa as I climb the creaky stairs to my room and images flash through my mind of his shadowy figure moving down my grandparents' hall with a flashlight at 3 a.m.

     The night before my appointment, I retraced the usual night-time path through my house and my heart pounded deep in my chest, waiting for something to happen. I am always waiting for the worst to happen and that night I almost wished someone would have broken in to my house and given me a reason to obsess over something other than my swollen nodes.
     Anxiety doesn't sound like a legitimate illness and certainly not something that can be inherited. Yet the next morning as I sulked out the door for the appointment, I glanced back and watched as my mom popped a Zoloft into her mouth and washed it down with freshly-brewed coffee. I took a step and closed the door slowly, pausing and staring at my car.

     Caught inside my own head as I drove towards the appointment, I remember beginning to shake violently until I gasped for air and my foot rattled on the brakes. I can hear the honking of car horns behind me as I tell myself to accelerate but my foot stays still. By the time I turned into the parking lot, I had stopped controlling my own body and I had let my fears take the wheel. Apparently, fear is not a good driver because, after gaining control of my breath, I was spilled out on the sidewalk and my car was parked across three parking spaces at the back of the station mini-mart.

“Hon?! Are you there, hon?!” said my dad at the other end of the phone. I stood up, trembling, and got back into the car, still sobbing. Slowly, I switched the car into drive, turned the air conditioner on high, and made a right onto the busy street.

     My life-threatening illness turned out to be a common urinary tract infection, but it occurred to me that I had something much more serious wrong with me. My mind. I left the office with a prescription for a three-day course of antibiotics and a referral for anxiety counseling.

     I used to blame my fears on things that happened to me in the past—my parents' long and bitter divorce or maybe that time I got chased by that man with a gun in that movie theater. Maybe none of that is out of the realm of possibility. But when I look in the mirror, I am beginning to see more of my grandfather in me every day—in the ways that I worry about the past that I cannot change and the future that has not yet happened. I am coming to the realization that this maniac worrying may be due less to the things that have happened to me and more to who I am deep down at the core. It has become apparent that I have inherited more than his olive skin and his lazy eyes.

Word Count: 1,330
Intended Publication: "Lives" section of the New York Times Magazine 

Writing for Story (Week 4 Response)

            Writing for Story has given me a lot to think about with regards to the way that I write. I found that I can incorporate many of Franklin’s structural pointers to not just narrative journalism writing, but also to feature writing in a more traditional journalism form. Above all, what stuck out to me the most was his emphasis on being organized. Each chapter flowed into the next as he literally taught us how to build a story from the ground up. Every time I read a story, I am now going to find myself considering certain key questions, such as: “Why did he/she do that?” and “What is his/her motive?”. When it comes to structure, the most helpful part of the book for me personally was his lesson on outlining. When I usually think of outlines, I imagine long and fleshed out lists of roman numerals and sub-letters filled with ideas that sprout in every direction. It was astounding to me that he is able to create an effective outline solely by choosing the story’s key tensions and expressing them with action verbs; it really got at the heart of what makes a story important.

            If Franklin had not included “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster” and “The Ballad of Old Man Peters” in this book, everything else he says may have fallen on me as cold theory. During my time as an English major, I have been instructed to read several different texts about style, but none of them have truly benefited me like Writing for Story. Had I not been able to feel the tension in the operating room with Mrs. Kelly or explore the intricacies of Wilk’s life, I would have been in the dark searching for examples that put into use Franklin’s stylistic suggestions. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it is most definitely one that I am not selling back to the book store. I consider it a valuable resource not only in this class, but in my future writing endeavors.

An Anxious Legacy (Final Draft)

I picture my grandfather sitting at the sturdy, wooden table of my grandparents’ kitchen piling salsa picante onto whatever he was eating and worrying about the past, the present, and the unforeseeable. If you couldn’t tell he was a ball of nerves from the way he would rub his eyebrows, he would be happy to let you know what was ailing him today, whether it be the Dodgers or the weather or the most recent trip to the doctor’s office with my great aunt Caro.

 

“Can you believe she said ‘fuck you’ to the nurse?” he exclaimed to my grandmother who cooked and rolled her eyes, almost laughing from his exasperation.

“That doctor is a cabrón! And a racist! They treat me bad there because I’m a Mexican,” said my fair-skinned and light-eyed aunt who lifted her hands to further her point.

My grandmother always told me that my grandfather’s life changed the day that I was born and that she fell in love with him again after almost 35 years of marriage. It is true that his grandchildren were the apples of his eye and he would show his love for us by worrying about us incessantly at every moment of every day.

Whether it was big dogs, the beach, playground equipment, or sub-70 degree temperatures, everything was out to get us.

“Here comes old ‘No-jacket Matthew’ they call him” he would always say as I would enter their house regardless of the month. Unless it was the dead of summer, I was always exposing myself to the perils of the arctic Southern California climate.

“Mijo, if you love me, just put on a jacket before you walk in our house,” my grandmother would tell me. “I don’t care if you weren’t wearing it all day, just put it on or I will hear about it all week,” and we would chuckle as she did impressions of him in Spanglish.

I remember when my grandpa got sick and I would go over during the summer to help take care of him and my grandma would look at me over the breakfast table with tired eyes and say: “You are going to look just like your grandfather one day, baby.”

Years after he passed away, I would stare up at a picture of him that I tacked to the bulletin board in my room and images of him would flash through my head as my heart beat rapidly, unable to sleep.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night because I've dreamed that I am in a room filled with snakes and there is no way out. Even though it is a recurring dream, I always leap out of bed onto the floor and rip the sheets off the mattress, examining for anything that moves. Before I can convince myself to give getting back into bed a try, I usually pace the house checking locks on windows and doors and unplugging lamps so the house doesn't burn down; this was always a legitimate fear of my grandfather's ever since he saw that 60 minutes special.

Sometimes I think that I am just crazy. It doesn't take much to put me over the edge, usually; especially an illness. There's a certain irony in diagnosing yourself a hypochondriac, which is just one of the decisions I made one night as I shook in terror over two swollen lymph nodes in my groin. I was having pain urinating and doctor's appointment for the next day to do some tests.

 

Ever since the moment I came out to my parents, I was always worried that being gay had predestined me for something awful. Against all the reason in the world, I nearly cried three months earlier as the nurse pricked my finger to draw blood for an HIV test at a routine physical. I had now convinced myself that the test was a false negative and tomorrow I was going to the doctor's to receive my true fate. At this point, I had the theme ingrained in my mind and I tossed my phone across my bed in the latest heated exchange with my boyfriend of nearly a year about coming out to his parents before I traveled across the globe to meet them for the first time. But with my impending diagnosis on the mind, would any of it matter anymore? I pulled the blankets over my face to keep everything out and I examined the crisscross pattern until I dizzied myself to sleep.

Anxiety doesn't sound like a legitimate illness and certainly not something that can be inherited. Yet the next morning as I headed out the door for the appointment, I glanced back and watched as my mom popped a Zoloft into her mouth and washed it down with freshly-brewed coffee. I took a step and closed the door slowly, pausing and staring at my car.

I guess I remember putting the keys into the ignition and backing out of the driveway, but it was in the gas station parking lot on the corner of Grand and Schaffer that I regained consciousness. I was shaking and sobbing hysterically on the curb next to my car and the hum of my still-running engine made me dizzy. The word “Dad” illuminated the screen of my phone which I was holding in my right hand and his voice called out to me from the speaker. I struggled to regain my breath and managed to spatter out a weak: “I’m okay.”

It is hard to describe an anxiety attack to someone who has never had one before, but I know when I pulled out of the driveway that morning I never saw it coming. The thing about anxiety attacks is that I never do see them coming, but that morning it all became too much for me. Caught inside my own head as I drove towards the appointment, I remember beginning to shake violently until I gasped for air and my foot rattled on the brakes. I can hear the honking of car horns behind me as I tell myself to accelerate but my foot stays still. By the time I turned into the parking lot, I had stopped controlling my own body and I had let my fears take the wheel. Apparently, fear is not a good driver because after gaining control of my breath I was spilled out on the sidewalk and my car was parked across three parking spaces at the back of the station mini-mart.

“Hon?! Are you there, hon?!” said my dad and I stood up, answered, and got back into the car, still sobbing. Slowly, I switched the car into drive, turned the air conditioner on high, and made a right onto the busy street.

My life-threatening illness turned out to be a common urinary tract infection, but it occurred to me that I had something much more serious wrong with me. My mind. I left the office with a prescription for a three-day course of antibiotics and a referral for anxiety counseling.

I used to blame my fears on things that happened to me in the past—my parents' long and bitter divorce or maybe that time I got chased by that man with a gun in that movie theater. Maybe none of that is out of the realm of possibility. But when I look in the mirror, I am beginning to see more of my grandfather in me every day—in the ways that I worry about the past that I cannot change and the future that has not yet happened. I have come to the realization that this maniac worrying may be due less to the things that have happened to me and more to who am deep down at the core. When it comes to my grandpa and me, it is becoming apparent that I have inherited more than his olive skin and his lazy eyes.

*Intended Publication: "Lives" section of the New York Times Magazine

Orlean/LeBlanc Reading Response

These two readings provided a deeper understanding for me of what a narrative journalism piece truly is. Although they are different in many ways, a common thread that ran though both of them is the extent to which the reporters engaged themselves with their subjects. For a hard news journalism piece, I am accustomed to getting to the site of the event and doing fast reporting to be able to turn around and produce a finished product before deadline. It became more obvious to me that narrative journalism is completely different in this aspect and that a real investment is necessary for a successful finished product. In the case of Orlean, it was much more clear to me the methods that she chose to engage with her subject, the little boy. It was clear  that she devoted time to observing him within the household context, at school, and in the pizza place by his school; she picked a subject and she followed him through his daily environments. In LeBlanc's piece however, he relationship with Trina was something that was very unclear to me. I was not sure if she originally set out to do a piece on Trina or if one developed simply out of her interactions with her. It seems that she blurred the line between a support system and a reporter simply trying to get a story. This created a lot of problems for me because it came off as unethical that she initiate so many interactions with someone who needed help so bad if the goal was just a story. I think of the moments when Trina would call her phone and she would not call back, only to reach out a later point in time. I think of how difficult following a person like Trina would be, but I wonder if LeBlanc gave her the hopes of a false relationship.

Having voiced my criticisms of LeBlanc's potential reporting, I think that her final product is a vibrant piece that tugged at my heart strings. She manages to give Trina this voice that his both comical and alarming. I think of the moment when she references vomiting to avoid HIV contraction and I did not want to believe that anyone would live in such a state or be so misinformed about something so crucial. However, at times a more carefree and humorous side of Trina came out-- such as her references of the "junkie shuffle" and the searing image in my mind of her flailing arms. In many ways, LeBlanc accomplished this better than Orlean for me. I thought Orlean told a story that was not that exciting or truly interesting like "Trina and Trina" was. On top of that, I think it made too many assumptions about what the "typical" ten-year-old looks like. While this is the perfect cookie cutter family that I have grown accustomed to watching on TV, my experience as a ten-year-old could not have been more different. I think it was a very upper-middle class portrayal that was used to speak for an entire group of adolescent boys and that did not read well with me. The insight into the boy's life was fun at times, but at the end of the day it was "Trina and Trina" that I had pumping through my mind and truly stuck.  

Personal Essay Process Writing

            When I first sat down to write this story, I was conflicted between telling two different stories. I knew that I wanted to speak to my anxiety in some way, but I had the choice of talking about my own personalized anxiety or that which I feel for my sister who has faced her own hard times. In both cases, I knew that they would not be easy to write because my experience with anxiety has not always had many defining moments. In fact, I often find myself grappling with a lack of justification for the anxiousness that I am feeling.

For this piece, I decided to pick a concrete example from my own life and relate it to my childhood relation with my grandfather. Whenever I think of anxiety, I automatically think of him because he was the most nervous person I ever knew. I am hoping that the transition between these two experiences flows naturally and it is not alienating to the reader. Since this is one of the first times that I have ever written a piece of this nature, I am interested to get everyone’s feedback on my strong points and my weak points. I look forward to reading everyone’s work and to a good first workshop.  

An Anxious Legacy

            I picture my grandfather sitting at the sturdy, wooden table of my grandparents’ kitchen piling salsa picante onto whatever he was eating and worrying about the past, the present, and the unforeseeable. If you couldn’t tell he was a ball of nerves from the way he would rub his eyebrows, he would be happy to let you know what was ailing him today, whether it be the Dodgers or the weather or the most recent trip to the doctor’s office with my great aunt Caro.

“Can you believe she said ‘fuck you’ to the nurse?” he exclaimed to my grandmother who cooked and rolled her eyes, almost laughing from his exasperation.

“That doctor is a cabrón! And a racist! They treat me bad there because I’m a Mexican,” said my fair-skinned and light-eyed aunt who lifted her hands to further her point.

            My grandmother always told me that my grandfather’s life changed the day that I was born and that she fell in love with him again after almost 35 years of marriage. It is true that his grandchildren were the apples of his eye and he would show his love for us by worrying about us incessantly at every moment of every day.

            Whether it was big dogs, the beach, playground equipment, or sub-70 degree temperatures, everything was out to get us.

            “Here comes old ‘No-jacket Matthew’ they call him” he would always say as I would enter their house regardless of the month. Unless it was the dead of summer, I was always exposing myself to the perils of the arctic Southern California climate.

“Mijo, if you love me, just put on a jacket before you walk in our house,” my grandmother would tell me. “I don’t care if you weren’t wearing it all day, just put it on or I will hear about it all week,” and we would chuckle as she did impressions of him in Spanglish.

            I remember when my grandpa got sick and I would go over during the summer to help take care of him and my grandma would look at me over the breakfast table with tired eyes and say: “You are going to look just like your grandfather one day, baby.”

            Years after he passed away, I stared up at a picture of him that I tacked to the bulletin board of my room and tossed back and forth, unable to sleep. I was having pain urinating and I had made a doctor’s appointment for the morning to diagnose what I was sure to be cancer or something equally as awful. In a moment of decisiveness, I flicked on the lights and thrust open my laptop to check Google for the seventh time and compare my symptoms with that of kidney stones and Chlamydia and HIV and the rare disease Cystitis that I was probably sure to have in addition to everything else.

            I was already sitting at the kitchen table the next morning when my mom came down the stairs to get ready to go to work. I had spent the night productively thinking about all of the different scenarios for having to tell my parents that I had contracted a rare and incurable sexually transmitted disease; or I pondered the survival rates and treatment options for my particular kind of bladder cancer.

“You look like hell,” said my mom who threw bread in the toaster and placed a sertraline on the napkin on the counter. “Did you sleep okay last night?”

            I couldn’t speak as I shivered and texted my boyfriend, too nauseous to look at my mom’s toast. When I tried to remove the looming doctor’s visit from my head, I could only think of my college graduation or my wedding day or my future children, all of which I was sure I would never see. My stomach ached as my boyfriend and I exchanged messages about him telling his parents about us before I would meet them; I convinced myself deep down in the pit of my stomach that I would never live to see that day, especially with my illness. When I mustered the strength to stand up, I headed out the door, stuck my keys in the ignition of my car, and backed out of my driveway towards the doctor’s office.

            It was in the gas station parking lot on the corner of Grand and Schaffer that I regained consciousness. I was shaking and sobbing hysterically on the curb next to my car and the hum of my still-running engine made me dizzy. The word “Dad” illuminated the screen of my phone which I was holding in my right hand and his voice called out to me from the speaker. I struggled to regain my breath and managed to spatter out a weak: “I’m okay.”

            I stood up and got back into the car, still sobbing, and turned the air conditioning on high. Slowly, I switched the car into drive, turned on my blinker, and made a right onto the busy street.

            My life-threatening illness turned out to be a common urinary tract infection. I left the office with a prescription for a three-day course of antibiotics and a referral for anxiety counseling.

            I am beginning to see more of my grandfather in me every day—in the ways that I worry about the past that I cannot change and the future that has not yet happened.  It has become apparent to me that I have inherited more than his olive skin and his lazy eyes.
*Intended Publication: "Lives" section of the New York Times Magazine