When Our Character Flaws Became Superpowers

I’ve been eyeing the world with suspicion for most of my life. This may stem from the time I was hung from a tree as an elementary school student. Or the time I  was a teenager and I went to visit a beloved adult couple that my parents and I had vacationed with every summer when I was a child only to be told by the husband that he found me sexually attractive. Or maybe I was just born wary.

It's always seemed like kind of an annoying character trait. Like when I switched to a new school in seventh grade and was convinced that every time someone giggled with a group of friends that they were all laughing at me. Or when I replaced my bedside light with a halogen lamp and something about the lighting made me nervous and reluctant to sleep with it in the room. Like it was going to come alive at night, hop on my mattress and menace me like some sort of malevolent version of the cute Pixar lamp. Or that bit when I constantly regaled my then fiancé with my fears about the consequences of Peak Oil.  (Don’t even get me started on my thoughts on climate change.)

I spend my free time listening to podcasts about con artists and murderers so I can try to understand the psychology behind villains and learn how to recognize and avoid them in daily life. I queue up histories about the fall of civilizations and worry about the parallels between modern American politics and the demise of the Roman Republic. I subscribe to podcasts on epidemiology—the study of the incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases.

All this makes me a very good Trivial Pursuit player, but can make me a real drag at parties. I abhor small talk but can very easily find myself cornering people and yammering on about fires in Australia, the hantavirus outbreak in Yosemite National Park, or how you need to watch yourself around men who fake injuries and request your help only because they want you to lower your guard before bludgeoning you into unconsciousness and dragging you off to a secondary location.

But, in March of 2020, I realized that this generalized anxiety and paranoia had actually been a superpower in disguise all along. Since I started worrying about COVID in January and building an Amazon wish list of pandemic survival supplies, I had already purchased 48 rolls of toilet paper from Amazon before other people’s panic hording even started. I’d begun building shelves in the basement to hold a massively increased pantry. I knew people in Asia regularly wore masks while they were out and about to avoid getting sick so I placed an order for reusable cloth masks so that I had something that fit more securely over my face and didn’t constantly slip down like the bandanna I had been wearing. (And that didn’t make me feel like I was trying to rob a stagecoach.)

And it wasn’t just me. Other friends who had lived for years with character traits that they had treated like illnesses found that they became super useful as well. A buddy who had obsessive compulsive disorder and had always had a special interest in hygiene found himself perfectly poised to dispense advice on how to deal with decontaminating surfaces. At a time when we weren’t at all sure how the virus was spread and when it was recommended that we wipe off grocery store items  before putting them inside the house, he recommended creating a staging area where items that were hard to wipe off like broccoli could be quarantined for 24-48 hours before use. He used his garage. I used my basement, using the previously underutilized side door as the route the groceries took into our dwelling and closing the otherwise completely ignored door at the top of the basement stairs to separate as much as possible the basement from the kitchen.

As strange as this sounds, I actually felt a much lessened amount of day-to-day panic once there was something happening worth panicking about.

This Is Your Brain on Anxiety

As an anxious person, I tend to spend a lot of time looking around me and scanning for things to worry about. From possible cracks in my ceiling to signs my kid might be struggling in school, to that neighbor I haven’t seen leave her house in a few days. I worry that I’ve forgotten to pack my kid’s water bottle, that I’m going to be late to the vet, or that I’m going to miss a deadline at work. My brain goes over things that I’ve said and done and analyzes them for signs that I’ve given unintended offense or bored someone or made them angry at me. Physically, my heart rate is usually elevated, my shoulders braced high to protect my neck. My jaw is clenched and this radiates into tension headaches. If I’m not paying attention I get light headed cause I hold my breath. My muscles are tense and ready to spring into action which is why I practice yoga and fantasize about going to day spas to get massaged. I go through most days like I’m being threatened by life and my body responds accordingly.

In the brain, the region that is involved in perceiving threats is the amygdala. It’s an older structure that served humanity well in its history. The amygdala is on the search for danger and will sound the alarm and alert other parts of the body to speed up the heart and divert blood away from the core to the limbs to prepare the body to flee or put up a fight. In people that don’t spend all day worrying, another part of the brain serves as a check on the alarm sent out by the amygdala. It’s the prefrontal cortex, that most human, thinky, analytical part of the brain.

The prefrontal cortex intercepts the message sent by the amygdala, reviews it, and makes a decision about whether the threat is really worth getting worked up about or not. And, a lot of the time, in chill people, it will decide that the “threat” is not a big deal and tell the amygdala to calm the fuck down. But my prefrontal cortex doesn’t seem to be very chill. It doesn’t tell my amygdala to calm the fuck down very often. So, most days, I go about my life in a constant state of threat. I find myself doing everyday stuff like invoicing clients like I have a ravenous grizzly bear behind me that will swipe its claws at my jugular if I make a typo. It’s kind of exhausting. And I’m sure it’s aging my body at a rate that is kind of depressing to think about.

But, when a real crisis hits, unlike a normally chill person, I’m not caught by surprise by the physical symptoms. I’m used to them, baby. I’ve trained for years in how to execute normal household activities while being simultaneously menaced by phantom apex predators.  I know that a rapid heartbeat isn’t a heart attack. I remember that I have to stop and remind myself to breathe from time to time. And if I find that my limbs have suddenly gone numb, I know that it’s  the adrenaline surging through my system from the panic attack that I’m having and I just have to repeat the familiar mantra “adrenaline metabolizes in two minutes,” for 120 seconds until the feeling in my fingers comes back.

A crisis is simply the place where I can execute at peak performance. My anxiety is my genetic legacy from a long line of humans who used it to survive wolf attacks and the ravages of war. It gave them the speed to run from their enemies, and the wit to stock up the root cellar against the long winters.

Tip from the COVID Times: Look within yourself for character traits you have perceived as flaws and see if they might actually be superpowers. Do you tend to carry more fat on your frame than the patriarchy and a grueling beauty industry deems acceptable? Well, that tendency to store fat is what is going to keep you alive longer than your whippet-thin neighbor if you face food instability. Were you considered to too chatty in school, prioritizing friendships over memorizing facts and figures? Well, that sociability might be the key to forming a local network that swaps goods and services in a barter system that keeps the entire neighborhood afloat if republicans break the world’s economy. Have people told you that you are too strident and/or bitchy? Maybe you are the right person to lead local resistance against an oppressor

Being Hanged Taught Me To See the Future

Now, I’m not saying anyone is obligated to regard their traumatic experiences or life challenges as positive things. Often bad shit happens and it is just bad shit that happened for no reason and that sucks ass. I’m very much not an “all things happen for a reason” type of person. But, sometimes, there is valuable stuff to be learned from trauma. And, in the case of my being hanged in elementary school, the trauma did teach me something although it would take me a while to realize it.

When I was a little kid, I lived in a newly-constructed subdivision in a suburb of Cincinnati. The area had, until recently, been a mixture of farmland and kinda swampy woods. By the time my family moved in, the neighborhood consisted of a series of three intersecting streets with evenly spaced two-story homes each on its own half-acre lot. Behind the houses and at some of the intersections was a kind of woods that the neighborhood kids used communally. I say woods, but it was really just a bunch of 20-30 year-old trees, overgrown tangles of honeysuckle bushes, and a fair amount of “pricker bushes” that would snag your clothes. The geography was varied enough so that there were flat places, baby hills, and drainage ditches that we decided to call streams.

The neighborhood was primarily made up of young families with yuppie parents. There were about ten kids around my age, some had younger siblings, and there were a few packs of teenagers scattered about and available for babysitting. At the time I was in first or second grade I think. My best childhood buddies were a brother and sister that had lived in the house next door to me, but they had just moved out of town so I was on the hunt for a new kid gang.

There was an existing kid gang consisting of the kids that lived at the top of the street and one day I saw them gathered in front of one section of woods near their houses. They beckoned to me to come along and join them. My heart leapt at feeling included so I left my yard and trotted on up. They waved at me to come join them in the woods.

Once inside an outer parameter formed by scraggly trees and a wall of honeysuckle bushes, the woods thinned out. There was a flat empty space about six or eight feet in diameter that was caused by the shade cast by one of the remaining older and respectable trees. This was a great tree. A treehouse-deserving tree suitable for climbing with stout limbs and I had had no idea that it even existed in the neighborhood because this section of woods was the territory of this particular kid gang. I was stoked to have found out about it.

A rope snaked down the trunk of the tree. I didn’t give it too much thought. If anything I figured it was there to facilitate bringing building materials up into the branches, cause for damn sure these kids had to see the treehouse potential in this majestic tree.

“Want to play a game with us?” one of the kids asked.

Duh, I thought and nodded.

One of them pointed down at a circle of dry leaves below one of the branches of the tree. Here and there the circle hadn’t been completely filled in with leaves. I could see what was concealed under it. Rope.

“Step over there,” a kid said.

Like a character in a Star War, my thought was, I have a bad feeling about this. My stomach felt like I’d just sucked down a full pitcher of orange juice mixed from frozen concentrate. My hands went clammy. I could feel my body vibrating with little shocks like I’d just touched the metal doorknob after scooting across the carpet with thick socked feet. Hey wait, I thought, aren’t these the kids that make fun of me on the bus? This isn’t going to go well.

But I stepped forward into the circle anyway.

And a kid, who had previously been concealed up in the branches of the mighty tree, leaped down, pulling a rope with him. The circle of dry leaves exploded as a loop of rope tightened around my ankle. The rope snaking its way around the trunk hissed as it was wrenched up the bark. My body flipped upside down, my back cracked into the trunk. Blood rushed to my head. Since I was now hanging from one ankle, the inside of my thighs and groin ached with the sudden and unexpected adductor stretch. Tears coursed down from the corners of my eyes and into my hair. The kid gang advanced and surrounded me and began to air their grievances.

I’ve always been what you might call a late bloomer emotionally speaking. Like, I wasn’t ready for college to be over after four years, so I stuck around for another two and got a Master’s. I wasn’t exactly ready to move out of my mom’s house and go to college when I as 18 either, so I drove home most weekends and moped around being homesick for all of freshman and most of sophomore year. And when I was in elementary school, I wasn’t quite ready to leave for the whole day and hang out with strangers. I remember talking to my mom and reminiscing nostalgically as a kindergartener for the good-old days of half-day preschool.

So, as a way to manage these big feelings, my mom walked me to the bus every morning and let me take a toy to school. Now, having my own elementary school student in 2023, this doesn’t seem unusual. There are even days set aside during the school year now where kids are asked by their teachers to bring their stuffies to school. And I think you might be arrested for leaving your kid unattended at a bus stop now. In Illinois, for example, the minimum age at which a child can be left unsupervised is 14. Fourteen! But, in 1980s Cincinnati, being a first grader whose mom held her hand at the bus stop was a bulling invitation.

They began by name calling as soon as we sat our wee butts down on the cracked vinyl bus seats. But, I was somewhat insulated from that by the cozy aura emanating from whatever beloved object I had brought with me as a talisman that day. Their response was to break my shit. Devastating. Did that deter me from bringing my toys? No. I continued to stubbornly bring an object every day. And they broke it most days. Eventually I had to come clean to my parents about why all my shit came back from school all busted up.

Which got those kids in trouble.

Which motivated them to get revenge.

All this was explained to me in guttural growls as I writhed in pain, dangling from the rope. I was eventually dumped onto to the dirt after I promised I’d learn my lesson about the consequences of telling and left to limp home into the safety of my own lawn.

How did this turn me into a diminutive clairvoyant, you ask? Well, it taught me to trust my gut.

I’d seen the rope peeking out from among the leaves. I felt the acid in my stomach, my sweaty palms, the adrenaline beginning to pump through my bloodstream. I had the thought that this situation wasn’t going to end well. But I’d ignored all those signs. In hindsight I realized that I was smart enough to recognize when bad shit was going to go down. And I vowed that I’d listen to my own inner voice from then on and it would protect me from danger.

Sometimes I try to protect myself from imaginary grizzly bears, but I can also sense when it’s a good time to stock up on toilet paper.