Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.

I came out of the womb scratching. Mitts had to be put on my hands so I would stop clawing my skin. When I was seven and got mad I would bite myself, raising welts on my arms. This was already well into the time when I would have to touch certain spots on the cabinets, on the sidewalk, with my fingers and toes. At 12, after a seriously traumatic event, I began to pull out my hair. Every day since then, for the past 18 years, the hairs on my body have gone one by one, in the thousands, as I have tried to cope with overwhelming anxiety from a chaotic series of experiences that from birth have made me feel inside as if my very life is at stake if I do not pick and pull and bite and scratch.

The way I coped with circumstances outside my control was to grab onto something — specifically, my hair.

This is what anxiety does, the anxiety that comes from being a sensitive being in an insensitive world. We are taught when we are young that life will be fair, good guys will win, that if we are well behaved we won’t suffer, that out there for each of us is some perfect stranger who will swoop in with armor and save us, some fictional man or woman who will make everything — all the assaults and sorrows, traumas and disappointments — O.K. But it is painful to be born, to literally be pushed out from a tiny canal, crushed so that we can live.



When we arrive the world is bright and harsh and loud. Strangers fondle our bodies as though we asked them to and then we are given to one, maybe two, people, our parents, who are supposed to love one another and us. Often some part of that equation is lacking and that becomes confusing because when the blind trust between child and parent gains sight and we see things as they really are, when we see the disappointed tears of one parent, hear the screams of another, when the reality starts to come into focus and we realize that what we believed was real never was and that trust is a candy peddled by strangers, it becomes too much to bear.

When this happens we have to look elsewhere for the picture of happiness we formed before we saw clearly the underlying thread of sadness inside those we love, all the while doling our light and love out to those lacking as if our supply were endless. Soon we are tired, our lights are dim, but still we give, we try to make things we cannot change different so that the people we love are happy, but the burden becomes great, the task Sisyphean, and those we try to fix are never satisfied.

Jillian Tamaki

When I realized my family would never be happy — as if the daily wars inside the four-walled battlefield of our home were not indictment enough — and that I could never be happy in a society where I was from infancy an outsider, teased and picked on in the playground, I desperately searched for a way to fit in. My skin felt stolen, like the skin of a selkie, by those who wanted me to be different, be theirs, instead of wholly myself. Even being female in a chauvinistic culture made me feel wrong in some way — exploited, objectified, trivialized. As a woman I became an object for someone else’s affection, and often times rage.

The way I coped with circumstances outside my control was to grab onto something — my body, more specifically, my hair. I tried to marginalize my pain and dissatisfaction by uprooting the bad things that were making me anxious with tweezers, my fingers, nail clippers, safety pins, whatever tools were available during the desperate hours of my suffering. I would pull and pick and the destructive vortex of emotion that was threatening inside to sweep me away from life would stall, would recede, and for a while I could be calm, safe, even though that safety came at a painful price.

My obsessions, my compulsions, eventually my hair-pulling disorder — trichotillomania — gave me an excuse that for years I was ashamed to own. I would say I could not attend a function with kids who picked on me because I was sick with the flu. I would be late for a family dinner because I was going to the bathroom, the one place where social convention saved me because it made people afraid to open the door. Shut in there for hours I would at least miss the fighting, the teasing and the violence that was more damaging than my own body attacking itself in order for me to have peace.

Instead of the dorky misfit, I became the tardy girl, the screw-up, the rebel without a cause. Only I had a cause for my torment. I had many: all the people who made life unsafe, who touched me the wrong way, or teased me mercilessly, who were unkind when all I craved in life was kindness. It was the violent media, the violent words, the abuse as I was raped of my innocence, dragged down a flight of stairs head first. This is why I am anxious, why I take two pills in the morning and two at night now to bring me from a constant state of fight or flight back to something like a state of balance.

Related More From Anxiety Read previous contributions to this series.

I believe that anxiety is the result of a violent culture where abuse has been so normalized it seems insignificant. We are told that to be strong means to suffer in silence, when strength really comes from giving our suffering a voice. The voice my suffering has taken through the years is not a voice filled with words, it is rather my trichotillomania, my O.C.D., the eating disorders I survived in high school, rising from attempted suicide with resilience as I realized on the floor of my room — I deserve better.

Our culture is not nurturing. We ask each other, “How are you doing?” but we do not really want to know. We do not really want that person to say anything other than “fine,” because that would mean we would have to listen, to really care, something that most of us have not even done with ourselves. We want form responses, people who check all the right boxes, who say all the right things, whether they mean them or not. A résumé for a culture puffed up with lies, that is what we want. And as a result, we have a “fine” culture that is everything but fine. Medicated smiles, robotic responses, whole lifetimes that pass under the guise of “fine” when all we really want is for someone to ask and care.

“How are you?”

“How am I?”

We want nourishment, not only for our bodies but for our souls. That is what we need to flourish, to feel less anxious. Environments that are safe, loving, relationships that are honest and nurturing. Nobody wants to fight, not really. We are taught to fight ourselves and others, we are taught to be defensive and aggressive, so that we may survive another day. But it seems it should be different.

When I look at nature — the way a seagull spreads its white wings wide as it hovers just above a meal, the way the tide rushes in bringing shell sparkles and lost treasures, the way the sun rises every morning even when it is cloudy, the way a tree stands proud even when it is wounded, its roots deeper than the trials it endures — I see truth, a truth where there is no need for anxiety because things are as they should be. People should stand strong and say what they really feel not what they think others want to hear. They should flow with their emotions, like the tide, whether they be happy or sad. They should rise bright with possibility into every day and hover gently near what they want instead of aggressively taking.

I am an anxiety-ridden, obsessive-compulsive hair-puller, but this is not who I am or how I choose to identify myself. I am a survivor. I choose to be honest about how I really feel, who I really am, even if it makes me unpopular, because I would rather be unpopular and be myself than be popular and not really fine at all. I am grateful for my anxiety and my coping mechanisms. Hair-pulling, touching certain spots on the cabinet — these things have saved my life, have gotten me here, able to write from a place of distance about the great strength of character it takes to struggle and survive. I am hardly perfect, I am definitely scarred, but at the core I am myself, anxious and also beautiful, otherwise known as human.

What about you? How are you?

(Anxiety welcomes submissions at anxiety@nytimes.com. We can only notify writers whose articles have been accepted for publication.)



Alexandra Heather Foss is a freelance writer and photographer. Her most recent publication is “Finding Beauty In Your Scars,” which appeared on the Web site Tiny Buddha.