Is that normal?

Musings on the roiling brain in my stomach.

It starts behind my belly button: a warm, twisting sensation lands with a thud in my gut before creeping toward my fingers and toes, urging me to move—to get up, tidy, check my notifications. “Do anything but sit there,” it tells me.

I used to chalk this feeling up to a productivity fetish (or, sometimes interchangeably, IBS). “The reason I can’t brush my teeth without buzzing around the room struggling to make the bed with one hand? Capitalism!”

Recently I started to suspect that maybe working is merely how I channel the hot, pulsing discomfort out of me, rather than the reason it exists in the first place. Routine and predictability seem to blunt its effects. I spend a lot of time alone in my house, and I can go for long stretches without its churning reappearing. But anything out of the ordinary—a visit from the landlord, impending travel—activates my nervous system with misdirected dread, blooming in my gut like a mold spore.

Sometimes I wonder if my body is incapable of discerning between excitement and fear anymore. It all seems to translate into a singular, dull sensation, as though a circuit breaker in my brain was tripped, and all the anticipatory pathways converged into one superhighway of nervousness. Genuine enthusiasm for upcoming plans usually mutates into a sort of defensive catastrophizing.

So, is that normal?

A few months ago, Lauren Oyler wrote an essay titled simply, “My Anxiety.” She described the way her head hovers above the pillow at night—how she concentrates on softening into her bed, only to discover moments later that her trapezius has reengaged and her head is, once again, floating of its own accord.

She seems to raise a question that I’d never thought to ask: Wait, is this normal?

What is “normal,” after all, in a world that is so unnatural? Artificial lights, artificial flavors; constant accessibility and constant expectation. “I can’t sleep,” we say, rolling over to face the nightstand, “Maybe holding all of the world’s news three inches from my face will help.” See? Maybe “normal” isn’t great.

And on the note of what’s “natural”—I’m not so sure that’s a useful barometer, either. A non-exhaustive list of things that are natural: poison ivy, tsunamis, death, sinkholes, cancer, forest fires.

Still, I’m functionally unsure how to internalize the fact that the bear is not chasing me; that a rude email does not warrant my fight-or-flight response springing to attention, being in the presence of other people for an activity is supposed to be plainly enjoyable, and that I’m not keeping the plane in the air with my mind. That I can unclench my jaw and stand down without inviting certain calamity.

My friends without this maladaptive tendency always tell me something about “my vagus nerve,” that I am “dysregulated.” But I don’t act impulsively (too dangerous; what if something bad happened?) or have trouble controlling emotions—I just feel an innate sense of urgency (toward what, I don’t know) that often makes me feel as though I’m late for something and I can’t remember what.

In any case, I don’t remember feeling this way before 2020. It’s as though the pandemic sent us careening into another reality altogether. After spending 18 months more or less inside before transitioning to a life of everything-from-home, it’s like I’ve forgotten how to exist outside it. “Hot girls have stomach issues,” a meme reassures me. Yes, I think in reply, but are the stomach issues correlated to imaginary worst case scenarios?

Still, there’s something a little superstitious; a little self-centered, about these machinations—that I must be so important in this vast cosmos that if I stop focusing on keeping it spinning, my mysterious confederation of haters¹ are sure to strike.

Sometimes it feels a little like I imagine Oyler’s head must feel at night: like I’m floating above these moments, out of body, only half-present to the reality around me, the other half attuned to the inner monologue combing the scene for somewhere to focus the indiscriminate worry.

At its core, I am not so sure that my condition isn’t distinctly American (is that self-centered, too? To assume that the US invented generalized anxiety?). One of the only times in recent memory that I remember feeling easy, simple enjoyment without the low-level hum undermining my sense of presence was at a three-hour dinner in a European city, in which I suddenly realized the entire point was to luxuriate in the moment—and it struck me as utterly profound.

But for now, there is only me—and the pulsing in my stomach.

1. Hunter Harris used this phrase once and it permanently entered my lexicon.