Anxiety and Springsteen
“Hard times come and hard times go”
-Bruce Springsteen
The cycle is as follows: I see the event advertised; I buy the tickets because I imagine enjoying the event; I get nearer to the date of the event and realise that going to the event means actually having to leave the house and be away from home for a long time; I start to panic about all the things which might go wrong when away from that safe space; I think about just giving the event a miss and eating the cost of it. After all, the tickets have already been paid for. The money is gone whether I attend or I don’t. But then I convince myself to just face my stupid fears (again) and try to enjoy it; force my way through a day of stress and anxiety to get to the event, overcome all the mental obstacles and psychological blocks and remember why I’d booked the tickets in the first place; then fail to enjoy it because I’m too worried to be present, but eventually get home, safe and sound, and look back on the event fondly. I buy a lot of merchandise from gigs and shows to help with this. By the time I’m wearing the t-shirt, I have forgotten the tunnel-vision and hyper-sensitivity to crowds and intrusive thoughts and sense of wanting to crawl out of my own body - I just remember a good time.
Today the event is Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at Wembley Stadium. I’ve seen Bruce many times before, since the 2008 Magic tour came to Cardiff during my final weeks of living there. Back when going to the show was as simple as a twenty minute walk out of my front-door. L and I listening to Jungleland live, arm in arm, from the pitch of the Millennium Stadium. Our song. The two of us not yet married. Not yet even engaged. Bruce’s ‘The Rising’ the first awkward gift I had ever bought for her and the two of us bonding over his Greatest Hits one university night…
Since then, we’ve seen Springsteen in many other places and many other times: Fenway Park in Boston, The Richo in Coventry, Hyde Park in London, Villa Park in Birmingham. Each show a wonderful three hour plus performance of old familiar hits and new instant classics. Each show well worth the extortionate price of the ticket. Each show - being far from home - a flurry of anxiety and fear mixed in with the enjoyment and fandom that makes everything worthwhile in the end.
I first heard Bruce Springsteen in a car - an appropriate place to be inducted into Boss-dom, given how frequently cars feature in his lyrics. Though the car in question was not driving up and down American highways, it was shuffling through summer holiday traffic in the UK, trying to crawl its way down to Cornwall, or over to North Wales, or up to my grandparents’ house in Bury. Our three most common long distance destinations growing up. I forget which particular journey we were taking, but Wales feels right. I have coded associations of Morfa Nefyn in my mind with Springsteen’s Cadillac Ranch and Glory Days. But that might have come later, once the songs were already established in the family holiday canon as acceptable car music alongside the Beatles, Abba and Little Richard. Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and Dire Straits had all been banned by myself and my sister for being too boring. Not enough hooks. Too samey and long. Irish folk band, The Furies, would come later, and only when dad was driving. It was mom who put on Springsteen - or “Bruce String bean” as she would often call him - firmly connecting his Americana with her own New York origins in my mind. “Born in the USA”, Springsteen sang, and I wished I had been born there too instead of stuck living on this grotty little island. My secret wish since I first understood what being a “dual citizen” meant and being conscious enough to take in the differences between where I lived and where the American side of my family lived, was that we would one day move to the United States. That I, too, could go to school in one of those American high schools I saw on TV all the time. Have a locker. Wear my own clothes instead of the stuffy British uniforms. Run out of class, even if my teacher was mid-sentence, as soon as the bell for recess rang. Sit at one of those all-in-one “chables”…
It wasn’t just the idea of American schools (this was pre-Columbine, of course, when the idea of American high school was far more rose-tinted with Grease, Boy Meets World and Saved by the Bell, and far less blood-drenched and coloured with tragedy). I loved how America smelt. I loved the distinct stink of New York whenever we visited my Gran there - so mysteriously different from the familiar stench of our nearest equivalent in London. Proof of other cuisines and cultures forming the superior ingredients of their city life compared to our own - and the heady aroma of the Long Island beaches where we visited my aunts and uncles in Sag Harbor. I loved American food, American television, American accents, American weather, American architecture…the whole American attitude to life; the whole American atmosphere. I loved America and couldn’t understand why my mother would have chosen to leave the vibrancy of Manhattan to settle down with my philandering father in boring old Birmingham.
I blamed Shakespeare. Mom had, after all, come to Birmingham to study the man’s work near his birthplace. And it was there, at the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, where she had met my father. The romantic vision she had of England from the work of the Bard and the voice of Laurence Olivier meant she found intrigue and beauty in all things English, just as I saw the same in things life-long Americans like her would think mundane. The recycling deposit on cans of soda. Automatic cars and drive-thru banks. Main Street and shopping malls. Food delivered right to your door. Toll booths and turnpikes. Diners and late night talk shows. Mailboxes at the end of your driveway… Mom was similarly enamoured by corner shops and country roads, local pubs and parish churches. So enamoured that she stuck with dad even as he betrayed her with other women. Even though she, myself and my sister, had the blue American passports that would have allowed us to run away across the ocean and start a new life on US soil.
How could I not fall in love with Bruce Springsteen, putting into words and music the manufactured American Dream I felt denied the chance to live myself? The nostalgia for a history I wasn’t part of - and which didn’t necessarily exist - but which I desperately wished was my own? The hope for better days and the promise of a future in a country I hoped to one day move to?
Back then, when I was a kid, travel never meant anxiety attacks. Travel meant getting the fuck away from that awful house where mom and dad lied their way through a failing marriage and tried to cover their unhappiness up by buying us whatever toys would best distract us and keep us occupied. Travel was my happy place. And I was always happiest when travel took us to America. To visit gran in the apartment building where Dana Barrett lived in Ghostbusters. To visit with our extended mishpocha on Long Island in that Hamptons beach house that aways felt like summer. To visit mom’s college friends over in Massachusetts, where she had gone to Brandeis, and wonder around places like Lexington, Boston, and Cape Cod thinking how amazing it was that America was awesome everywhere, not just in New York!
I can’t remember when travel first started to make me anxious. But looking back I realise that it was definitely something I learned from my mother. While I was enjoying the trips away, ears usually stuffed with headphones blaring out rock, pop, and eventually punk music into my brain, and my head in a book, mom was always low-key panicking about absolutely everything in the background. Will the train/plane/cab be on time? Might it crash and kill us all? Will the hotel have lost the reservations? Might we get mugged on the streets or ripped off at the airport? Will we have enough foreign currency or travellers’ cheques? Will Gran kick us out early again after the two of them get into another hurtful and inevitable argument about past wounds that never heal? Will dad still be there when we get back?
My worries now are different, but still fit that pattern I was taught by mom: assume the worst. Assume nothing will work properly and that you will be struck down by some terrible illness that will ruin everything you looked forward to. Assume you will never get to your destination because the world is against you and, if by some miracle you do get there, assume there will be many things wrong with the place when you do. Today is the day you will get robbed, get caught up in a natural disaster, experience a hotel fire, miss your connection, find bed bugs in your suitcase, get food poisoning from dinner, trip and break your leg…
It just became natural, I guess, when starting to plan my own travel to catastrophise like this because this is was always the natural soundtrack to leaving the house when I was younger. Don’t get sunstroke! Wait before you swim after eating! Is the tide too strong? Will it sweep you away? Don’t trust that vendor! Don’t pick that thing up - you don’t know where it’s been! I internalised the idea that the word outside the boundaries of home was somehow a dangerous and seething place of peril and threat and that the universe was always conspiring somehow to ruin your carefully laid plans to have fun.
So instead of today’s gig simply being a lovely thing in the diary that I am planning to enjoy, I see it as a series of terrible missions to ensure: from home to the train station, hoping all is well with the train and we get to London on time, checking into the hotel and dumping our bags and getting to Wembley on time (again - will the trains be reliable? Will we get lost?), finding food and sufficient water at the venue, not missing any of Springsteen’s set and hoping we don’t end up standing next to assholes, and then getting back from the venue to the hotel (will we miss the last train home?) and then, in the morning, managing to survive the day in London to get our final train back to the Midlands (and once back at the station - will our car still be there?). That is the insane drama going on in my mind instead of just being excited about seeing one of my favourite artists and having a good time.
But I have learnt to make friends with the anxiety - poke fun at it and recognise it for what it is: some broken wiring after years of detrimental training that needs to be challenged, confronted and ignored. I start to think these self-destructive things and I try to let them wash over me without impact. I shall drive to the station anyway, wait for the train, check into the hotel, get to the venue, enjoy the show and go home again, regardless of all the negative narratives in my head constantly trying to erode my enjoyment by scaring me that it will all be terrible. Knowing in my heart that even if they turn out to be true and it is as terrible as I fear it might be, I will deal with it as and when. Just as I have dealt with genuine problems and genuine catastrophes when they occur, as they so often do, completely unexpectedly and out of the blue. The ones you don’t anticipate being what this really is all about: trying to control what is uncontrollable. Trying to ready yourself for something you can never be ready for. “Intolerance of uncertainty”, as a therapist once diagnosed it to me. The illusion of control that might come by being able to say “I knew this would happen” when disaster hits instead of being taken by surprise, all coming at the cost of wasting so much fucking time preparing for worsts that never arrive.
Later…
It’s two days after the Springsteen show now. As always - I’m so glad I went. We had a great time and the Boss was fantastic. None of the catastrophised fears came true. I wrote this piece as both an insight into the mind of someone who suffers from anxiety, and as a reminder to myself that such anxiety remains a waste of life and energy. The good news is that I was right about looking back fondly - in my memories of the night, none of the anxiety remains. It’s just memories of good songs and good times. The anxiety so pointless that even the brain that generates it knows it is not worth committing to memory.