From the annals of anxiety: Watching Dan Fogelman’s This is Us and Reading Tim Clare’s Coward
A few years back, I found myself in the unfortunate position of having to report to morally bankrupt employers who constantly stood in the way of my trying to run an inclusive and kind workplace. My work life involved navigating manufactured crises, limitless egos given to very easy bruising, and a regular dose of thinly veiled threats and harassment. Eventually, a particularly egregious form of retaliation and intimidation led to a severe anxiety attack that landed me in the hospital.
Upon medical advice, I had to take some days off work in an attempt to centre myself. My immediate recovery regimen included a questionable blend of Tim Clare’s Coward: Why We Get Anxious & What We Can Do About It, a self-deprecating no-holds-barred personal account of dealing with debilitating anxiety, and Dan Fogelman’s superlative tearful drama This is Us. Cathartic and emotional, This is Us is perhaps as distant as possible from the kind of film or television that I usually consume. As much as I liked Milo Ventimiglia and Sterling K. Brown, I had until then stayed away from the show despite rave reviews from my partner. But in those weeks, the show became an interesting companion to my parallel reading on anxiety. In the months since, as I have tried to understand my anxiety, it has often been reflected in the characters of the show and the book.
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In This is Us, when Milo Ventimiglia’s Jack meets Mandy Moore’s Rebecca for the first time, he already has the early makings of the 90s hero-dad he turns into later, but he’s not quite there yet. He is a person of action but uncertain, quieter, and on the verge of blowing up his life.
He has not mastered the art of sweeping someone off their feet or Jack-Perasoning them, as Rebecca calls it later. Their first date is as bad as they come. Jack is tongue-tied and stops Rebecca dead in the tracks of all conversational openings, all topped off with getting her wet in the rain. The lesson here is if you are trying to impress a potential romantic prospect, and it starts to rain and you have to choose between spending money on umbrellas or games in a carnival, always go for the umbrella. Better yet, check the forecast beforehand and carry an umbrella.
When Jack drops her off, he tries to save the day by doing something that would become his trademark move — deliver a heartfelt speech. Over and over in the show, we see different versions of the Jack-Pearson-emotionally-stirring speech. He does this not by being charming, but by always telling a sincere story. Here, he talks about having a hard time since returning from the Vietnam War, and his perpetual sense of displacement. It is a little creepy to tell someone they make you feel like home on the first date. I am not sold on it even when Milo Ventimiglia says this with such a believable sincerity. Neither is Mandy Moore’s Rebecca. But what clinches it for her is “the way [he] looks at [her], wow!”
The awestruck, blown away, openly in love look is an overdone, working cliche on television, but Milo Ventimiglia does so much with it. Jack is not just transfixed by Rebecca but there is a slow, searching quality in how he looks at her, like seeing her will center him. Later, over the years, Jack is more assured and confident, but he still looks at Rebecca like that. This episode also made me realise what was so markedly different about Milo from Jess Mariano from Gilmore Girls, aside from ripped muscles and bad hair. Jess’ amused, mischievous eyes had given away to Jack’s sad eyes. Even in the best of times, his eyes betray an inner sadness, years of repressed anxiety, and unresolved emotions not quite locked away.
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Tim Clare’s Coward: Why We Get Anxious & What We Can Do About It is not a self-help book. He is characteristically self-deprecating when he says, “I’m barely qualified to dress myself, let alone coach someone I’ve never met through overcoming the most widespread mental illness in the world. It’d be like asking a goat to operate a lathe.”
The book is best described as part memoir, part self-experiment, part rumination on a subject that Tim Clare researches obsessively. For those of us who have ever suffered from an impairing form of anxiety, his resolve to get better driven by a concern for his family and whether he would pass on this impairment to his child, may resonate deeply. Through the book, he covers a lot of ground—diet and exercise, medication, cold-water therapy, hypnosis and meditation.
Our understanding of how anxiety and other mental health issues impact us physiologically has improved dramatically in recent years. But its fundamental principles have remained the same since 1915 when Walter B. Cannon published Bodily Changes In Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage. Tim Clare describes them succinctly.
“In the presence of pain or a perceived threat, our body stimulates the production of hormones like adrenaline, cortisol and noradrenaline which get us ready for action. Heart rate increases to pump additional blood to the muscles. Muscle tension increases to improve speed and strength. Blood clotting speeds up in case of injury. Blood sugar levels rise to provide the muscles with more energy. Breathing increases to flush out carbon dioxide in anticipation of an increase in waste CO2 as muscles begin working harder. Some blood vessels constrict while others dilate, to redirect blood flow to where it’s most needed. Digestion slows or stops. Vision narrows. Bladder and sphincter muscles loosen”
These are classic physiological symptoms of the fight, flight or freeze response.
I wonder if Tim Clare also saw the process of writing Coward as a way out of anxiety. He is brutally honest, not shying away from interrogating his feelings about different approaches to dealing with anxiety. He is confronted by the limitations of science in providing us with clear answers to ‘cure’ anxiety. Clare reminds us that anxiety often arises from an intolerance for uncertainty, he calls it an emotional fundamentalism. Science, on the other hand, inevitably involves embracing uncertainty.
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The Waiting Room from Season 3 of This is Us is one of the stronger episodes in the show, abandoning the space-time jumps for a single stage set, an entire episode set in a hospital waiting room.
Sterling K. Brown’s Randall is worried about and pissed at his brother Kevin who has just had a relapse, worried about his sister in surgery, worried about his massively-premature-to-be-born nephew, and worried about his mother Rebecca who is refusing to eat anything. Randall worries, overthinks and overplans. He is the only one of his siblings who inherits the Jack-Pearson-emotional-speech-giving talent. Unlike Jack, he tends to plan his speeches for weeks, perfecting them in his head and when and how to deliver them.
In the middle of this, we also see a part of a long fight about deep tensions in the marriage between Randall and the amazing Susan Kelechi Watsom’s Beth playing out. The person on whom Randall’s speechmaking talent is least effective is his wife, Beth. She sees him, anticipates him, checks him, and already knows whatever emotionally stirring thoughts are going on in his head. Randall is trying to talk his way out of this situation, ‘explaining’ what he meant when he asked her to ‘put a pin on her dreams’ and Beth is having none of it, calling him out on his carefully constructed conciliations.
Randall is like his adopted father Jack, perpetually displaced. He feels displaced in his loving, white, adoptive family; he feels displaced as a Black man; he feels displaced and trapped in his constant, doomed need to fix everything. Randall is also like his biological father William, sensitive and gentle. The series does a commendable job of chronicling Randall’s anxiety while referencing that of his two fathers.
When Jack was alive, he was the only one who could steady Randall when he was anxious. He would stand next to him, holding his head and take long, slow, deep breaths till he calmed down. For anyone who has relied on long, deep breaths to get through pain, fear and anxiety, the scenes between Jack and Randall, (and later, Randall and William during William’s last moments) may feel gut-wrenching. When a teenaged Randall shares his constant feeling of being out of place with Jack, you can see how much it breaks Jack’s heart to see his son experiencing a version of the same displacement he struggles with. Jack tells him, perhaps more in hope than anything else, that he will find that balance, foreshadowing the balance Randall would find with Beth.
Randall gets his need to save everyone from Jack. When Jack dies from too much carbon monoxide inhalation after saving his family from a devastating fire, this need dictates the rest of Randall’s life. Kevin sums this up in the most accurate, hilarious, sarcastic shot at his brother saying he is surprised Randall is not at the back delivering Kate’s premature baby.
William, who we later learn also suffered from anxiety, tried to gently tell Randall how to deal with it. This is a dying man, trying to grasp and catch the few precious moments he has left. If there is ever a person with perspective, it is a dying William Hill. He does not lament a ‘life of almosts and could haves’ but tells his son to ‘roll down his windows, grow out that afro and let someone else make the bed’.
Back to the hospital waiting room episode, despite Miguel’s insistence to leave Rebecca alone, Beth is the one who can talk Rebecca into eating something. Randall and Beth’s fight is not over, far from it, but he looks at Beth with so much love in his eyes. His look is not transfixed like the way Jack looks at Rebecca, it is not searching and sad, but content and admiring. In that moment, even though his life is completely up in the air, with his brother’s relapse, his sister’s life hanging in balance, and his marriage experiencing trouble, Randall is not displaced but at home with Beth.
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Tim Clare begins Coward with a description of how he grew a ‘tail’, a mixture of bone and cartilage, for about four weeks. Depending on how you count them, there are anywhere between twenty and sixty such documented cases. After a month, it was reabsorbed in Clare’s body. He points out that all of us grow tails at some point, but for most of us, it gets absorbed in our body when we are still a foetus. The title of the book, ‘Coward’ is a hat-tip to this tail.
“Coward’ comes from the Old French coart, meaning ‘one with a tail’. It may have been intended to evoke a dog with its tail between its legs in the instinctive gesture of submission. In old descriptions of heraldry, a ‘lion coward’ is a coat of arms depicting a lion with its tail between its legs.”
He darkly sums up the metaphor of the tail for anxiety, “We never lost our tail. It hides within us.” Much like Tim Clare, after having gone through a public and traumatic panic attack, I always feel like my anxiety lurks under the surface of my life. It is like a hidden anthill in the kitchen garden, whether neglected or well-tended, lying in wait for one wrong hit of the shovel to burst out into the open. When you live guarding against and managing your anxiety, whether you are anxious or not, your wonder whether your personality is that of an anxious person. The life that you live is one with an anxiety-toned filter, and sometimes you feel the need to get closer to see it clearly. Its constant presence can make your head spin.
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