On Miscarriage, Anxiety, and the Burden of Hope

“To have hope in the presence of suffering and constant anxiety can feel impossible.”

This is A Cure for Fear, a monthly column by Laura Turner on working, creating, and living with anxiety.

I saw Arrival the day after I found out that I was pregnant for the second time. My first pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage, and I didn’t have high hopes for this one—something about the timing seemed off, and my body hadn’t been changing in the ways it should have. No tenderness in my breasts, no nausea. But life is uncertainty and waiting, and so we went to the movies. An alien movie seemed like exactly the kind of distraction I needed that day.

I assumed buildings would get blown up, strange-bodied creatures would make me jump in my seat, and Amy Adams would look beautiful while she tried to put an end to the chaos. But Arrival was not an alien movie in the vein of, well, Alien, or Cloverfield, or even Mars Attacks. I wouldn’t be getting my two hours of distracted fun. What I got instead was a haunting and elegiac meditation on risk, certainty, and choice, featuring two elegant aliens who unspooled entire conversations from the palms of their long tentacles.

It won’t spoil too much of the movie to say that Arrival deals with the question of how we would proceed in life if we knew the precise details of the tragedies that will befall us. This question isn’t new; it dates back at least to the Golden Age of Greek mythology, when there was a widespread belief that men were born knowing the day on which they would die. That kind of knowledge does something to a person. It is an act of everyday bravery to live in a world knowing, that we have already circled the date on which we will die.

To live with every awareness that on a certain day, not so long from now, I will die, would seem a burden too great to bear. This existential angst boils down to our expectations. Many of us expect to lead healthy, long lives because that is what we can reasonably expect, being alive in this place, in this day and age. Anxiety, which has been my lifelong companion, was not considered a disorder until we began to expect that life would be comfortable. “Anxiety only stood out and began to be widely defined and treated as a disorder during the nineteenth century, once people could expect a basic level of safety and certainty in their lives,” wrote sociologist Allan Horowitz in his book Anxiety: A Short History.

We build a life based on what we expect. I expected that having a child would be straightforward; that my body would cooperate as soon as I introduced it to my will to be a mother. I expected to fill the second bedroom in my house with a crib, a soft white rug, dresser drawers stuffed with onesies. Instead, it remains overcrowded with my books, stacks of paper, an old white chair that no one sits on. It turns out that the place where expectations outpace reality is the most fertile breeding ground for anxiety.

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Hope is hard to come by when you are an anxious person. To us, the future has already been cast in as dim a light as possible, and the only thing we are certain about is that our dire predictions will protect us from ever having to experience the pain of dashed hopes. So when an anxious person suffers, she often tells herself that this is simply the way life is. My outward appearance suggests extroversion, optimism, and energy—and indeed I am, at times, full of these things—but when I read Thomas Hobbes in college, I breathed a sigh of relief when he described life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Here, I thought, was someone who got it.

At the root of my anxiety is the belief that if I anticipate suffering, perhaps I can soften its blow. My therapist tells me this kind of thinking is distorted. That’s not exactly how she says it, but she hands me a worksheet called the Daily Mood Log, and on the back there is a list of ten distortions commonly employed by people who suffer from anxiety. There is Emotional Reasoning: “If I feel X, X must be true.” Or Mental Filter, in which I only pay attention to certain kinds of evidence that reinforce what I already believe. Fortune Telling is another favorite—I predict that everything will turn out badly. And of course I do! Preparation is an important component of anxiety, because it extends the illusion that simply doing or knowing enough will keep me from harm.

Perhaps the key to not being anxious is to expect nothing. I never quite could come around to expecting nothing, though. I expect a lot of life, both volitionally and on account of the culture in which I live. Without meaning to, I have internalized the San Francisco sensibility of innovation, a value set that encourages careful comparison and fear of failure, and prompts me to tell myself You are only as good enough as what you have last produced. I compare my grief and suffering to the grief and suffering of other people, holding my tears against theirs and wondering why my inner life feels so much more suffused with pain than their outer personas.

The exquisite pain of anxiety is never more acute than in periods of suffering, because it is in suffering that we are offered proof of the world’s insufficiency, and we project that insufficiency forward throughout all time and space as long as we shall live. When I miscarried for the second time, I remembered a man who once said, in the course of arguing a point, “It’s like being pregnant: You either are or you aren’t. You can’t be ‘a little bit pregnant.’” Retroactive anger filled me. I wanted to find the man and shake him, and perhaps in doing so travel back in time, find a better body to inhabit, eluding suffering altogether. I wasn’t mad at him. I was mad because life is unfair.

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On the grand scale of pain, I have suffered relatively little. But I’ve started to ask a question in my anxiety and suffering: What do I want to get out of this time? I don’t expect to become a peaceful person overnight, but in some strange way, I think that if I don’t become a more kind, gentle, patient person during my suffering, I will have missed out on something very fundamental to being a human.

There is an urgency to life that can create and perpetuate fearful anxiety, and then there is the urgency that can imbue every interaction with meaning. The latter kind of urgency is what Arrival is about, the suffering that can be a balm between souls. Eventually, Amy Adams’s character can see the future unfolding in front of her, can see its gifts and the pain it will inflict on her, and chooses her path with clear-eyed openness. To be vulnerable is to be open to a wound. It is the only way we can live, but we also have to choose it.

Anxious minds like mine spin around to try to protect the heart from pain. And pain cannot be avoided, because it will find every one of us sooner or later, in large ways and small. Still, I hope for a crib and a soft white rug and a baby to raise. To have hope in spite of suffering is a brave endeavor. To have hope in the presence of constant anxiety can feel impossible. But life is uncertainty and waiting, and in the meantime, you can always go to the movies.