I spent a decade avoiding this book. Instead, I wrote a novel about intelligence testing, but it was missing something. So I wrote another book and another and another. Four manuscripts, all unpublished, were dancing wildly around a missing topic: anxiety. This book began as a way to let the panic out, but it soon became my sole focus, and I decided to dedicate myself to the project. The process was incredibly painful, although ultimately rewarding.
We come in all styles, and measuring the vast array of people with a one-size-fits-all model is counterintuitive. One size does not actually “fit all.” All means everyone. Think of every single person you meet in a day, in a week, or in a year. And imagine asking each of them the exact same questions. Their responses would be wildly different from one another, and impossible to score using one set of criteria. It’s a flawed system and it needs to be completely revamped. Tests are an accurate measure of a person’s comfort level in an artificial environment, not of what they know.
I really applaud the parents who are opting out of testing. What we need are more options. We can’t customize the tests to each student, but we can customize the environments and the methods by which the tests are administered.
I would tell myself to be really brave and talk to a teacher, tell her all of my symptoms, and say I needed someone to talk me through all my what-ifs.
I am still very much a New Yorker, geographically and psychologically, although SO MUCH has changed. All my beloved haunts are gone, the landmarks of my youth; the mom-and-popness of the landscape has also vanished. I’ve been in Brooklyn for fifteen years now and what’s most noticeable to me is the absence of multigenerations. I grew up surrounded by people of all ages, and I was friends with the people I liked. It didn’t matter if they were a decade older or younger. There’s a very specific energy to having three generations in a neighborhood, and I can’t find it anymore. What’s the same? The sky?
I still have anxiety, but I am better able to manage it. What’s helped me (outside of medication and regular therapy) has been my decision to be completely transparent about my struggles. I’ve been able to do that because of the accumulation of people who, over the past ten years, have confided in me about their vulnerabilities. Once I realized what plagued me was universal, it’s just that mine is severe, it helped me relax a little bit more into the world. My dog Busy and I live very happily in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, two blocks from my brother Eddie, and surrounded by friends. I am dating on and off (mostly off) and mulling over the idea of living in another state, or country, for a year.
I’m not quite sure. Either a book of speculative fiction or a collection of humor essays. Or something else entirely that hasn’t occurred to me. Although I do have four unpublished manuscripts on a hard drive somewhere…