My Year with Eleanor (2 page)

After signing off with Chris, I downed the dregs of my coffee and bellied up to the counter for a refill. While I waited my eyes drifted aimlessly around the café. Next to the register there was a flyer advertising free guitar lessons. Zany postcards were lacquered to the tabletop. Then something else grabbed my attention. On the far wall there was a small chalkboard sign featuring an inspirational quote of the day. Today's quote, written in pink chalk and squiggly handwriting, was:

Do one thing every day that scares you.

—Eleanor Roosevelt

“S
o what is it about this quote that's resonating with you?” my shrink, Dr. Bob, asked a few days later at our biweekly session. I'd started seeing Dr. Bob about a year before when I'd realized I knew more about Jennifer Aniston than I knew about myself.

“I don't know.” I escaped his stare by looking around the room. It was full of nonthreatening furniture with rounded edges and warm taupe walls. The entire room was neutrals. Even Dr. Bob was neutral. His unjudgmental shrink eyes. He was neither tall nor short, not thin or overweight. His hair was somewhere between brown and gray and arranged in fluffy curls, making him look boyish, despite being in his fifties. He should have given up his practice for a life of crime. The man blended.

I was sitting—I always sat, never laid down—on his squishy leather couch, and he was across from me in his own chair. We were both slouching. It always felt like we should be watching the game instead of talking about my feelings.

“It's just . . . I used to
do things,
you know?”

“Do things?” he repeated.

“I don't try new things anymore. The older I get, the less I challenge myself.”

He rubbed his fingers thoughtfully over his chin. “Can you think of a situation where fear stopped you from doing something?”

“Well, I don't know if I'd call this
fear,
but a few years ago I was at this karaoke bar with a bunch of my friends, right? I put my name in for a song—I think it was The Divinyls' ‘I Touch Myself'—”

Dr. Bob raised an eyebrow.

“It was a lark!” I said defensively and continued. “Anyway, this guy went on right before me and did an incredible rendition of Journey's ‘Don't Stop Believin'.' He had this whole dance routine to go along with it. At one point, he actually kicked over a chair! Everyone was going wild. Afterward people were still clapping him on the back, and then my song started up and I froze. I knew it was supposed to be all in good fun, but no way was I following that.”

“So what did you do?”

“What do you think I did? I pretended it wasn't my song and I got the hell out of there.”

“And what if you had gotten up there and bombed?” he mused. “What happened the last time you performed poorly at something?”

I mentally thumbed through the past few years of my life, but all I saw was work, a dinner here or there with Matt, the occasional summer blockbuster. “Okay, last year Matt and I went bowling and I threw ten straight gutter balls in a row.”

“And what happened afterward?”

“And now I don't go bowling!” I said, exasperated. “It's not about
fear
. I just don't enjoy doing things I'm bad at.”

“Avoidance
is
fear,” he said gently. “When we're afraid of fear, we avoid situations that trigger it.”

“But who cares if I don't bowl or sing karaoke?”

“The problem with avoidance is that it leaks over into other areas of our life. For instance, you've been avoiding new people, recreational activities, your friends—”

I interrupted, “That last one doesn't even make sense. I'm not afraid of my friends.”

His voice remained patient. “No, but when our world feels out of control, we withdraw to maintain the illusion of safety.”

I opened my mouth to object, then closed it. There was a moment of uncomfortable recognition.

He continued: “Fear can paralyze our lives. Fear of making the wrong decision keeps us from making any decision at all.”

The empty one-year plan on my computer popped into my head, aggressive in its blankness. Was Dr. Bob right? Had fear slowly been consuming my life without my realizing it? My mind replayed all of the times I'd said nothing during work meetings because I was worried my idea would sound dumb. The time I'd turned down the opportunity to speak on a panel because I hate public speaking. How I'd stayed at bad jobs for too long because it was easier than leaving. Even small things like paying full price at flea markets because I was uncomfortable haggling with the vendors. How many chances had I squandered? How much of my life had been about avoiding life?

“Going back to this Eleanor Roosevelt quote,” Dr. Bob was saying. “This could be a good project for you. You should run with this!”

“Huh?” I asked, snapping to attention. “Run with what?”

“Start doing more things that scare you!” When Dr. Bob got excited about something, his head actually bobbed. “You need to avoid avoiding. Practice confronting your fears,” he said. “The more obstacles you overcome, the more empowered you feel, and the more you want to overcome other obstacles.”

He had me nervous when he'd said
project,
but lost me completely at
obstacle,
a word that brought to mind climbing walls and tire mazes run by people in short shorts.

“Couldn't I just”—I cast about for an alternative and settled on an antianxiety medication—“take an Ativan or something?”

“Pills are a temporary fix,” he said firmly. “What you need is a lifestyle change.”

Lifestyle changes were for the morbidly obese. Or people who hoard newspapers until they're so walled in by the stacks that their living space is reduced to three square feet. A
lifestyle change
? I mean, get serious.

Dr. Bob's eyes scanned my face for a moment. “Noelle, anxiety can foster depression, impair your physical health, damage your relationships, and reduce your effectiveness in the world.” His voice was concerned, rather than matter-of-fact. “But if you allow yourself to fully experience fear, eventually you'll learn how to face it without being overwhelmed by it.”

What could I say to that? I was trapped. If I refused, I was being an avoider. Dr. Bob didn't wait for my response. He knew it was better to let the idea percolate. Instead, he stood up, pulling the sides of his jacket together like curtains at the end of a play—the signal that our session was over.

“Think about this Eleanor Roosevelt idea,” he said, opening his office door. “It might be the direction you've been looking for.”

On my way home, I stopped by the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. It had an entire Roosevelt section, including a number of books written by Eleanor herself. I was skeptical about this whole fear-facing idea, but Eleanor had me intrigued. I was intensely curious about her life the way I once hungered for details about Angelina Jolie. I grabbed a couple of books off the shelf and plopped down on the scratchy industrial carpeting. Her life story was so rich that she wrote three autobiographies.

Skimming through her memoirs, I discovered that one of the most celebrated women in recent history was consumed by self-doubt as a kid. Her father, Elliott, doted on her, but one thing he had no patience for was her timidity. Because she adored him, she did her best to hide her fears from him. When she was six, the family took a trip to Italy. During a donkey ride through the mountains, Eleanor came to a steep downhill slope. She trembled with fright and refused to go forward. Elliott stared down at her and said, “You are not afraid, are you?” Fifty years later, Eleanor wrote, “I can remember still the tone of disapproval in my father's voice.”

But it was her mother, Anna, who planted the first seeds of doubt. “I always had the feeling from a very young age that I was ugly,” Eleanor said. She was forced to wear a back brace to correct a curvature of the spine, and she was painfully aware that her beautiful mother was embarrassed by her plainness. “I can remember standing in the door, very often with my finger in my mouth,” Eleanor recalled, “and I can see the look in her eyes and hear the tone in her voice as she said: ‘Come in, Granny.' If a visitor was there, she might turn and say, ‘She is such a funny child, so old-fashioned that we always call her Granny.' I wanted to sink through the floor in shame.” Anna suffered chronic migraine headaches, and Eleanor rubbed her mother's temples for hours.

“The feeling that I was useful,” Eleanor later said, “was perhaps the greatest joy I experienced.”

This was the problem with blogging, I thought. I'd been busy but I hadn't felt useful. One of the quotes in Eleanor's book that made me flinch was: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” For years I'd been paid to write gossip about people.

I set down the autobiography and noticed the corner of another book peeping out from the pile. It was an unassuming little advice guide she wrote titled
You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life
. The summary on the back read: “Offering her own philosophy on living, the woman who was called First Lady to the World leads readers on a path to confidence, education, maturity, and more.” I flipped the book over and studied the photograph of Eleanor on the cover. She was in her forties, smiling gamely at the camera, swathed in a fur coat and a triple-strand pearl necklace. While not a beautiful woman, she was glamorous and confident, so different from the insecure child I'd just been reading about. I'd gone the opposite way, I realized. I'd been bold when I was younger but instead of challenging myself as I grew older, I'd simply eliminated the threatening things in my life. Deciding Eleanor's life story was something I needed to digest more fully, I gathered the autobiographies and advice book and headed to the cash register.

The next day at the coffee shop I blew through
You Learn by Living
in one sitting. Upon finishing, I turned back to the chapter titled “Fear—The Great Enemy” and reread it carefully. Eleanor credited fear as the great motivator of her life. “I was an exceptionally timid child, afraid of the dark, afraid of mice, afraid of practically everything. Painfully, step by step, I learned to stare down each of my fears, conquer it, attain the hard-earned courage to go on to the next. Only then was I really free,” she wrote.

I leaned back in my chair, and my gaze fell upon the chalkboard. The Eleanor quote was no longer there, having been replaced with something by Maya Angelou. I'd memorized it anyway:
Do one thing every day that scares you.
If Eleanor determined her life purpose by conquering her fears, maybe it could help me figure out my future, with the added benefit of salvaging my friendships and reviving my relationship. Maybe to find out what I
did
want to do, I first had to do the things I
didn't
want to do. At the very least, conquering a fear each day would give me a goal to meet, a sense of purpose.

When I was reading
You Learn by Living
, I felt like Eleanor was talking directly to me: “The most unhappy people in the world are those who face the days without knowing what to do with their time. But if you have more projects than you have time for, you are not going to be an unhappy person. This is as much a question of having imagination and curiosity as it is of actually making plans.”

“How long would you do it for?” Matt asked when I called him with the idea.

As a blogger I'd had deadlines every half hour, and my work had always felt careless and unfinished. Now I wanted enough time to fully devote myself to what I was doing. Time to ensure I wouldn't return to my old habits as soon as it was over, but not so much time that I'd burn out.

“I'll give it a year, starting on my twenty-ninth birthday.” My thirtieth birthday seemed like a natural stopping place.

“A
year
?” he repeated, sounding incredulous. “I'm all for anything that gets you out of the house, honey, but have you thought this through? How will you support yourself?” The problem with Matt being a reporter was that he was always playing devil's advocate. The problem with me being stubborn was it made me dig my heels in even more.

“I can make enough money freelancing to stay afloat for a while—no one's hiring for full-time positions anyway—and I have savings.” The more I defended the idea to him, the more invested I felt in it.

“Well, you know I'm here for you no matter what,” he said, but his voice was dubious.

Chris was even less charitable. “It sounds a little crazy.  I would hate to see you in a straitjacket, Noelle. They're really unflattering. They just add bulk.” He added, “Though I have to admit, the idea of taking a year just to focus on me
does
sound pretty appealing.”

Maybe it was crazy. Then again, our culture constantly sought lifestyle advice from celebrities, many of whom rose to fame on nothing more than sex tapes or a willingness to argue with others on camera while living in mansions provided by television networks. Wasn't
that
crazy? Eleanor was more than a celebrity—she was a role model. This was an anxious girl who grew up to become a social activist and a First Lady who held regular news conferences, wrote a newspaper column six days a week, and carried a pistol. In her downtime, she helped form the United Nations and establish the state of Israel. She assisted Franklin in carrying out the New Deal. It was an experiment in which the government poured resources into various programs to restore growth and public morale.

I told myself that this experiment could be my own New Deal: investing in myself now to create future growth. But part of me wondered if Chris was right and this was simply an exercise in self-indulgence. Shouldn't I be serving others? Then I remembered what Dr. Bob said about anxiety reducing our effectiveness in the world. Wasn't living a fearful life also self-indulgent? I wasn't fully contributing to the world if I was pulling back from it all the time. Not only that, worriers are draining to other people. I didn't want to keep dragging others down. If Dr. Bob was right about fear perpetuating fear in ourselves, my fears probably touched those I came in contact with in ways I couldn't even comprehend.