Feeling Unhinged: Discovering I’m Not Alone

By Melissa Ludtke

“I’m feeling unhinged,” I tell my friend. We’re on the phone. I called to talk. Perhaps I needed to hear her voice as comfort food for my soul. Texting isn’t the same. Yet as we’re talking I can’t quite explain why I used the words I did to describe how I feel. They must have bubbled up from within me. Now I was releasing them without knowing quite what I really mean.

It’s like I’m adrift, a feeling I know well from sailing. It’s like the wind is shifting. I’m caught in a lull and sensing a squall approaching. I’m working, but not in any way that feels productive. If I had wheels, they’d be spinning. I’m unfocused, and this morning I’m finding myself easily rattled by what on another day might seem a tiny irritation to easily swat away like a fly at rest. On edge, I guess I’d call it.

It’s like the wind is shifting. I’m caught in a lull and sensing a squall might be approaching.

In wading into the bottomless pit of one of those hit-a-number phone trees, I was simply trying to talk with an actual human being. Hit a number. Listen. Hit. Listen. On it goes until I hit O. I press down, hoping O still means operator — or at least offers a pathway to a human being. As frustration mounts, I feel primed to slam the receiver into the phone’s cradle. That I use a phone that has a cradle hints at my age. Yes, my landline gives me away; I’m a Boomer.

Maybe younger people are onto something. Forget talking with a human being. If it can’t be done via Snapchat or text, don’t bother. Trying to reach someone by phone ranks up there with flying. Another friend told me last night how surprised she was to find a long, long line just heading into the TSA zone at 4:30 that morning at Logan airport. “Remember when flying was about choosing a really nice outfit to wear,” she said. I do. Dressing up to fly is oxymoronic these days; I wear the loosest fitting clothes possible to squeeze into my impossibly cramped seat and headphones to block out the ubiquitous complaints.

Unhinged? Even if I can’t define my own feeling, my friend can. There’s meanness in the air, she says, a virus of hate on the loose. Last night at her usual coffee shop, the waitress she knows well was ending her shift. She looked exceptionally tired, so my friend asked her if anything was wrong. “People’s meanness is wearing me down.”

Meanness abounds. My friends write op-eds, and before their words are even published, they assure me they won’t read the comments. Why bother? Too often descent into hate-filled, argumentative diatribe is rapid. Civility is boring. Not edgy click bait. Forget manners, and certainly don’t expect a thank you.

Civility is boring. Not edgy click bait. Forget manners, and certainly don’t expect a thank you.

From the time I was nine years old the quadrennial political season has enthralled me. I still enjoy going door-to-door for my candidate; human contact feels good. I’m asked to join phone banks but I know how much I dislike the computer dialed calling and scripted conversations, so I decline. In fact, this year I’m doing whatever I can to escape coverage of the campaign; I don’t have cable TV; I turn off radio “pundits,” and I run the other way whenever I see a Donald Trump video on social media.

Still, Trump’s demeaning, derogatory personal jabs seep into my consciousness. Like a sponge, I absorb his meanness. Unhinged? Maybe it’s the fending off of meanness that has me sputtering as I try to regain my stride. I sense others, too, are taking this in, whether they seek out coverage or not. It seems to inhabit the air we breathe.

It’s leaving me on edge, feeling like a teenager, again fearful of when the verbal bully will strike next. Distrust stands at record lows. No institution commands the respect of the American people. Where do we turn when the intensity of anger amps up at each of the major candidates vying to lead us?

Massage therapists and psychiatrists observe this uptick in anxiety. The friend I called says that her therapist told her last week that her patients spend half of their session talking about the Republican candidate and the uptick in anxiety they are experiencing. Headline writers at the Washington Post aren’t waiting for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to label this ailment. They call it “Trump anxiety.”

“I’m feeling unhinged,” I tell my friend.

By the time we hang up at least I know I’m not alone in feeling the way I do.

And that’s why we talk to friends. Isn’t it? ##

Melissa Ludtke is producing the transmedia storytelling project “Touching Home in China: in search of missing girlhoods.” As a reporter for Sports Illustrated, she won equal access for women sportswriters when she took Major League Baseball to federal court in the 1978 case Ludtke v. Kuhn.