Who was the enemy? All those rough, Gentile kids who liked to spit and seemed to only have last names-Hutchins, Miletti, Himmler--and who seemed to take great pleasure in terrorizing meek-mannered Jewish children like me, who preferred to read during recess rather than participate in the insanity of dodgeball, an insane game in which the strongest and most athletic kids seemed to take sadistic pleasure in throwing a ball unbelievably hard and fast directly at my head from only a few feet away. Not my game. Rather, I was among the nerdy, brainy ones our teachers constantly praised, scribbling "A++, Great work!!!" across every homework assignment, and practically deferring to us as if we were visiting Talmudic scholars at a Yeshiva. It must have been extremely annoying. I would have wanted to beat me up. (Sadly, I have, and do.)

Thus if it is true that our greatest gift is buried inside our biggest fear, for me that always seems to involve leaving the house. Apart from writing, virtually every meaningful thing I've ever done that has made any genuine contribution to others has required my not only getting dressed and getting out, and not only actively engaging with all sorts of people that make me anxious to the point of dripping with nervous sweat, but to actually assume leadership positions. Again and again, I am asked to step forward and do exactly the very things that terrify me most, and almost always it involves being in front of roomfuls of people. As a result, there just isn't anything I'm half-way good at that doesn't cause me to have knots in my belly for about a week beforehand, not to mention neglecting to actually breathe for days at a time. Forget about sleep. (When I met my wife, she was a practitioner of an alternative healing modality called "Transformational Breathwork." I was the first person she was unable to respirate, and it effectively caused her to end her career and go mainstream, now working toward a Ph.D. in Psychology in a last-ditch effort to cure me.)

Much soul-searching over the years has revealed to me that my incessant fearfulness is likely a direct descendent of my mother's cellular terror of the "other," after barely making it out of Nazi Germany as a young girl. As a kid, this inherited condition simply labeled me a "scaredy cat" or a "chicken."  

As I got older, it was reframed by professionals with the more legitimate-sounding title, "Generalized Anxiety Disorder." (A more appropriate name, I think,  would be "Being Alive Syndrome.") Yet over the years, whatever gifts and talents I have been given have  demanded that I continually face, feel and act in spite of my fears, and I've just never been happy about it. It's kind of similar to the way that all the fun things to eat are bad for you; just one more of life's practical jokes.

I felt a little consoled when I learned that some of our greatest performers--I believe this is true of Barbra Streisand, for one--still throw up before every performance, despite a lifetime of success and adoration from fans. That made me feel a little better about the fact that none of the available options in the therapeutic supermarket have been able to touch this particular malady of mine, and I've run the gamut of available approaches--Primal, Gestalt, Object Relations, generic talk therapy ad nauseum, and an assortment of others; nor have pharmaceuticals or spiritual practices made any dent in this particular area.

It always astonishes me to learn that mine is not a universal problem, that there are actually some people--maybe even you--who simply wake up in the morning without a deep sense of dread and foreboding, and go about their business, as if living is no big deal. Actually, come to think of it, I live with one of them. After a few sips of her morning coffee, Shari is apt to spontaneously perform one of her faux-Bob Fosse dance routines while I'm still groggy, grumbling, and trying to psych myself up to encounter another day on earth. (The dance routines do help, I have to say.)

My friends will substantiate that virtually nobody has gone to more extreme lengths than I have in seeking a solution to this fundamental, raw discomfort with simply inhabiting a human form on this planet. I spent my obligatory six months in India and Thailand, sitting before the spiritual great ones, both known and hidden. (See photo, above; that's me, sitting between Ringo and the Maharishi, in my "George Harrison" get-up). I put in my time in the Brazilian jungles ingesting ancient, powerful shamanic brews (ayahuasca) that had me vomiting my guts out continuously for three weeks, which is actually an expected part of the purging process leading up to visionary states. My visionary states, however, were limited to vivid images of my mother saying, "For this you paid money? You call this a vacation? You can throw up at home, for free." I've sat alone in secluded mountaintop huts for 40 days and 40 nights, and camped out atop Mt. Sinai conversing with a maddeningly silent Old Testament God

 who, though once spotted there by Moses, apparently summers in the Negev. My list goes on and on. (Read all about it here.) 

As a music composition major in university, I wrote and arranged pieces requiring up to 30 instrumentalists to perform, and after suffering through the agony of having to personally request 30 people to come to rehearsals, I decided to only write piano works that I could play myself, and quit music school soon after. Again and again, throughout my life, I would either withdraw from those situations that provoked extreme anxiety, which resulted in making my life smaller and deader--or I would suck it up, tighten my belly, assume a presentable face, maybe pop a Xanax, and step forward, into and through them. Whenever I did the latter, I almost always met with success, appreciation, positive feedback and acknowledgement, as well as an inner sense of gratification that my life seemed to have left a positive mark in some small way on the lives of others. And all it required was my doing exactly the opposite of what I felt like doing. So much for "trusting your feelings." (Don't.)