Social Anxiety and Holocaust History

It’s taken me this long–almost three decades–to figure out how my view of the world was shaped by the history I learned at Jewish day school, which often focused on the Holocaust. It sounds silly, but only over the past few years have I really understood that, actually, not being able to remember ever not knowing about the Holocaust isn’t normal; neither is being taught by survivors and children of survivors, and neither is not knowing how many survivors you’ve heard speak because you’ve heard so many, starting from a very young age.

Even once I realized that these parts of my education weren’t usual, it took me a little longer to understand that they’ve shaped parts of my worldview and behaviour in ways I’d never considered. In specific, although my social anxiety stems from a lot of sources, I only very recently came to realize that part of the reason I feel very uncomfortable if I think people dislike me, are angry with me, and/or don’t appreciate my competency is because I grew up on histories of personal feelings like those being the literal difference between life and death.

As an academic historian, I was trained to understand that history isn’t a smooth narrative in which we can point to the cause of every effect. People who achieved lasting recognition and/or effect on the world did so at best only partly through their own actions and choices; there’s an underlayer of contingency outside everyone’s control. 

But that’s not the way we think about history, and especially not about our own stories, especially not when we’re coping with grief and trauma and anger. It’s untenable to most of us to think “Why did this thing happen to me?” or “How did I achieve this?” and not be able to answer at least partly with “Well, it’s because I did or didn’t do this other thing.” Even when we turn over agency to a higher power–“I don’t know why this happened to me, but God does, and it’s part of God’s plan”–there’s still a sense in which we cling to the cause-and-effect of our own choices: “Something I did (or didn’t do) must have made God choose this path for me.”

That’s why, I think, so many survivor stories settled in my brain not as “The tides of fortune are truly random, and that is the horror and evil of what happened. Another person could have survived and I could have died just as easily, and none of us will ever know why” but as “In this part of my story, I did this small thing, and it turned out later that it saved my life because someone in response chose to be indifferent when they could have been cruel or kind when they could have been indifferent.”

Obviously, it’s not just personal stories bearing witness to the Holocaust in which this happens; in fiction, such as Western fairy tales, a common trope is for the main character to act kindly, at personal cost, when rivals didn’t, and to be rewarded when the recipient of the kindness turns out to be more powerful than expected. The woodcutter’s third son gives his food to the beggar by the wayside, who turns out to be a sorceress in disguise;* Androcles helps the lion.

And I’m sure all of them worked together on my psyche to gift me with the inner voice that whispers: but what if doing this thing makes that person angry with you? What if you need them later on?

Sometimes, this is only minor catastrophizing: what if they are my server in a restaurant? What if they work for a company I’d like to do business with or write something about me online that I have no way of responding to? And sometimes the catastrophizing is… more catastrophic.

Because I work in education, these feelings come up a lot. Not only do I sincerely hope that my students attain any positions of power, influence, and usefulness to which they aspire, but sometimes, what seems to me to be the right thing to do is going to make them upset. My goals are fairness for every student and helping them to learn the course material as best they can; understandably, sometimes students’ goals are different, like “pass this course”, “get a good mark to keep my scholarship”, or “don’t feel stressed about schoolwork.”

I struggle with the necessity of making someone unhappy when our goals conflict, even when my overall goal is what I see as the biggest benefit to all my students. The truth of life is, you can’t make everyone happy all the time, because sometimes being kind to someone is necessarily being unkind to someone else. Even if you do whatever you can to help others at an individual level, regardless of the general social cost, you’re still going to upset individuals who expect and depend upon you to be fair and treat people equally.

I know that I can’t avoid leaving a history of people who are upset with me and/or think I’m a bad or mean person, unless I avoid people totally (and even then…). That doesn’t stop my brain from wanting to hoard as many “good impressions” as possible, in case my survival depends on it someday. In case I need someone not to point me out or to spare me some food.

That’s ridiculous, and I know it is. It’s absurd on so many levels–not the least of which is the very fortunate unlikelihood that I’ll ever find myself in such a situation. And even if that unlikely situation does come to pass, I know that life isn’t a fairy tale: you don’t get punished because you made one misstep on the plot that was supposed to be your heroic journey but ended up being your tragedy. Sometimes, what happens to you happens for reasons that have nothing to do with any choices you made. It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.

Besides, I get upset with people without feeling like if I had the chance to ruin their life, I’d take it. I’ve felt unfairly treated by professors or teachers or others in charge too–in some cases, so much so that I still haven’t fully let go of my indignation–but my knee-jerk instinct if offered the chance to hurt them–even by lack of providing help they need–would be a resounding “No!”

All these arguments make sense, but feelings don’t always make sense. I still get a surge of irrational, anxious adrenaline whenever I have to email anyone decisions they might not like. And the best I can do is remind myself of the terrifying lessons of history: you can’t control every single thing that happens to you, and you can’t be prepared for every bad thing. All you can do is what seems right in the moment and train yourself to turn your thoughts to the good and probable things instead of to the bad and unlikely ones.

* Only as an adult have I started to imagine exactly what sort of person I’d have to be in order to decide, as a powerful sorceress with the ability to help people, that my time is best spent pretending to be helpless and passing judgement on whether strangers stop to aid me. I think it might be worse to be deemed worthy by that kind of person than to be found wanting.