The first time I remember feeling anxiety was a morning before school in the third grade. It was autumn. It was a K-8 program; we used to get dropped off, shuttled into the gym, and held there until our volume moved within an inch of a fever pitch, at which point we were finally released to class to avoid creating the unique chaos of people aged five to 14.
My belt was not buckling.
It made me uptight. There was a heavy fluttering in the center of my chest. I knew what “heavy” felt like and I knew what “fluttering” felt like, but did not understand how they were able to coexist. And I didn’t have time to think about it, because my motions became sharp and rigid, to answer for this faulty belt. I wore a belt every day. I never had a problem before.
One of my aunts was at the house that morning. She recommended using the reverse side of the belt, to see if the buckle laid differently. I paused to hear what she was saying, tried it, and it worked. This was also the first time I remember being anxious, stepping back, and then feeling as though time could dissolve and reconstruct itself between blinks, as if the feeling slowly working itself down my chest cavity could go away like a dream you don’t remember. It meant that I could walk into the gym with hundreds of other kids and not think twice about what was happening with my belt or who would notice.
Here’s the thing, though: I quickly learned the difference between knowing that feeling could dissolve and it actually dissolving, and which one to believe more readily. I walked into that gym and got a third of the way to my class’s bleachers and I felt something again. It made me walk slower, which made my brain ask what was going on, which made me look at my belt and realize it had unclasped, and the rigidity and sinking mass were back.
It didn’t lead to any great embarrassment. I don’t even remember the rest of that day. The sum of the morning was swallowed up like a piece of popcorn, a kernel that serves a greater hunger but nothing by itself. Experiences like this continued for years, never prompted by anything in particular. (Much later, I’d learn that this was the “General” in “Generalized Anxiety Disorder.”) I’d say they were countless but I know that’s misleading. They are countable, but I have lost interest in counting them because it is far more startling to consider and much simpler to instead use a generic adjective, even now.
***
For the most part, my anxiety didn’t wrap its hands around my moments with sports because my hometown Phillies stunk. I spent a lot of Sundays at Veterans Stadium and Citizens Bank Park with my brothers and it was incredible, but the mediocre-or-worse play was part of the deal. I knew Curt Schilling’s departure for Arizona in 2000 was disappointing but it didn’t cause me dread. Even as the team edged into being interesting the following year, Travis Lee holding them back by being one of the worst first basemen in the league after being a big piece of the Schilling deal didn’t stop me in my tracks. Jimmy Rollins didn’t, either, when he appeared to level off in 2003 as simply a nice player to have. None of this had anything to do with my stomach pain in middle school that I feared would make me double over if I moved too quickly.
Kenny Lofton’s bounceback in 2005 and Aaron Rowand’s in 2007 were flat-out exciting and were unrelated to the white knuckles I’d get when gripping a drumstick at marching band rehearsal in high school, which I only became aware of when friends pointed them out. I thought it was normal, that it was how everyone held a stick. This says nothing of the team’s core of Rollins, Ryan Howard, and Chase Utley having fully emerged by that point, or about how having only sniffed the playoffs meant they never gave me any reason to feel anything close to a paradoxical shiver in the center of my physical being. Their success was nice, and it was fun, but I hadn’t felt compelled to attach any hope to it beforehand.
When the team broke the city’s championship drought in 2008, I had only just started college. I remember exactly where I was, the noise I made when Brad Lidge struck out Eric Hinske to seal it, and the release of nerves that came. But I was still months off from my first full-blown anxiety attack. Nothing that team did ever coalesced with the dread of asking myself “what if?” and the chilling silence afterward.
***
That came at the end of the spring semester, right at finals. It mimicked a stroke. The right side of my body went numb, giving me anxiety about my anxiety. I’m right-handed, and couldn’t finish a project that was due the next day. I sat on our white couch—the nice one you only sit on when there’s company—disoriented, short of breath, and terrified.
Eventually the anxiety retracted its teeth enough to allow me the freedom to finish the project, but as can happen after an anxiety attack, adrenaline coursed through my entire body. I stayed up late enough to outlast an NHL playoff game that went to overtime on the West Coast, the San Jose Sharks against the Anaheim Ducks. And then, as can happen when an anxiety attack truly ends, I crashed. I was stone cold asleep for 12 hours. When I woke up, I felt even freer but also distant; close, but not accessible, like I was watching myself from the other side of a crowded train. Then I realized I had slept through a final and receded into the bed.
Awkwardly, I made it through the end of that school year. I started the next one not yet recovered from the slow, grinding exhaustion of the previous 12 months, and unaware of how the years leading up to it—in which I got constant reminders that the heavy flutter could go away but didn’t, which I never confronted—contributed more than I could have imagined. The Phillies surged forward, though, adding Cliff Lee and topping their 2008 win total by a game on the way to their second-most wins as a franchise since 1977.
My own trajectory felt as though it was plowing downward but when they won, I won. Their dominance became a massive comfort, a release from the vague concept of coming out on the wrong side of the line of winners and losers, of helpful and hapless. They were a force the whole season and a steamroller through the playoffs.
Then the World Series happened against the Yankees, owners of the league’s best record that year at 103-59. The Phillies won Game 1 but by the time Game 4 happened, so had Hideki Matsui and Johnny Damon and Johnny Damon again. The most talented Phillies of my lifetime were on the ropes, down three games to one. They ended up making it to a Game 6, but calling it competitive would be generous. It felt like it was over by the middle innings and stayed that way. I remember where I was for the end of that one, too, and the sounds I kept to myself, and how there was one more thing from which I felt distant after 18 months of similar, inevitable pile-up I didn’t want to look at. The external reprieve that they provided, that I had come to bank on because I couldn’t count on myself, was gone.
***
That winter I had my second anxiety attack, during which I heard a distinct voice telling me I’d be fine, that I just had to wait things out. It sounded a lot like my own but plain and mostly unconcerned. I couldn’t tell if that was because it was telling the truth or because it wanted to. For the next four years, the pattern would go no longer than six months without repeating again, and often happened much sooner than that. Then it happened less often and on slightly less intense terms for the three years after that.
That took me through Roy Halladay’s perfect game, and then Halladay saying it was only gonna get funner, and then Halladay’s playoff no-hitter, and eventually losing to the 2010 Giants in the NLCS. Ditto for 2011 with the four aces with Halladay, Lee, Roy Oswalt, and Cole Hamels. That team won 102 games but lost to the 90-win Cardinals in the divisional round. The season ended with Howard stumbling and then collapsing as he charged out of the batter’s box in a last ditch effort to preserve it. The moment mimicked the team’s, and what felt like my own, shortcomings: long and slow and resounding.
By the time the front office realized that they needed to move on from the core that won a World Series in 2008, I had graduated college and started working. By the time they admitted that the rebuild wasn’t working, it was a solid year or so after everyone else did and I had been bouncing around from job to job, thanks to short-term positions wrapping up, budget cuts, and staff restructuring. In my personal life, I had gotten the help that I deserved, and that everyone deserves, including the time to explore what that help should look like.
Once again, the Phillies didn’t give me any reason to feel connected to them—that’ll happen when your team president talks about making the playoffs like it’s a brunch reservation when they already have an in-home chef—and my dread, far more intermittent and far less esoteric, was no longer something I projected onto losses. If 2008 showed me that the unthinkable can happen, then 2009 and beyond reminded me gently but firmly that I was from a city where even the three-legged rats don’t catch a break—but that that’s not a damning condition.
***
That’s why I was startled when each game of the 2022 playoffs created more heavy fluttering in my chest cavity. As productive as the previous decade had become for me personally, it also reinstated a lack of expectations around the Phillies. They didn’t make the playoffs, that was just part of reality. They weren’t supposed to win against the Cardinals once they got there. But then Jean Segura slashed at a pitch he shouldn’t have, that he definitely shouldn’t have made contact with, that definitely shouldn’t have gotten through the infield but did, and it was like Sisyphus was pushing the rock down the other side of the hill; I knew that the faster it went the harder it could crash. Between that first game against the Cardinals in the Wild Card round and Yordan Alvarez smashing that god forsaking home run in Game 6 of the World Series, my beard had acquired more white hairs than I could hide with a trim. I went to bed the night of the Alvarez home run heartbroken in ways I was intimately familiar with. And at its core, that’s all anxiety ever wants to avoid.
My own practices, crafted slowly the way a bird would carve away at a rock by circling it with a scarf in its beak, allowed me to wake up and smile about it all much sooner than the end of the World Series 13 years earlier. Sports are often a sour experience, but don’t have to be a zero-sum game when it comes to appreciating them. The 2022 Phillies weren’t supposed to be The 2022 Phillies, but they were. Ending as less than champions doesn’t make them less remarkable.
The 2023 Phillies were similar but, because it has to, this sentence regards them in the past tense. They were over even sooner than the 2022 club. Jarrett Seidler’s requiem details them in ways worth reading. I don’t have much to add. After a similar season in which they grew and changed from April through September, slowly finding themselves, October came and they were washed away like a sand castle worn down by an inching tide. Another 18 months and another lesson on letting go.
Thank you for reading
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