This excerpt from A Healthy State of Panic describes an all-too-familiar immigrant story of isolation.
Farnoosh Torabi is a former financial reporter, podcaster (behind the series So Money), author, and expert on all things money, but that doesn’t mean she mastered the concept at an early age. In fact, at age 22, she was more than $30,000 in debt, and terrified. Recalling the financial mistakes — and triumphs — she experienced throughout her life was what led to her to write her latest book, A Healthy State of Panic. In it, Torabi dives deep on the psychology of fear, and how it can motivate us to make wise (or incredibly unwise) decisions, both in our personal lives and in our finances. In this excerpt from the book, she explores the topic of loneliness and how you can combat that feeling — and even use it to create something beautiful.
The fear of loneliness doesn’t exclusively mean being in the absence of others. You can be in a marriage, on a team, sitting in a crowded café with your baby asleep in her stroller, and all the while feel like you are on your own, with no shoulder to cry on or friend to share a laugh with. The feeling shows up when we find ourselves being an only or other.
Loneliness expert John Cacioppo, the late director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, said this can be one of the riskiest types of loneliness, the one to really fear. “If you’re in a crowd and that crowd is perceived to be antagonistic, then that’s more dangerous than being alone,” he said. In other words, in the company of people who seem to lack empathy, who are unkind or untrustworthy, is one of the scariest places to hang out. This fear is one to befriend. It may be telling you to take stock, find fruitful connections, and figure out where your resources are and how to use them to build community.
Perhaps the people who are most successful at doing this are those who haven’t been included in the overarching culture’s narrative of who belongs and who doesn’t. Sometimes the crowd around us is so foreign, we don’t know if they are antagonistic or friendly, or who we can trust. When my mom got married to my father, she was promised a whole new world, but when she got stateside, it was anything but this land is your land, this land is my land.
She was nineteen, didn’t speak the language, couldn’t drive, and had no network. Her story may not be unique in a room full of immigrants, but living in an apartment in Worcester with me, her little human appendage, while my father spent his days at the university, all she felt was lonely. She was not only new to the country but also to marriage and motherhood. And I didn’t exactly cure her loneliness either. For my mom, some of her loneliness may have stemmed from not really wanting to be a mother, at least not so soon. I mean, she didn’t even want me to call her “mom” in those early days, preferring me to use her first name, Sheida, followed by Joon, a common term of affection in Farsi. So, for many years, she was not my mom, she was my Sheida Joon.
By the time I was three or four years old, my mother had earned her driver’s license. On commutes to the Worcester Center Mall, a friend’s house, or the grocery store, I heard stories inspired by her pilgrimage to the United States, a journey filled with equal parts hope and resentment. Just as she was about to turn seventeen, her parents sat her down and explained that she needed to get married. And quick.
In the absence of being able to create human connections, we need to reach for something else safe that makes us feel alive, even happy.
College was not an option, nor was living with them indefinitely. My mom was the last remaining child in their house, and rather than encourage her to take the necessary time to create a plan and design her own way, as they had with her siblings, my grandparents introduced her to my dad to arrange a union. These were also very unsettling times in Iran with rumblings of a revolution underway. I have no doubt that the fear of an uncertain future prompted their sense of urgency. And so the decision was clear: the first viable suitor who checked enough boxes would earn her hand in marriage. My dad came from a well-to-do family in Shiraz. He was educated and already friends with my mom’s brother-in-law. A year later Mom was on a plane to the United States with her new husband, and an overstuffed Samsonite handed down from her sister.
Mom missed the “normal” life back home. She missed focusing on her own passions. Her life in America left her afraid, distrustful of the world around her. And while I didn’t always understand her anger and controlling nature, or the depths of her sadness, looking back, I see that she was scared of being alone.
My mom’s loneliness was not a state of mind. You can move to a place with more community, but my mom didn’t have the freedom to come and go as she wanted. At first she couldn’t drive. She didn’t have the means to call a cab whenever she was bored and wanted to go somewhere new. She couldn’t just walk out of the apartment and try to meet people; they wouldn’t have understood her. She was facing too many barriers to connection, including mobility, language, and the lack of a shared cultural foundation.
Loneliness doesn’t play around. In the absence of being able to create human connections, we need to reach for something else safe that makes us feel alive, even happy. Dance was an activity my mom brought with her from her past life in Iran, and it gave her a way to tap into her culture. Weekend mornings, while my dad was still asleep, she’d softly turn on the cassette player in our living room downstairs, close her eyes, and begin moving to and through the sounds of Iranian singers Hayedeh and Moein, on classic tracks she had brought over from Shiraz. She did this alone, freely expressing herself without judgment. As a kid, I studied her from a distance. I often felt a bit “in the way,” a wedge that stood in between my mom and her freedoms. I got the feeling that she didn’t want me around all the time, something I can relate to now, as a parent who hides often in the basement bathroom. Even I occasionally need a break from my children, two humans I willed into the world.
Persian dance is a delicate art form, a series of small, carefully crafted moves, engaging your entire body: toes, hips, shoulders, wrists, and even the eyebrows. Back then, I perched on the stairs, peeking below the handrail. She performed without ever asking for permission. Her passion for movement empowered her. It brought her joy, and for a little under thirty minutes every Sunday morning, it made her feel less lonely.
When you anticipate loneliness, when you feel the fear moving in, ask yourself what it is you need to connect with. What are you missing? What can help ease that fear for a stolen moment?
Adapted from A HEALTHY STATE OF PANIC, Copyright © 2023 by Farnoosh Torabi published by Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
