This Friday is the final day to enter Moment’s Elephant in the Room Contest! Send us 200-500 words addressing the question: How has anxiety affected you, your family or the Jewish people in general? Three winners will each receive an iPad, and the winning essays will be published in Moment. This year’s contest is a partnership between Moment and the Andrew Kukes Foundation for Social Anxiety. Below are some excerpts from a few of the entries we’ve received so far:
“I’m still not over Soon-Yi, but I remain grateful to Woody Allen for making “anxious” at
least sound entertaining. I’d have never become a writer if I was calm and grounded. But
then, would I have been born Jewish? Christians have faith, Buddhists have inner peace,
Muslims have rules. Atheists have science. Jews have Irritable Bowel Syndrome. This is
what happens when you grow up with kishke as a party food.”
“I don’t even feel perfectly safe when I’m in my own home. I’ll be at the top of the stairs,
balancing a basket of laundry, and I’ll suddenly have the thought, “what if I had a stroke right
now, lost my balance, tumbled down the stairs, broke my neck, and died.” And in thinking it,
it becomes a possibility that feels as corporal as the kids playing downstairs. As if fate were a
person poised to push me over the first step. I have similar fears even when I’m not at the top
of the stairs holding a laundry basket. I can be lying in bed and think of 1000 ways I could be
dead before morning. I can be washing dishes and come up with the same. These thoughts loop
through my brain incessantly, almost like an annoying student who keeps raising her hand while
you’re trying to continue on with the lesson.
I think these same thoughts for every person I love. No one feels perfectly safe, even when
they’re doing something as mundane as peeling a clementine.”
Have your own story? Share it with us by Friday by submitting online or through email at elephant@momentmag.com.