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that very day.
    Anxiety and sadness often occur at the same time. Psychological assessments for sadness often look for an anxiety component, but they are absolutely separate. One can be anxious
and
happy, for example (an incomprehensible combination to my mind, like Jewish Republicans). I couldn’t for the life of me tease the anxious and sad strands apart, so I spent a good portion of theday asking poor Julie Norem to once more explain the difference to me. She was doubtless very glad to drop me off at the Amtrak station six hours later.
    My confusion was making me stupid in other ways, too. On the train back, I realized that I had allowed the cassette to auto-reverse on itself over and over, all day long, like a weaver’s shuttle. I had lost many of the hours and hours of questions and answers in a magnetic pentimento. Even as I sat there in the Quiet Car, my hand covering my mouth in wonder at my “yes I am indeed fucked … so very, very fucked” stupidity, I was not hugely surprised at this small act of self-sabotage: I didn’t want to write this piece.
    So I didn’t.
    In the three weeks leading up to the due date, I did no writing at all, aside from my self-pitying, stultifying diary, whose entries all began “T minus X days,” referring to the twentieth, when I would have to call my editor and tell her that I had failed, without even the necessary pages of twaddle I’d need to qualify for a kill fee. I was Penelope at her loom, filling my time with busywork. I woke each day at the crack and, when it seemed appropriate, I would pick up the phone and begin that day’s interviews with other psychologists, all purportedly in the name of re(me)search.
    I spoke to James Pennebaker, the chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas in Austin, who worked with survivors of traumatic experiences. He found that if patients wrote, talked about, or articulately confronted what they had gone through, as opposed to suppressing the feelings, they showed marked improvements in physical health, immune function, and other markers. In another study he conducted in 1989 with David Watson, they found that even the kvetchiest patients, those with the least-positive attitudes, who complained most about their symptoms, turned out to be no objectivelysicker than those with low negative affect. It was nice to find out, then, that if one is characterologically incapable of
not
being a total fuckface, science has not shown you will die any sooner. People might just be gladder when you eventually do.
    David Lykken conducted the Minnesota Study of Twins (not the baseball team; think Doublemint, or Romulus and Remus), collecting data from hundreds of pairs of identical and fraternal twins for years, measuring their subjective well-being (SWB)—their self-reported happiness—and found that “the effects on current SWB of both positive and negative life events are largely gone after just three months and undetectable after six … Most people will have adapted back to their genetically determined set-point.” Lykken found this to be the case across the board among his subjects, regardless of economic, racial, ethnic, gender, or other circumstantial factors. So if you win the lottery or have your limbs lopped off by an oncoming train, within 180 days, you’ll be back to your old self, which is very good—or bad—to know.
    Many scientists have challenged Lykken’s results, and the media has misinterpreted his findings, often conflating the malleable and potential notion of heritability with the genetic verdict of heredity. Even Lykken himself contends that one mustn’t use one’s set-point as a pretext for resigning oneself to one’s DNA.
    “After we published that study, I said something like ‘trying to be happier is like trying to be taller,’ and I regretted that as soon as I saw it in print,” said Lykken on the phone. “It was a smart-aleck comment and in fact I wrote a book to contradict it … one