Trump and my bleeding eyes
It started with a blurry vision right after the presidential election. President Trump’s made my eyes old, I reasoned, the way people are said to gray overnight after a great fright. The ophthalmologist detected a blister on my retina, indicating Central Serous Retinopathy. A condition by and large thought to be psychosomatic, CSR is brought on by extensive worrying.
But OMG, there was something else: My retina was actually bleeding. “You need an injection right now,” the doctor proclaimed. When I, a journalist, demanded he give me time to verify the wisdom of jamming a needle into my eyeball, he threatened, “In an hour or so you could be blind!”
I had experienced CSR once before, many years ago, when a source threatened to sue me because my book exposed the (unflattering) truth about the organization he represented. The suit never materialized — he didn’t have a case — and the blurriness resolved on its own. But never before had my eyeballs started bleeding. My hypertension, which had reached dangerous levels, may have had something to do with it. Trump had brought my eye ailment to a whole different level, I reasoned.
America is engulfed in an unprecedented epidemic of worrying. Two weeks ago, the American Psychiatric Association released a poll finding that people are 39% more anxious today than they were a year ago. Women and people of color, those arguably targeted the most under the Trump administration, are more anxious than the rest.
While anxiety levels have swollen in all five surveyed areas — health, safety, finances, relationships and politics — I, for my part, can’t blame my perpetually mounting anxiety on the first four factors. Unlike many of Americans, I live a healthy, financially stable life; my husband and I are getting along splendidly. What I worry about is that we may be lost to someone who calls himself “a very stable genius” but who has proven time and again that he is nothing but an unstable liar.
Not long ago, 27 mental health professionals came together to discuss “The Increasingly Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” Dr. Bandy Lee from Yale University said, “It is important to note that while the object of our concern is indeed Mr. Trump, and with his capacity as President, it is his effects on public health that concern us most, not his personal mental health.”
As a journalist, I worry about being governed by someone who has nothing but disdain for people like me, by someone who has fought against truth every step of the way. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic that Trump has called us journalists “fiction writers,” “enemy of the American people,” “a stain on America.”
Trump’s name-calling echoed in the blog post of a woman who called my thoroughly researched article about her relatives “fake news,” accusing me of having “made up a story to get paid.” If you don’t like it, it’s fake news. I needed another eye injection.
I know that only a minority makes a decent living from their writing and that, unlike Trump, most of us are driven not by money or fame, but by an almost compulsive need to set things straight.
Anyone who has ever gone through a publication’s fact-checking process knows that it can be grueling. Mistakes happen, but my colleagues and I try our best to verify our facts.
We, as a group, are the opposite of Trump, who continuously lies without as much as flinching. I know Trump’s tweets and his hate speech targeting journalists are just part of his wretched attempts to protect his status, but worry that his supporters don’t care that much about facts.
I also worry that our propensity for sarcasm, America’s favorite coping mechanism, has triumphed. Another day, another lie. What gives? It has come to a point where we are surprised if Trump speaks the truth.
It is well known that stressful events impact the body, and studies have shown that both lying and being lied to cause stress, which in turn can cause hypertension and a depressed immune function. Stress can increase the likelihood of Type 2 diabetes and clinical depression and damage one’s memory, fertility and digestive system. In other words, lying breaks us, as individuals and as a country.
Whether CSR can be caused by lying or by being lied to is up for debate, but its connection to anxiety and fright is well established. One of the first scientific studies on it established that those engaged in “worrying work” were disproportionally affected.
After a series of eye injections — think “A Clockwork Orange” without the Beethoven — my eyesight has almost reverted to normal. Yet I constantly feel like I have to keep myself in check. I wallow in anxiety every time I read the news. The truth is my last resort. Because once everything else fails, what else do we have? Nothing.