I married into dog ownership. Years before she even knew I existed, my wife Laura found our dog Liebchen (“Liebs” for short) in the middle of a country road. Alone, scared, and not even a month old. In rural Ohio, where Laura is from, it isn’t uncommon for people to let unwanted puppies loose on old farmland, leaving them as tiny burdens for the world.
In the spring of 2014, a few months before my wedding, I sat in a dim and mostly wooden room, across from the therapist I’d started seeing three years ago, when I first decided to crack my long-diagnosed anxiety disorders. I told him that I thought I was becoming a dog person. What people seem to love about cats is what I had always loved about them: They do not depend on our love. Rather, we depend on them to dispense whatever affection they can spare. When it comes—a joyful surprise. When it doesn’t come, it is just the nature of the animal. To care for any creature that depends on your love for comfort and survival is perhaps the most overwhelming pressure that we nonetheless welcome. Loving a cat is like loving a ghost. They arrive unexpected, take from you only what they need, and vanish again.
Now, in a room designed to shake the richest emotional honesty out of a person, I declared my new allegiance to dogs.
To say Liebs is an anxious dog doesn’t fully capture her history, and the truth she lives each day. Even though she’s now eight years old, it’s hard not to see that she still holds, beneath her skin, the fear and memory of being an abandoned puppy. Before I first met Liebs, on an early date, Laura said: “You have to meet my dog so I can make sure she likes you. Otherwise this won’t work.”
[For more of this story, written by Hanif Willis Abdurraqib, go to http://www.psmag.com/health-an...s-anxiety-that-noise]
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