On the roof of Gregory & Paul’s hotdog and beer stand is a statue of a paunchy man giving the thumbs-up. He’s holding a hamburger so faded one suspects it was fresh off the grill 30 years ago. The man is covered in graffiti, and so is the old-fashioned rocket ship with which he shares the roof. Back in the day, it would not have looked out of place in a Flash Gordon serial; today its blue and red paint has faded, and its white spots are splattered with yellow rust.

The sign on the top of the beer stand says “Astroland Park,” a reminder of a time when Coney Island was somebody’s idea of the future. Though the area has currently lost its former space-age shimmer to time’s onward march, it still inspires futuristic thinking — and not just the thinking that has it slated for massive commercial renovation in the coming months.

Day-trippers and beach-lovers have been visiting Coney Island for centuries, and in 1864, the West End Terminal, the area’s first train station, opened. But at the beginning of the 20th century, as Brooklyn grew in popularity, the New York City authorities and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company had the West End Terminal demolished and rebuilt with the most innovative, flexible transportation technology available, including a then unheard-of eight tracks and four platforms.

The new station, named the Stillwell Avenue Terminal, opened on May 29, 1919. Shortly afterward, Surf Avenue’s bustling boardwalks and amusement parks, like Steeplechase Park and Luna Park, made Coney Island one of the most popular vacation spots in all of New York; at the height of its popularity, the area had more than a million visitors a day.

Over time, Stillwell has grown into the largest above-ground terminal in New York City and one of the largest in the world. And since its 2005 renovation and reopening, it has become the first and biggest solar-powered terminal in the world, says Gregory Kiss of Kiss + Cathcart, Architects, the architectural firm that helped plan the reconstruction.

Kiss, a skinny man with a calm, professor-like demeanor, walks along the bridge that links all four platforms, pointing with pride to the panels above him. Kiss and his company worked with the New York Transit Authority to design and build the 80,000-square foot terminal shed that covers the platforms like a stadium dome.

In many ways, the Stillwell Terminal feels like the first attraction that subway users see upon arriving at Coney Island. The platforms are constructed with faded periwinkle- and white-colored steel, and are markedly free of the grime and graffiti coded into the DNA of the New York subway experience. Yet the disembarking teenagers and nuclear families rarely pause to look upward at the roof’s phalanx of panels, as such gawking is for tourists, and there are beaches, myriad forms of deep-fried batter, and the Cyclone to attend to.

If they did look up, they would see a ceiling composed of 2,730 five-by-five panels, which are two layered sheets of industrial glass that have sandwiched between them two squares and two rectangles of semitransparent photovoltaic glass. The intersecting lines between these sheets form crosses of light when looked at from below. 

Photovoltaic glass is a type of solar cell that captures the energy of the sun and converts it into direct current electricity. Kiss estimates that there is more than 50,000 square feet of it in the shed. “In most ways, they really are the best source of energy, period, because they are solid state with no moving parts, no emissions of any kind, and they produce the most energy when you need it the most — typically, in the middle of the day,” Kiss says. “This is the biggest project in the world that uses this kind of technology, integrated into a building structure.”

The shed’s solar panels represent the successful union of architectural design and fuel efficiency. They are also very, very shiny. The silvery glow of solar cells make the terminal feel like something more akin to Disney World’s Epcot and Tomorrowland amusement parks than the nostalgic charms of Coney Island. When viewed up close, a vantage point made possible by the nearby Wonder Wheel Ferris ride, the ceiling resembles a mirrored disco ball that has been unraveled and fashioned into an airplane hanger. Taken in as a whole from 150 feet in the air, the terminal and the rest of Coney Island’s attractions seem symbiotically out of time: Astroland Park and the rest of Coney’s attractions a living postcard from half a century gone by, and the terminal shed an image that arrived a few years ahead of everyone else’s schedule.

Construction time again

Last year, the New York state government announced the “15X15” plan to reduce electric energy usage in New York by 15 percent by the year 2015. The plan seeks to address the rising cost of energy by reducing the state’s reliance on fossil fuel–burning power plants. The “15” initiative calls for an increased investment in clean power options and greater energy efficiency, two areas Kiss understands well.

Kiss, 49, was born in Toronto but grew up in New Jersey around Princeton. He received his bachelor’s from Yale and his Master of Architecture from Columbia University. In addition to authoring technical manuals for the Department of Energy, his lectures on advances in solar technology and how they can be used with architectural design have taken him across the globe, and his projects have been developed everywhere from Panama to Native American reservations.

He moved to New York to study architecture in 1981, and in 1983 his newborn firm had its first commission: to design a solar panel manufacturing factory. Ever since, he’s had an interest in integrating solar technology and efficient energy practices into architectural design.    

His firm has constructed a number of environmentally forward-thinking projects in the city, including the sun-fueled, self-sustaining Solar One community education center by the East River. The center, which resembles a suburban home outfitted with a downward-facing, panel-lined roof, teaches energy conservation techniques to New York students and residents, and also hosts dance and film events.

In 1998, Kiss and his company were hired by the New York Transit Authority to help revitalize the dilapidated Coney Island Terminal. Though the area was synonymous with the Roaring ’20s, after World War II it struggled to remain relevant. The area faced competition from Jones Beach, as well as the rising popularity of then-burgeoning entertainment options like television and air-conditioned movie theaters. In 1946, the popular Luna Park closed after being ravaged by fire, and Steeplechase Park closed in 1964 following a series of accidents and the rise of crime in the area. By the 1970s, the area had become so deeply synonymous with drug- and gang-related crime, much of it linked to notorious low-income housing projects like Surfside Garden, that commercial developers were wary about investing in the area. By the 1990s, the once mighty Coney Island shrank to just four blocks of roller coasters and shows, with The New York Times reporting more than 50 unoccupied lots in the area.

Kiss remembers visiting Coney Island when he first moved to New York in the early ’80s. Back then there were hypodermic needles in the sea and fear in the air. And it only got worse as years of saltwater-infused air, as well as citywide neglect, accelerated the rust and decay of the platform’s metal.

Physically, the terminal was close to collapsing. “It was pretty scary. The steel columns down below these tracks and in many other places were corroded away to almost nothing, so there was some degree of danger there. It had to be replaced,” Kiss says. “This was an expensive project, not the sort of thing you do lightly, but as a matter of safety, it had to be done.”

Kiss + Cathcart was hired to create a new ceiling. The terminal once had individual roofs over each platform, but the Transit Authority wanted a giant roof that covered all of them. It had to be aesthetically pleasing, it had to be durable, and it had to be low-maintenance and easily fixable. Also, it would be nice if the structure could multitask.

“They thought, ‘well, this station has been here for almost a hundred years, and it will hopefully be here for another century or more.’ They have very long planning periods,” Kiss says, “and they figure that it might as well be generating electricity as it’s sheltering the station.”

Kiss and his team worked with the Transit Authority to integrate the energy-saving photovoltaic glass into the structure, and designed it with a state-of-the-art, silver and glass retro-futuristic look that would blend in well when subway passengers viewed the terminal on the same horizon as Coney Island institutions like the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone. The firm took care to use recycled steel and aluminum, and Kiss even designed the roof to have wires that delivered a mild shock to keep birds from nesting on it.

Although they came to Kiss wanting a forward-thinking structure, the Transit Authority still had to be convinced that the project could actually work. “[We had to] show them why this makes sense and why this is not a finicky, scary, fragile technology, and why it is very reliable, and how it can be done in a way that if something does go wrong, it can be fixed.

“One of the most satisfying things to me was really the process of dealing with this very large organization that, for very good reasons, tends to be very conservative, and working through the process of educating them and understanding their needs,” he says. “It affected the design a lot; we did a lot of work and made a lot of changes to make this a very user-friendly, maintainable facility and so on.”

Power, houses

The total rebuilding of the terminal cost $250 million, some of which is returned in the form of energy savings.

The sunlight collected by the photovoltaic glass is fed into a conversion device that creates alternative current electrical energy, which is then fed into the grid for the entire station, including the main office, police stations, and underground lights. None of the collected energy is used to fuel the actual subway trains, as Kiss says that utility companies are very strict about how much power can leave an installation, and the Transit Authority prefers to sidestep the issue by keeping the energy within the local grid. “The power that is generated is used within the system,” he says.

“Another way to look at it — this project is unusual and it’s hard to get your head around it — this station produces enough electricity to provide all of the electricity for about 33 average single-family houses in this part of the country,” he says. “Total, per year. It’s a significant amount of energy.”
                       
Green days

Because of the difficulty of efficiently transporting electricity into the city from outside the city, 80 percent of the energy for New York City is generated by fossil fuel–burning power plants within city limits. These power plants contribute to unwanted citywide pollution, so Kiss thinks it’s only a matter of time before every city-owned structure that has sunlight falling on it will be outfitted with solar cells.

“The sun is giving off about probably 850 watts per square meter of energy, and it’s basically going to waste right now,” he says. “All it’s doing is heating up the sidewalk.
 
“In fact, it’s worse than that, because in most cases city buildings with a black roof, the sun is heating up the roof, heating up the building, and we are cranking up the air conditioner to counteract that. So we’re wasting all that energy, and there is an enormous capacity to harvest and use this energy in a very positive way in the city.”

There are several ways of getting power from the sun: Solar thermal power stations use sunlight and mirrors to heat up a liquid that drives an electric generator. But photovoltaic cells are the most popular form. Though solar panels have existed since the 1800s, the first solar cell was patented in 1946 by semiconductor researcher Russell Ohl. The company for which Ohl worked, Bell Laboratories, discovered that certain forms of silicon were markedly sensitive to light. The company was the first to create a device to harness energy from the sun; it had an efficiency of around 6 percent. Driven both by America’s space exploration efforts and the gas crisis of the 1970s, the technology continued to slowly grow in efficiency, popularity, and affordability, but has yet to achieve widespread household acceptance.

Even today, many think that solar panel technology, especially photovoltaic glass, is too exotic, too expensive, and not ready for mass use. Kiss wants to prove that cutting-edge technology and innovative design can fit into a reasonable budget.

“There is this sense among a lot of people, even environmentalists, that ‘yeah, solar is great, it’s expensive, but we shouldn’t even worry about the cost, we should do it anyway,’” he says. “I find that kind of an unfortunate attitude. By doing things like [Stillwell], you can make the technology much more economical than it would otherwise be. It is a struggle, but that’s not a reason not to do it.

“You don’t see more of this because of a lot of different reasons, none of which is a very serious issue in and of itself,” he says. “Technically, obviously it can be done. It can be made quite economical. There are regulatory issues, building code [issues], but those things can all be overcome.”

Whether out of concern for the environment or the bottom line, there is no doubt that the construction industry is showing an increased awareness of environmentally responsible building principles. In 2006, the Chicago-based Mintel International Group Ltd. estimated the green marketplace to be worth more than $200 billion. Chief executive officers (CEOs) are paying attention. According to a recent study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 61 percent of executives who responded said it was important that their companies take steps to reduce their environmental impact.

One organization helping companies do that is the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit environmental organization that works with businesses to promote energy efficiency. Spokesperson Ashley Katz says that 39 percent of total energy consumption and 39 percent of harmful carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions come from buildings in metropolitan areas. The council helps companies reduce their energy use by showing them how to rely on windows instead of indoor lighting and how to install energy-saving air-conditioning units, among other techniques.
 
“I attribute it to a lot more awareness of climate change and global warming, whether it be Al Gore’s documentary [An Inconvenient Truth] or people learning more about the issue,” Katz says, “but I think right now this is a big time to be green, and people are really seeing that they need to step up to the plate in order to make a difference and turn back the clock on global warming.”

Show and prove

Kiss’ design has already saved the Coney Island Terminal both financially and in terms of CO2 emissions. And while architectural design that integrates photovoltaic technology could potentially help reduce electricity costs and harmful emissions across the country, Dr. Edward Kern of Irradiance, Inc. cautions that solar panel–integrated design is far from a quick fix for all of America’s power and pollution issues.

Kern has been working on the development and deployment of photovoltaic systems for close to three decades. A past president of the Solar Energy Business Association of New England, Kern and his company help to create commercial photovoltaic installations, and designed and executed many aspects of the Stillwell Terminal design.

Kern points to “incredible year-over-year growth” of 40 percent for companies that make solar cells as proof of the technology’s increasing acceptance. But he warns that it is best to take the development with measured enthusiasm, as the technology can reduce carbon emissions, but will not be able to completely replace the current means of producing electricity.

“It’s definitely a step in the right direction. The more solar you do, the better,” he says. “But it’s not something that’s going to end coal tomorrow and save the world.”   

Kern points to the technology’s limitations, one of which is the finite amount of energy that panels can provide relative to an area’s electricity needs.

“If you look at the electricity consumed per square mile and the amount of sunlight falling on that square mile, for New York, that ratio … is a very large number compared to rural areas,” says Kern, adding that even if it were theoretically possible to put solar panels on every square mile of the city, “solar alone for New York isn’t going to do it. You’re going to have to bring in energy from the surrounding land.”

In addition to concerns about how much energy can be generated, Kern also believes that the other main obstacle to solar technology catching on in American cities is its cost-effectiveness. While solar cells cost about $4 a watt, coal, which he says is still the most commonly used fossil fuel, only costs “about $1 or $2” a watt. A power source’s dollars-per-watt ratio is determined by dividing the cost of the source by its rated energy output. For example, Kiss says that a panel that produces 200 watts and sells for $600 has a ratio of $3 a watt.

When solar panels first became commercialized in the 1950s, the cost was usually thousands of dollars for one watt, says Kiss. These days, prices are holding steady at $4 a watt, as booming demand for solar panels in Europe and Asia is keeping prices high at the moment, he says. But he’s encouraged by reports from solar technology developers First Solar, which is currently developing a thin-film photovoltaic cell that he says will be “approaching $1 a watt fairly soon.”

At that point, it’s unclear whether people will take to the change and how much energy solar panels will truly be able to provide, as even experts in the field cannot agree on just what can be reasonably expected of photovoltaic technology.

But it is clear that as proud as Kiss is of the energy saved by the terminal he designed, he thinks the greatest achievement he made at Coney Island was showing that large-scale,  environmentally friendly, solar-powered buildings can not only be achieved, but can be practical and economically feasible.

“The general awareness of people that ‘yes, solar is great but it belongs in space,’ or ‘it’s going to be another generation,’ it’s just a lot of stuff like that adds up to a big obstacle,” Kiss says. “But there’s no inherent reason there shouldn’t be a lot more of this. And there will be — it’s just a question of time.”

Michael Tedder

Jeanne had long harbored a crush on the short Indian man who played squash at her gym. For more than a year she tried to relax and talk to him. But she usually just stared at him while telling herself “you know, you should really say something. Like, ‘Hello.’”
   
One time, she did manage to have a conversation with him. He was smiling, friendly, and seemed happy to see her. She became so tense that she could barely think. For reasons she can’t recall, she abruptly blurted out that he should just go see a doctor about his knee. He excused himself and walked away.
   
The man tried to talk to her a few more times, but each time, Jeanne was tense and terse, and each time, he backed away. Jeanne saw him one more time at the squash court, and desperately wanted to explain how sorry she was and how much she liked him. But she couldn’t, and he left.
   
That was five years ago. Just recently, they again ran into each other at the gym. He quickly left while his brother gave her dirty looks.

“You just want to cry from how tragic it is,” she says. “Even now, I can’t even say hello.”

Speechless

Today, after 11 years of therapy, numerous self-help books, and finally, a four-month class on identifying and working through anxious thoughts, Jeanne, who asked that her real name not be used out of concern for her privacy, is buoyant as she shows me around her Brooklyn neighborhood. At first she seems unfazed by the crowd in the café we head to, but after we find a table in the back, she gives stares at anyone who walks by or sits next to us. She pushes my tape-recorder behind my cappuccino and out of her view, and continues talking.

In her 40s, with brown hair and a soft, even voice, she sometimes shivers when talking about her boss or the way her chest tightens when she thinks about speaking at a business meeting. Other times she beams, as she talks about how she can finally email someone a question without being shackled by the worry that all she will get in response is a “no.”

Five million Americans are affected by social anxiety disorder each year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The American Psychiatric Association defines the disorder as an intense fear of a potential negative judgment, usually in a public situation.  Potential triggers could be anything from eating in public or using a public restroom, to talking to strangers or having sex.

The causes and severity of apprehension vary from individual to individual, but researcher Richard G. Heimberg, author of Social Phobia: Diagnosis, Assessment and Treatment, says that up to 13 percent of the population has some form of the disorder.

Many people are shy around those they don’t know, and get nervous when they have to speak in public. For those with social anxiety disorder, these feelings reach irrational levels. Their fears are so intense that they get nauseous while thinking of them and live unsatisfying lives in an effort to avoid them.

In Jeanne’s case, attacks revolved around dating, job interviews, speaking in public, talking to authority figures, and a myriad of other situations in which she could be looked down upon. She would frequently plan her life around avoiding her fears, often at the expense of her true desires, such as when she attended a college in the city with dreams of becoming a psychiatrist. The school wasn’t her ideal choice, but because an interview, or even a personal essay, was too frightening to consider, her options were limited.

Once enrolled, Jeanne realized that she couldn’t take upper-level psychology classes without giving presentations. Plus, her family didn’t really support the idea of her studying psychology in the first place, and she began to think that people she’d work with as a psychiatrist probably wouldn’t like her anyways. Eventually, she ended up in the history department.

Her problems continued after graduation, as Jeanne found herself terrified of changing situations, even ones that made her unhappy, for fear of new situations that could leave her exposed. She’s lived in the same apartment for 19 years, has had the same job for 9, and says she’s still “way too close” to the only boyfriend she’s ever had, even though they haven’t dated in decades. She can’t even get rid of the squash partner she dislikes for fear the new one will be worse.

“I have a hard time giving things up even if they’re negative,” she says. “It’s better to have something that’s mildly negative because the next thing might be extremely negative. It’s irrational.”

It’s not as though she’s never tried to get more out of life. But it always seemed that Jeanne’s anxiety triumphed over her ambition. She tried to get back into the health field four years ago, this time focusing on becoming a dietitian. Her beginners’ classes went well, so she then contacted nearby programs by email to inquire about taking advanced courses. When her emails weren’t answered, she gave up on the idea without attempting to call or drop by the places where the programs were offered.

Jeanne currently lives and does media work in a one-room, wooden-floor, white-wall apartment in Brooklyn, where her oversize couch doubles as a bed. She has to attend an occasional office meeting, filled with pushy talkers and irritable bosses who only want to hear good news. Just the idea of entering this melee is still enough to make her vaguely nauseous, but it is now much better than the overwhelming fear she once felt, before her recent breakthrough.

“If I thought I would have to speak … I would start to feel kind of a significant fluttering in my chest, what maybe people call butterflies,” she says. “And I’d probably get a bit of a stomach ache, and a bit of a headache, and my heart would start beating very hard. There’s a lot of tension and movement at the same time.”

When Jeanne would start to feel this way, she would find herself unable to focus and would just hope to get away without being noticed or, worse, forced to talk.

“You kind of feel frozen,” she says. According to Jeanne, social anxiety disorder can wear away a person’s self-esteem, and it can condition him or her to believe that it’s better to accept a current unhappy situation than to risk change. After two decades, she couldn’t talk to the men she liked and couldn’t imagine things ever getting better.

Ready to fail

Jeanne remembers she would often eat in the empty stairwell in high school because she was too worried to eat in the lunchroom. She never knew how to sit down and talk with groups of people, and even today, she has a hard time approaching two people who are talking to each other.

Memories of spending her childhood isolated made Jeanne decide that she could never put another person through this — Jeanne says it’s commonly believed but not proven that social anxiety is hereditary — so she decided that she would never have children. She changed her mind a few years later, but decided that it was too late for it to matter anyway.

For Jeanne, the insecurity reached beyond class and work into her personal relationships. The idea of dating once made Jeanne miserable. She’s has had only a handful of dates in the past few years and one long-term relationship. The anxiety had crushed her self-worth to the point that she assumed that if she liked someone, he couldn’t possibly like her. The only dates she could go on were with men she was uninterested in.

“I had so many fears about going on a date or dating … I didn’t even want to do it. I still don’t know anything about dating,” she says. “I feel like I’m 13 in dating situations.”

She found that sweets could temporarily make her calmer and more festive around her friends, and there were times when she combated her anxiety by eating to the point where she was too nauseous to be nervous. But the relief from her fear that food provided would never last very long.

Some of her fears make more sense than others. She hates traveling out of the city for family dinners every few months because her family has always criticized her — for everything from her weight to her shyness.

“They would say things like ‘she should have a Ph.D. by now, but she’s too shy,’” she says. “I was way too fat, I had too much acne, I was very disorganized, and the teasing about that was pretty constant. I really felt like no one in my family liked me, growing up.

“The current criticism is that … recently I’ve been told that my clothes aren’t good enough by my sister and my mother, and I just think that I’m too old to be told that,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with my clothes, and you shouldn’t tell that to anyone, really.”

But often, her worries have seemed ill-founded and self-defeating. In college, there were many times Jeanne thought she was incapable of handling an assignment, and then she became too anxious to study or to ask the professor for help. Although she had always done well in high school chemistry, she dropped out of a college chemistry class because she was worried that the teacher would give her a bad grade. She would procrastinate as much as possible; sometimes she would be so worried about her ability to write a good paper that she would be unable to finish her assignment, and thus she would receive a bad grade, which further enforced her fear and destroyed her self-esteem. 

“Before I realized it was social anxiety, I just thought ‘I’m a big loser,’” she says, “‘I can’t make a good speech. I can’t take a test and do well on it.’ I just didn’t really connect it to social anxiety until recently.”

Interrupting the talking in your head

As bad as it got, Jeanne was never completely alone, as several of her friends suffered from anxiety as well. For Jeanne, it just seemed natural that people slow to build trust and friendship would gravitate toward each other.

Jeanne and her friends knew that something wasn’t right about their shyness, and five years ago they began reading about social anxiety. But even though she knew what her condition was called, she didn’t know what to do about it. Jeanne tried to do some of the exercises mentioned in a book about cognitive behavior therapy — a branch of psychiatry dedicated to modifying harmful thoughts and behaviors — but they seemed too difficult, and once again, she was too discouraged to continue.

She continued to live a life where she never talked to the men she liked, never spoke at work, and never went for the things she wanted. It was hard, but it seemed harder to change.

Then, about a year ago, while searching online for information about anxiety, she discovered a research clinic at Columbia University that was studying, and developing a treatment for, the disorder. She took an online self-help test sponsored by the university clinic. Intrigued by the results, and sick of how she lived her life, she enrolled in the school’s study on social anxiety, and qualified for a free therapy program.

She was temporarily given Paxil to decrease her tension, and was taught how to recognize and break down the thoughts that were leading to her anxiety. She was taught to figure out what the core beliefs behind her fears were, and then to write out and explain her feelings when she began to feel overwhelmed. One of the core beliefs Jeanne learned to rationalize away was that her crush at the gym would never find her interesting enough to talk with.

“That’s going on in your head, so you can’t have a normal conversation,” she says. She learned to give herself encouragement that related to specific, immediate behavior goals, such as “even if he doesn’t have a crush on me too, we could have a good conversation. I’m fully capable of having a good conversation.”

The program lasted 16 weeks. She thinks she’s off to a good start. Sometimes it’s hard for her to make herself meet new people, but the exercises usually help her stay in control.

Jeanne was encouraged by the program to put herself in uncomfortable situations so she can learn how to rationalize her fears. One sign of her progress is that Jeanne’s been attending meet-up groups organized on the Internet, to force herself to interact with strangers. On one of her first outings, she went to a lecture about self-promotion for introverts. The theme of the leader’s speech had been that introverted people should just accept who they are and not bother to change how they do things. After the speech, 11 group members, including Jeanne (“sitting at a table is my most fearful spot, so the idea that I was able to is great for me”), met for dinner at a Korean restaurant and gathered around a long table. The leader asked the group what it thought.

Although talking at a table usually reminds Jeanne of cantankerous work meetings and strained family dinners — situations she would have fled in the past — she found herself speaking up. And even disagreeing.

“I just talked about how you can accept yourself,” she says, “but what if you’re intensely nervous or panicked … and it does require some kind of change?”

Jeanne was encouraged that the group accepted her even though she disagreed with it. She says that she was able to overcome her shyness because the setting was very relaxed. She later used the lessons of the treatment in a much more stressful situation.

Though Jeanne gets lonely working at home, it allows her to avoid her bosses, one of whom is often angry and critical. While in the office recently, a coworker dumped some of her excess work on Jeanne. She didn’t have the time to do it, she told Jeanne, and she shouldn’t have been assigned it in the first place.

This coworker had the assignment for six months without telling anyone that she couldn’t finish it, and it seemed unfair to Jeanne that she had to do the work now. But when she asked her bosses about it, they took the coworker’s side.

Jeanne was horrified. She felt that the bosses didn’t think much of her and that her job wasn’t secure. She tensed up and was unable to concentrate for the rest for the day. When she went home, she was able to write down and work through her reaction, and she eventually realized that the situation didn’t really directly affect her anyway.

“I might write … ‘she is acting to protect herself and look good to the bosses,’” she says. “‘It had nothing to do with you or your competence or self-worth.’”

Before she had learned to think through her problems rationally, Jeanne says she probably would have been panicking for at least a week.

“I’m thinking much more in reality now,” she says. “Yes, there are these negative assessments; you’re going to have to live with them, and this is what you can do about them now. Just go forward from here. That’s all I can do.”

Dealing with the no

Jeanne recently went to an upscale Meetup.com event at a lodge. She ended up being paired with a man through one of the event’s gimmicks, where players are assigned cards and have to find their match. Although Jeanne was anticipating having a good time, shortly after they began chatting, the man’s friends called him away in a “suspicious manner. He said he had to go talk to his friend for a moment and he’d be right back,” she says. “And then he never came back.

“In the past I would have kind of held onto that as a rejection instead of thinking that I wasn’t happy about it, but it was very clear that we weren’t clicking, so it’s not really a rejection,” she says. “So I could talk myself down in a couple hours.”

Another way she’s been pushing herself to be more active has been by emailing questions to her coworkers, telling family members when they are hurting her feelings, and taking the lead in seeing if her friends want to hang out.

“A year ago I wouldn’t ask any questions. I wouldn’t invite people out. I wouldn’t invite myself over because I was afraid of the ‘no,’” she says, “and now I do it. And of course if there’s a ‘no’ I don’t enjoy it, but its fine.”

One of her friends of almost 30 years describes the changes she has observed in Jeanne:
“It has been frustrating for me, because I cannot rationalize with her about her fears and insecurities, and I feel sorry for her because she seems needlessly worried and unhappy. [But now], she seems more open to meeting people, going to new places, and generally, making herself vulnerable. She has also become very capable of poking fun at herself, and seeing the humor and, even sometimes, the absurdity of her behavior.”

“I just wish I was Bill Clinton. I absolutely do,” Jeanne says. “I would be able to do anything and not be afraid of a negative assessment. Just ‘okay, if you don’t like me, you don’t like me.’”

Michael Tedder