Teresa of Avila On Anxiety

I’ve been reading James K.A. Smith’s Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark and was taken aback by this passage commenting on Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle:

One of the threads of Teresa’s Interior Castle that is so prescient and timely is her attunement to the fears and anxieties that lurk within us—anxieties only amped up by late modernity. … What are we afraid of? … At bottom, Teresa suggests, we are afraid of being misunderstood, unseen, unrecognized, bereft of love. We want to be known, recognized, liberated because we are loved as we are.

It’s hard to put words to just how deeply this resonates. I have organized so much of my life around trying to “be useful” or “do something meaningful.” I need to be seen like I need to breathe. As those closest to me can attest, I do not respond well to being regularly misunderstood. I become bitter, short, passive agressive. In short, I become smaller than myself.

This clarifies much of the ick I feel interacting with chatbots. If I am am engaged in some kind of transaction with one, then fair play. But the moment I start to feel known by one, I feel a deep unease and need to take very large step back. I think this is good. That feeling is a lie when it comes from a machine trained (simplistically) to produce an average response to my conversational input.

What I mean is that Teresa’s framing is—for me—clarifying. Now I get to sift through the variety of small anxieties that attend modern life and figure out where I feel unknown. The hope is that acknowledging it will give me a chance to move through the discomfort with some intentionality. If this can make me more patient with the customer service agent who is unable to help me (and who is likely powerless to do so anyway), then that’s a win.