It’s a Small World After All

by Jim Herbert

A few months before I was born back in 1964, the most frequently played song in the history of all songwriting debuted at the World’s Fair in New York. The song was not written for a person. It wasn’t written about a specific event or a particular moment in history. Some might even say that having the chorus line for this song running through your head repeatedly could be a bit maddening and I apologize in advance if that is going to happen for you now.

The song in question was actually written for an amusement park ride, which would go on to be one of the most famous attractions at the Disney theme parks around the world. In fact, between the multiple Disney theme parks across the globe, it has been said that there has not been a single moment where this song has not been playing in atleast two places on earth at all times for over 30 years now since the opening of Disneyland Paris in 1992.

By the title of this post, I’m sure you’ve guessed by now that the song I’m talking about is It’s a Small World After All, written by brothers Robert and Richard Sherman. While you may know the chorus of It’s a Small World After All as well as any song that gets stuck in your head, what you may not know is that the Sherman brothers wrote the song in response to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis which inspired the song’s underlying message of peace and brotherhood, both of which are topics that are dear to my heart these days.

I’ve had It’s a Small World After All running through my head on and off for a couple of weeks now and it has nothing to do with a Disney Ride or the Cuban Missile Crisis. It all goes back to a conversation I was having with my wife Christiana about the fragility of mental health in the world in general and my own mental health in particular. I have done my best to manage anxiety and depression for the entirety of my life. To me they are like a pair of waves that roll in and out with a varying degree of intensity depending on the status of the winds of life and the alignment of the stars. Sometimes the waters of my life are still, but there is always another wave in waiting out there and I stand at the ready, hoping this next one is not a tsunami, but rather a slow roller that will allow me to stay atop my surfboard of life until the next period of calm.

In my conversation about anxiety with my wife a couple of weeks ago, Christiana said something in particular that sparked my curiosity. We were talking about how so many people seem more walled off than normal lately. I was noting that it seems to me that many people are staying to themselves or only connecting with their innermost circle of people. Christiana replied by saying, “Anxiety makes the world smaller.” It was one of those “lightbulb goes on inside my head moments” in life and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since, which by the way, is the reason that I have had the song running through my head and am writing this post.

In addition to being like water, anxiety can be a bit like fire and spread when it goes unchecked. It starts with a little smoldering in one area of your life and all it needs is a light breeze to spread into other areas. Before long that fire is creeping its way towards the dry grasslands of your inner psyche and raging like an inferno through your entire world.

There are so many things that can cause a person to become anxious, but one of the most common and powerful catalysts for anxiety is trauma. The trauma itself is the inception point of the anxiety and then everything that reminds you of the trauma exacerbates the anxiety, so you in return do everything in your power to avoid the things that make you anxious without even necessarily realizing it.

Case in point, I experienced sexual trauma around age ten at the hands of some older teenage boys in the neighborhood, so without even consciously realizing it, I spent the next four decades avoiding groups of men. I had a few friends who were guys through the years, but the vast majority of my friends and certainly all of my deeper connections were with women. Even though it was on a global scale, I was in essence subconsciously making my world “smaller” by eliminating the possibility of connecting deeply or intimately with approximately half of the planet’s population.

In addition to avoiding groups of men for the majority of my life, I kept nearly the entire world at arm’s length in an attempt to feel safe. Once I reached high school, I typically placed the majority if not all of my energy into whatever girl I happened to be dating at the time and steered away from all other of the relationships that were a part of my life. Pretty much all of my female life partnership relationships from age 15 to age 50 were entirely co-dependent with me being the giver or the rescuer and if I didn’t feel needed, I felt worthless.

Interestingly, my Disney reference in this piece of writing is more than a coincidence. In many ways, I was addicted to finding the damsel in distress and showing up as a knight on a white horse. No surprise then that I stayed with the same life partner/wife from my late teens until I was in my early forties, tirelessly trying to be the hero, rescuer and servant. The ending of that marriage nearly killed me psychologically even though I was leaving it by choice to be with Christiana, who was destined to become my soul mate and help make me a first-time father. That transition was one big freaking tsunami for sure!

Are you following along here? I realize that I have taken you on a tour through the Magic Kingdom of the deepest parts of my brain, but I promise you that I am leading to something important and here it is…

If anxiety makes your world smaller, there is what I consider to be a foolproof strategy to surf the waves of that anxiety…

Push back, make your world bigger, and refuse to let the anxiety win. It’s what I’ve been trying to do for my entire life.

I must add that this “choice” to push back was nothing that I did consciously at first. It started about the same time I left the safety of the nest of my mother a few years after that sexual trauma. As I mentioned earlier, I started serious dating relatively young at age 15. About the same time, I took my first job in the hospitality industry.

Being in the restaurant four or five nights a week forced me to be around more people and I gradually became adept at being someone who people perceived to be outgoing and highly socially interactive. Inside me though was a scared little boy (there still is in many ways) who enjoyed the interactions, but felt safe enough because none of them needed to go too deep or get too personal, except of course for the one with the female bus girl named Tammy, who became one of my high school obsessions in my sophomore and junior year.

Tammy fit the bill perfectly for me. She was stunningly beautiful, had a quiet, princess-like presence, and came from a broken home. Tammy was working during high school to help her mom pay the rent. I on the other hand was working to buy clothes, fancy cameras or the best new ski equipment. In fact, when I was 16, I used some of my tip money to buy Tammy a pair of top-of-the-line Olin Mark IV skis and the full package to the tune of $400. That’s a lot of money even now, but back in 1980, it was a huge sum. Looking back, my primary love languages of gift-giving and acts of service were already emerging, even in my earliest romantic relationships.

In many ways, I have lived in this pattern of codependency, playing life small and pretending to be an extrovert in an introvert’s body for the vast majority of my life. While I have been in the therapeutic process for over 20 years, the real shift started to happen for me about a decade ago when I attended an empowerment conference with a guy named Mike Dooley. That conference led me to Toastmasters, which led me to competing in The Moth storytelling shows, which led me to running my own conferences teaching people about their own power. Eventually, it even led me to starting my own men’s group! Talk about coming full circle!

And the funny thing is, I didn’t even realize I was doing all this to heal my trauma. I bravely created my own men’s group and then began to delve into getting more involved in other men’s community work before I even remembered my repressed childhood sexual trauma. That trauma finally came to the surface a little bit over two years ago and let’s just say, the EMDR therapy and specialized psychological work I have done to heal a lifetime of mental health challenges that manifested through anxiety, depression and occasional panic attacks, has been like being on an amusement park ride that was getting hit by a tsunami at the same time!

But I wouldn’t trade any of it for the world. Disneyworld or any other world for that matter.

We live in some of the most exciting and challenging times in human history. Things are rising to the surface for healing both individually as single humans and collectively as a planetary culture. As these things rise to the surface, we find ourselves living in “a world of laughter…a world of tears…a world of hope and a world of fears.” Credit to the Sherman brothers for letting me borrow a few of the lines that they birthed back in 1964, a mere three months before my mother birthed me.

Staying in a small world and withdrawing may feel safer at times, but take it from me, reaching out and connecting is by far the better path to healing. When we open our hearts, live vulnerably and ask for the help we so richly deserve, we make our world both smaller AND bigger at the same time. In a world that at times feels so divided, I like to notice that there is so much that we all share and I look forward to the day that we will all become more aware that it can be both a big world and a small world at the same time in the best possible way…. after all!

Thanks for reading all the way through. As usual, my posts are a bit longer, but I write primarily to heal myself and if in the process it connects or inspires another, then that’s a nice bonus too. I always love hearing back from you. Feel free to reach out and connect with a comment, email, phone call or even a virtual smile. We may live far apart geographically, but we all live under the same moon, the same golden sun and a smile means friendship to everyone. The mountains divide and the oceans feel wide, but in reality, it truly is a small world after all, and that’s totally okay by me!