You want to know what being told that a neighbor has threatened your life can do to you?
It took a year of talk therapy and continued prescription drug treatments to get me over a lifelong issue with crippling anxiety that manifest itself in blood clots, which then eventually became a pulmonary embolism that nearly took my life in 2021.
The anxiety that dates back, for me, to childhood is now back, in the form of recurring pain in my shoulder that I’ve come to refer to as “my anxiety pain,” and occasionally elevated heart rates, in the aftermath of me receiving two emails from a member of a white nationalist militia group telling me that a neighbor had threatened in a group chat to “settle a score” with me over politics.
Waynesboro Police actually ended up getting involved, informing the neighbor, who the anonymous militia group member had warned me was heavily armed and possibly suffering from a mental illness, that the PD was made aware of the threat.
A sergeant told me later that the neighbor had told the patrol officer that she “didn’t wish to retaliate, a nod to her claims in the militia group chat that she’d had a number of Trump campaign signs stolen, had found a dead squirrel in her yard, and claimed that someone had left “fake bombs” at her house, all in efforts to intimidate her.
She fixed on me as the culprit, because she realized that I live down the street, that I’m the editor of a progressive news website, and I guess she assumes I’m the only Democrat in the neighborhood, and that I have nothing better to do as a 50-year-old professional writer and broadcaster than to engage in teen-age pranks.
The message from the PD hasn’t exactly resonated with me. I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that there’s someone lurking around the corner, literally, with a gun and ill intent, and a clear shot at me from their frontyard into my backyard.
I know, intellectually, that it’s almost certain that nothing bad is going to happen, but then, that’s not how anxiety works.
It took me more than a year to overcome the sense after the pulmonary embolism to understand that a muscle twitch, a cough, a headache, wasn’t going to kill me.
I went all the way from there to getting on a plane, twice, to go back and forth to Florida to be able to cover the NCAA Tournament last month.
Even the turbulence didn’t bother me.
Now I’m having trouble sitting in my home office, hanging out in my backyard, shooting hoops in the driveway, wondering if the next person walking down the street in front of the house could be armed and considered dangerous with a score to settle.
This, I guess, is how threats of terror are supposed to work.
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Chris Graham
