Mark: "About a year ago I asked my mother if she remembered that incident, and what did I tell her. She remembered it, and repeated what I had told her. When I asked her where it had happened, she said it had happened at the end of the street. She went down and was relieved I wasn't killed. There's a slope. It's a hill. And there's a tunnel there wide enough for four lanes of traffic. But when it happened it was like I was far, far away from home, on the other side of town or something."

(I then asked the group what their jobs were. There was revealed a profile of people on the run, constantly making changes, moving, leaving, escaping. One of them, jenny, had just fulfilled her lifelong dream to move to New York and "live in a big city full of lights and lots of people." She has had this aspiration since she was nine.

I grew up with the same dream, to live in a little apartment m an enormous building in New York with a view of a brick wall.

I did that, though, and it didn't help at all. I now live in an apartment with huge windows and spend a lot of time m a very isolate country cabin.

For most of my life I was running from this, whatever it is. I am unwilling to run anymore.)

Whitley: "We all have trouble saying what we did."

Joan: "Why do you think that is?"

Whitley: "I think we all have something called performance anxiety. That's one of the reasons we all have difficulty pinning ourselves down to do something. I've been extensively psychologically tested twice, and in both cases it came out that there was this deep anxiety in the performance area. I think the reason is that a lot of us have been asked to do some very hard things, that were very frightening, and also I have a feeling that we've been questioned very, very hard. And we can't remember that either."

Jenny: "Do you have trouble taking tests?"

(General agreement.)

Whitley: "That's performance anxiety."

Jenny: "My profession involves auditioning. And every time I go to an audition, I think I'm gonna die."

Sam: "I have tremendous anxiety. Things that I'm very sure of, in the sciences, I don't have a difficult problem. When you start getting out of those areas, I get into real problems."

Whitley: "Fear?"

Sam: "I don't know what it is. Some kind of anxiety there. I really can't pinpoint it."

Sally: "The simplest test — a typing test — I freak out."

Sam: "Being examined. . ."

Budd: "You see, if you imagine that there's a situation of having seen two worlds, of living in this world and then being dumped into this other world at intervals-that has to make you wonder where you belong. And if, in that other world, you are deprived of your ability to act on your own — you can't even move, and you have no choice, nobody asks you anything