Hello dear ones,

Today's piece is quite long, but it's important.

When sharing this with your Little Panicker, I suggest printing it all out and reading it to them, or with them, in pieces over the course of a few nights. Or, if they are too young, read it, save it, and have it available in the future for when they need it.

It's hard to limit a topic that's profoundly dear to my childhood and adult heart. Apologies in advance for the length. But, I promise you, I only included the most essential information.

Dear Little Panicker,

I am you, all grown up and there are a few things I want you to know about anxiety.

When I was young—younger than you—and until I was a grown-up, fear was a constant sensation inside my body.

I was afraid my mother would die or disappear if I wasn’t watching her. I was terrified my father would decide not to return me and my siblings back home to her at the end of our weekend visits with him.

The fear was so powerful, pins and needles raced across my face, a scribble of vibrating dread grew heavy inside my stomach.

I felt a type of terror, like I was about to die. I felt this often, and I secretly worried, and then began to believe that something was terribly wrong with me, that I was broken, defective.

The dread I felt was so palpable both inside my body and surrounding my body. It was a different type of gravity, one with hands that threatened to draw me away by my ankles into a tarry black lake of quicksand to disappear me forever.

No one knew what to do about these fears of mine. They just kept on telling me not to worry, that everything was going to be fine. This made things worse because it didn’t feel true.

My body was telling me things were not going to get better. My body was telling me that things were going to get very, very bad. I didn’t need anyone to tell me that things were going to be okay. I needed someone to help me figure out why I was so afraid.

I was too afraid to sleep over at a friend’s house, and because I worried it would distract me from making sure my mother didn’t disappear, I was too afraid to have friends sleep at my house, so I missed out on socializing, bonding with friends, and building memories.

I was afraid to go on class trips, afraid to go out of town with my father. Anything that meant leaving my mom was something that felt too hard for me to do.

Sometimes I was so afraid that my mother let me stay home, or told me I didn’t have to do things that felt too hard for me, and the relief was so large I felt I could fly from the power of my own happiness.

While the short-term relief was big, it wasn’t helpful for the long term, because getting me out of things didn’t help me grow stronger. In fact, it simply made me feel that I was right to be afraid.

Letting me avoid the scary thing told me I couldn’t handle it. Although that wasn’t true. I COULD handle it (and so can you). What I needed was for someone to take my massively huge fear and break it down into smaller pieces.

I really needed an adult to help me figure out why I was so afraid all the time, so that maybe my fear would lessen. The world terrified me. I needed an adult to walk me through things before I did them, to show me that nothing bad was going to happen.

I needed someone to teach me that just because something felt scary did not mean it was dangerous.

I needed someone to explain the difference between facts and feelings and that I often confused a feeling of fear for a fact that there was something to fear.

I needed someone to explain that the anxiety I felt was actually quite natural, that mine just happened to have a large personality and was constantly overreacting to every little thing, instead of being more discriminating and responding only to the essentials.

I needed someone to explain what was happening to me, why it was happening, and how I could teach it to behave in ways that would serve me and not cause me mental anguish.

That is what I want to do for you right now.

But first, I want you to know that if you, like me, are filled with fear and dread and even sometimes terror, that there is nothing wrong with you. You are not broken. You are not damaged. You are not defective. You are simply doing far more work than is necessary.

When I was your age, we didn’t use words like anxiety and panic. We said “homesickness,” which never felt like a big enough match for what I felt. When I was your age, we didn’t look for the answers to our problems in our emotions. We didn’t look inside our bodies, we looked outside to the world around us. Parents and caretakers didn’t communicate with their children about the issues that their child was having.

Things are different now, thankfully, and parents and caretakers include their children a lot more, especially when the concern is about the child.

In this case, you.

Most adults grow up and forget their childhood struggles. These are the same people who dismiss their children’s problems.

Because I grew up with out-of-control emotions, ones I had no words for until I was 25 years old, my childhood self never actually disappeared.

Where did all this anxiety we feel come from??