The Tender Architecture of Childhood

Welcome to the very first "How to Live" newsletter post.

In this space, I will interrogate questions of existence, examine why we are the way we are, and wonder aloud about what it means to be human, all to encourage answering the question: How do I want to live?

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I am not a psychologist, scientist, or journalist.

I’m just a person whose first 25 years of life were spent suffering from an undiagnosed and untreated panic disorder, as the adults around me misapprehended my symptoms and sent me, year after year, for myriad intelligence and personality tests.

Growing up as a panicked child shaped the person I am. It has led to a life-long investment in self-interrogation and reflection, while also alerting me to the inadvertent ways well-meaning adults often damage the fragile psyches of children.

My early experiences of being a conscious human being in this world did not go well. First, there was the matter of my emotions and the degree to which they turned against me, threatening my existence every time I had to part from my mother.

Being away from her felt dangerous; the fear of separation created physiological and mental anguish in me that had no name. No matter how many times I left and returned, it always felt like the first time: I wept with grief, my skin needled and burned, my heart tore too far ahead of its own beat, and I vibrated with a fresh, new terror.

Neither my siblings nor my friends felt the way I did, and so I believed early on that my feelings were incorrect. I was broken, my emotions were too large, the wrong shape; I was defective. I was ashamed to be the one wrong person in a world of people rightly made.

Then there was the matter of my external self and how it discomfited these rightly made people: I was too small, I weighed too little. Plot-wise, on the growth chart for height and weight, I landed two grades below my own.

Words looked and sounded blurry; instead of up, I held my hand down in class. Test questions wiggled away from underneath my pencil, resulting in scores lower than my body weight.

Much to my horror, I became the whisper between my teachers and my parents. All evidence suggested something was wrong with the way I learned. No one spoke to me about any of this, but they spoke of me when I was near—when you’re small, you’re invisible.

I heard the story of myself being told before I even knew there was a story of me to tell. At every turn, I was reminded there was something wrong with me.

I was trapped inside my own terror, controlled by my emotions and my belief in what they foretold: The world was too hard for me; I could not get through a weekend visiting my father, which was a stipulation of joint custody.

My fear was so all-encompassing; not realizing the harm this would later cause, the adults around me removed all obstacles that made me panic.

My mother made excuses for me to get me out of sleepovers, picked me up halfway through a weekend with my dad when I called her crying. Everyone meant well, but helping me avoid what scared me didn’t only make my world smaller, it cemented my belief that the world was too hard for me. Instead of teaching me how to manage hardship, they taught me how to escape it.

And so I began to duck just about everything until the feelings of discomfort and uncertainty themselves felt ominous and threatening.

All evidence suggested something was wrong with the way I learned. No one spoke to me about this, but they spoke of me when I was near—when you’re small, you’re invisible. I heard the story of myself being told before I even knew there was a story of me to tell. At every turn, I was reminded there was something wrong with me.

When I was 11 years old, I was sent for an IQ test, a single event that turned into a decade-long testing odyssey.

No matter the day of the week, I was tested and probed by clinicians, evaluators, and medical professionals.

I believed the adults would help fix my emotions and help shrink my fear.

But that’s not what happened.

The tests had nothing to do with my internal life, with the constant press of dread and terror enfolding my throat.

The questions they asked had nothing at all to do with my emotions but with my brain and with how much information it held. My body, always in a state of heightened alarm, shut me down whenever I was asked to prove what I knew, so I did not do well on these tests.

Which meant more tests were needed.

It was an inescapable, endless loop.

By the time I was 25, I had gone so long without being diagnosed or treated that I became agoraphobic and experienced suicidal ideations. The therapist who finally diagnosed me expressed alarm that no one had been able to name what was so obvious to him.

As it turned out, my condition was unrelated to learning or test-taking.

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