What Panic Feels Like From Inside the Body of a Child.

A chapter from my memoir, Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life.

Amanda Stern
February 08, 2022

In 2018, I published a memoir called Little Panic: Dispatches From an Anxious Life, about growing up in Greenwich Village with an undiagnosed panic disorder.

My goal for the book was to write an autobiography of an emotion; to present the terrifying somatic experience of the invisible and nameless disorder that gripped me with relentless dedication from my crib until I was old enough to rent my first apartment.

I was finally diagnosed when I was 25, and have spent my life trying to straighten out a life made crooked by internal terror.

This newsletter is the culmination of the work I've done these past decades.

Today, I'm offering the chapter from Little Panic that best showcases the anxiety I felt as a child from the voice of my childhood self. All you need to know going into it is that my anxiety organized itself around separation. Namely, leaving my mother: for school every morning or my father's every other weekend.

I never trusted that she'd remember she had children and worried she'd move to Europe when we were out of her sight, that something terrible would befall her if I weren't trailing her every step, that she would open the front door to murderers, or that I'd never be returned.

If this chapter offers an insight into the experience of a child’s anxiety, the book is available for purchase or from your local library.