You’re reading How to Live, a weekly examination of the unconscious logic behind our attachments, defenses, distortions, and recurring dilemmas. Most of what shapes us operates outside awareness. This newsletter attempts to make those structures legible.
Paid subscribers receive immediate access to more than four years of essays: hundreds of closely argued pieces that approach the psyche from different angles and moments in time, along with invitations to seasonal in-person gatherings and the opportunity for direct correspondence.
What Panic Feels Like From Inside the Body of a Child: An Excerpt
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 my work over the 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.
For fun, here are photos of me, Kara, and Eddie as kids.
Kara, Eddie, Amanda
Amanda, Kara, Eddie
Amanda, Eddie, Kara
Amanda
And you? Did you have anxiety as a child? How did you deal with it? Let me know in the comments!
Until next week, I will remain…
Amanda
Paid subscribers read essays examining the psychological forces that determine behavior; why we repeat patterns we claim to reject, how we mistake performance for authenticity, why we pursue desires we've inherited rather than chosen.
Upgrade
Share
Quick note: Nope, I’m not a therapist—just someone who spent 25 years with undiagnosed panic disorder and 23 years in therapy. How to Live distills what I’ve learned through lived experience, therapy, and obsessive research—so you can skip the unnecessary suffering and better understand yourself.
Some links are affiliate links, meaning I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Every bit goes straight back into supporting this newsletter. Thank you!