TL;DR is a monthly digest summarizing the vital bits from the previous month's How to Live newsletter so you don't miss a thing.

I learned early that my energy set the tone for the entire night. As the first person to walk onstage, I was the tuning fork. My mood dictated the evening—signaling to the audience what kind of night they’d have, and to the performers whether this was worth their time or a f**king death trap.

My history of performing began long before the series, just not on a stage. As a child with undiagnosed panic disorder, I had to act like I wasn’t having a panic attack—because I was terrified of what was happening to me. I thought if I hid it, the fear would go away; if I showed it, it would devour me.

Turns out, I wasn’t just pretending—I was practicing.

Spend your life hiding fear, and you learn to live in two minds: one performing cool, one cowering under it. Running Happy Ending taught me to navigate that paradox—to feel fear, while projecting confidence.

Over time, I started inventing ways to get through other stresses. It worked. For years I kept them secret, embarrassed that to manage, I needed to pretend, while everyone else (or so I believed) could deal without invisible crutches. But in recent years, especially after my memoir Little Panic: Dispatches From an Anxious Life came out, people started asking me how I got through things, when I had so much anxiety. So, I started sharing mine.

The word “hack” has always rubbed me the wrong way. You can’t hack life. You can’t shortcut pain. But you can reframe it—rotate the problem, tilt your point of view until something hard becomes doable.

Today, I’m letting you in on some top-secret pivots that get me through things that bring me anxiety. I hope that they’ll inspire you to create your own pretendings.

It was the most afraid I’d been in years. Beforehand, I hid on a narrow stairwell behind a closed door, doing the breathing exercises from my brother’s app in a last-ditch attempt to calm myself.

I’ve performed professionally for much of my life, so stage fright is familiar—but what hit me that night was the original, unfiltered version. The kind I felt before I had any tools at all. Because the story I was about to tell was one I’d never said aloud to anyone. Not from shame, but because I didn’t know it was a story until someone else saw it.

That someone was Catherine Burns—then The Moth’s artistic director (and premium member; hi Catherine!). Sitting on her couch in Fort Greene, I told her the scattered pieces of my panic, and she caught a connection I had missed for decades.

This is why she’s an expert story midwife.

This week, my story “Separation Anxiety” is airing again on public radio stations across the United States. Each Moth story only gets a brief window on the air before it disappears back into the archive, so if you want to hear it in its fully raw form—you can find your local radio station here, and listen while it’s on the airwaves.

Below is the transcript.

In 1974, near the end of his life, the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott published a paper with a revelatory thesis: the thing you're most afraid will happen has already happened.

He didn't mean it metaphorically. He meant it literally. The actual catastrophe we've organized our entire lives around avoiding—annihilation, rejection, abandonment—already occurred. The things we spend our lives haunted by; we’ve already survived.

Winnicott called this "the fear of breakdown."

He noticed that some of his patients lived in a state of constant dread, anticipating some future catastrophe that would shatter them completely. These weren't people with specific phobias or manageable anxieties. They were people who felt perpetually on the edge of something terrible, something nameless, something that would unmake them if it ever arrived.

The usual therapeutic approach would be to help them see that their fear is disproportionate, that the catastrophe probably won't happen, that they're safe now. But Winnicott realized something his patients couldn’t see: They were afraid of a past event they'd survived but lacked conscious awareness of that experience. They were simply too young.

Here's how it works: Something overwhelming happens to you in early childhood, a rupture in care, a shocking betrayal in a familiar routine; a profound aloneness, or a psychic abandonment. But when you're an infant or a very young child, you don't yet have the ego structure to experience it as an event. You don't have language for it. You don't have a self that’s cohesive enough to say, "this is happening to me." So, the experience doesn't get metabolized, doesn't get integrated into your narrative, doesn't become part of your conscious memory.

But it happened. Your body knows it happened. Your nervous system organized around it. And now, decades later, you're living in terror of experiencing what you've already survived.

Happy holiday gift-guide season, the time of year we’re tempted to spend what we don’t have, justify impulse buys for ourselves, and fall prey to psychological marketing. My favorite season.

My preferred gifts, in order:

Most guides sort gifts for her, for him, for parents, for siblings. Mine is for your friends—and, of course, for anyone else you love.

I hope you find something that truly delights.

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Until next week, I will remain…