What I Actually Know Now

When I was 7 years old, my parents brought me to a therapist to help manage what they called my “big emotions.” I would sit across from this sweet lady, usually with nothing to say, but somehow carrying more energy than I knew what to do with.

I was tested for just about everything under the sun and was eventually diagnosed with ADHD. It wasn’t until years later that I could look back at that 7-year-old girl and recognize something else underneath all of that restless energy: anxiety.

I just didn’t have a name for it yet. And what seven-year-old knows how to explain anxiety? But my first real introduction to what it feels like to fear your own body, mind and soul came four years later. My dad left this earth far sooner than either of us deserved.

I was 11 years old, and my body learned what it felt like to lose someone before I was old enough to understand what that loss would do to me.

Since then, anxiety has had a way of making me grieve things before they ever happen.

Before the dream comes true, I feared its failure. Before the relationship begins, I feared its end. Before I make the decision I know is right, I feared everything that could happen because of it.

Maybe you know the feeling.

Your stomach drops when someone doesn’t answer the phone right away. Your lips start to quiver when someone asks if you’re okay. Your chest tightens in the middle of an otherwise normal day, and suddenly your mind jumps ten steps ahead, preparing for something that hasn’t even happened.

And somehow, life doesn’t stop while you’re anxious.

You still have to go to work. You still have to go to class. You still have people depending on you. So you keep going when you’re running on empty. You show up because sometimes showing up is the only thing you know how to do.

For a long time, I let anxiety manage just about every part of my life, even the parts where I had found joy.

There were mentors who wanted to show up for me, but I was too afraid to fully let them. Friends who were tending gently to my soul while I quietly convinced myself they would eventually leave. Opportunities I wanted so badly, only to catch myself preparing to lose them before they were ever mine.

My body remembered seasons that had hurt me long after they were over.

My stomach would tighten into knots. Nausea would take over. One unanswered phone call could turn into the worst-case scenario before I had any reason to believe something was actually wrong.

Eventually, anxiety wasn’t just something I carried. It was affecting the way I lived.

It hurt relationships. It changed what I tolerated from other people. It changed how I saw the world and, probably most painfully, how I saw myself.

At some point, I realized I couldn’t keep letting fear tell me what happened next.

That didn’t mean forgetting my grief. I am still allowed to miss my dad. I am still allowed to acknowledge the things that taught me to expect people to leave. Taking the pen back didn’t mean pretending those chapters never happened.

It meant deciding they didn’t get to write every chapter that came after them.

So I started doing something incredibly simple: reminding myself of what I actually knew.

When my mom didn’t answer the phone and my brain immediately decided something terrible had happened, I would stop.

I would see her soon. True.

She was healthy. True.

If something had happened, someone would call me. True.

Not what could be true. Not what anxiety was telling me might be true.

What was actually true.

My body still keeps the score sometimes. But I keep the pen.

And most days, taking the pen back doesn’t look particularly profound. Sometimes it means walking around my neighborhood until my stomach settles enough for me to eat dinner. Sometimes it means calling someone instead of sitting alone with every possible scenario my mind can create. Sometimes it means sitting with the people I love and actually letting myself enjoy the fact that they are sitting there with me.

I am still learning not to turn every good thing into something I am terrified to lose.

Because the people I love are here now.

The dream is here now.

I am here now.

And I don’t want to spend so much of my life grieving endings that haven’t happened that I miss everything happening in front of me.

Anxiety may still try to grab the pen sometimes.

But it doesn’t get to write the ending before I’ve had the chance to live the story.