Anxiety & Panic
the thing is your entire life has been a constant cycle of anxiety and panic. it isn’t because your mother had ever been unstable or your home life had ever been less than functional. no, you’ve always had all of that so much easier than the rest of your close peers. even without a father figure in your life for so much of it, your life has always been so complete and put together because she’s made sure of it. yet that doesn’t mean that a second of it has come without your predisposition to panic.
take, for example, the fact that you realize everyone dies one day.
you were 7 and some song lyric came on in the kitchen about going to heaven. somehow, you’re very analytical brain put together the fact that one day everything around you would turn to ash. death became a fear of yours after that.
it never helped that you grew up in a post-columbine world where school shootings were the social norm. It wasn’t that you were afraid of going to school every day. it was that your mother has always been a teacher and you scared to death for her. learning the alice drills yourself was one thing. knowing that your mother was responsible for over 20 kids herself and that she would have protected them like they were you was the part that terrified you. you were scared to death that you’d find out one day that she’d been just another casualty of those mass newspapers.
