Member-only story
Terrified Every Day — updated 2024
My Journey With Anxiety
The first time it happened, I was around 10 years old, standing on the sidewalk in front of my Brooklyn home, looking up at a blue summer sky. For whatever unknown reason, my mind began wondering about the year 2000, and how old I would be then. (Quite possibly this had something to do with The Jetsons, or Astroboy, two of my obsessions at the time.)
As I calculated what my age would be, I was suddenly seized by a physical sensation I didn’t recognize, like a shot of electricity through my body, accompanied by the thought, “You are going to die.” The feeling soon crystallized as abject, paralyzing, terror.
Today, we might label this as an existential crisis or a panic attack. Whatever it was, it would rarely revisit me, at odd and unexpected moments, through the rest of my childhood and into adulthood. At some point after having children, it would surface as nervousness and fear when I felt out of control as a parent.
Sending them to a snack stand in a bowling alley without me. Letting them go on a boardwalk ride without me. Walking home from school.
It only helped reinforce the fear when, my son had a pot of hot coffee dumped on him while he waited for his snacks in the bowling alley; my daughter, unrestrained inside a tumbling cage on a Ferris wheel…
