When did it start? It started before I was born. It started before my mother was born. It started when friction created the world. When does anything start? It doesn’t; it just grows, sometimes to unmanageable heights, and then, when you’re at the very edge, it becomes clear: Something must be done.
Left untreated, anxiety disorders, like fingernails, grow with a person. The longer they go untended, the more mangled and painful they become. Often, they spiral out of control, splitting and splintering into other disorders, like depression, social anxiety, or agoraphobia. We rise and fall upon a merry-go-round of their features. Separation anxiety handicaps its captors, preventing them from leaving bad relationships, moving far from home, going on trips, to parties, applying for jobs, having children, getting married, seeing friends, or falling asleep. Some people are so crippled by their anxiety they have panic attacks in anticipation of having a panic attack.
I’ve had panic attacks in nearly every part of New York City, even on Staten Island. I’ve had them in taxis, on subways, public bathrooms, banks, street corners, in Washington Square Park, on multiple piers, the Manhattan Bridge, Chinatown, the East Village, the Upper East Side, Central Park, Lincoln Center, the dressing room at Urban Outfitters, Mamoun’s Falafel, the Bobst Library, the Mid-Manhattan Library, the main library branch, the Brooklyn Library, the Fort Greene Farmers’ Market, Laundromats, book kiosks, in the entrance of FAO Schwarz, at the post office, on the steps of the Met, on stoops, at the Brooklyn Flea, in bars, at friends’ houses, onstage, in the shower, in queen-sized beds, double beds, twin beds, in my crib.
I’ve grown so expert at hiding them, most people would never even know I’m suffering an attack. How, after all, do you explain that a restaurant’s decision to dim their lights swelled your throat shut, and that’s why you must leave immediately—not just the restaurant, but the neighborhood? If you cannot point to something, then it is invisible. Like a cult leader, anxiety traps you and convinces you that you’re the only one it sees.
The small things you once overlooked begin to accumulate: your grandmother’s agitated voice messages when you don’t return her phone call inside of an hour, how out-of-sorts your father gets when someone is sitting at the table he’s reserved, your mother’s anger when someone makes a mistake. We expect anxiety in others to look like the anxiety that exists inside us, but it often doesn’t, and so we don’t recognize its sundry forms, even when the distress we feel inside our bodies isn’t our own but someone else’s.
Life is not marked by “aha” moments. There are no narrative conveniences that give our messy stories the tidy shape of a novel or a movie, but there are occasional bouts of epiphany; and recognizing that my grandmother’s agitation was anxiety led me to widen my scope, silently probing others for signals that they, too, were anxious. With practice, I began to see it in my friends, which made me feel less alone and less defective. And then, one day, as I was joking at my own expense—as I often do—and a friend said, “Why do you always do that? Make jokes out of your sadness?” the roots exposed themselves to me, and I realized my dad’s jokes weren’t meant to hurt my feelings; he joked because my fear of him left him feeling rejected. Recognizing in others what I thought existed only in me gave me a context for their shortcomings, and I was overwhelmed by compassion. I couldn’t see what they suffered from because I suffered from it, and they couldn’t see what I suffered from because they suffered from it.
Anxiety, as the doctor had said, is inherited; it runs in families. In retrospect, that seems so obvious. We can’t recognize in others what we can’t see in ourselves. My suffering went undiagnosed all those years not because they weren’t looking, but because they couldn’t recognize what they saw. For better or worse, we can teach others only what we understand. I’ve walked through the world like a subject in search of its story. In my family, we always looked to others to tell us who we were. We asked, What’s wrong with this picture? What does not belong? Each person begins, after all, as a story other people tell. And when we fall outside the confines of our common standards, we will assume our deficits define us.
From birth to death, we are measured and weighed, plotted on a line of percentile curves and compared against an invisible normal. We are appraised on our ability to answer questions whose responses are either right or wrong, which telegraphs to us that we are either right or wrong. We are tested, examined, assessed, and evaluated, and the numerical-value results become who we are—but it’s in the chasm between “you” and that invisible normal where anxiety grows, telling you there’s been an error and the error is you.
This is where I spent my life, wasting my cleanest fuel on a misguided channel-crossing away from who I was and toward some interpretation of who I was supposed to be. At first I thought my feelings were the learning disability, until I realized it was my brain they were after. Beyond “learning disabled,” I was told so little, not even the name for the disability they said was “mine.” When I tried to get answers, my questions hung there without closure, and that incompleteness seeped through me, cementing worry into belief that what was slow and different about me was my own brain; that I was stupid. Where I thought one thing was the matter with me, now I understood there were two. The accumulated efforts to correct me left me feeling defective, and my inability to be fixed became my identity, and it’s followed me all the way here.
The message to people who learn differently, who are poor test takers, or who display any physical, emotional, or intellectual variance, is that we’re not who we should be, and who we are isn’t right. My fear and my conviction were the same: that I was the flaw in the universe; the wrongly circled letter in our multiple-choice world. This terrible truth binds us all: fear that there’s a single, unattainable, correct way to be human. We rely on measures that disregard human characteristics such as empathy and emotion to tell us who we are.
Unconsciously, we consider these results our worth, and we shrink or expand our self-image to fit inside these notions, but we are not our results, just as we are not who other people imagine us to be, and yet we are placed and displaced according to these returns. We spend our lives unwittingly applying this system of measurement ourselves, raising our children on it, and teaching them to pass it down.
I dragged my youthful beliefs into adulthood, granting myself the grand fears of my childhood by building a type of altar to my concerns and making good on old worries. When I was finally diagnosed at age twenty-five, I had to accept a different truth and learn a new way to be me.
In the end, so many of the things I feared would happen, happened. People died; they disappeared; we lost our house. It’s all come true, and here I am now, living inside the very future I feared, imagining it would kill me. Yet I am okay; I am alive. While I didn’t get the things I assumed I’d have, I did get the one thing I’ve been seeking since I was little: a name for my suffering, and something else—the will to go toward my fears, to feel my awful feelings and live with discomfort and uncertainty in a life that often feels too hard for me.
I’ve spent my life trying to become the story of myself someone else was telling. I have been looking outside to tell myself who I am; I’ve been looking everywhere for a family to call my own, but it’s me. I’m my family. And Busy is my family. Frankie Bird, the baby I never had, she is also my family. She’s the part of me that never happened, but she’s still a part of me. All these years, she’s always been the family whose story I never got to tell.
For the Patz family, Etan became a story that the world can’t stop telling, but what we know of the boy himself are the externals: his height and weight, the outfit he was wearing, the bag he was carrying, his route, and every theory that surrounded him, but we never heard his voice or knew what his laugh sounded like. We know only our version of him, and as such, who he was could be only the boy we invented. Etan could be Etan only to his family; to the rest of us, he was a representation, a symbol of our fears for ourselves and our children.
I used to think the closest I’d ever get to having a family happened already, that perfect April when I lived with Javi and Frankie on the small island off the coast of Maine, but I’ve since realized that family isn’t just a feeling, it’s a manner of action. I’ve spent years gathering supporting arguments for my claim that not creating a family of my own means I’m deficient and I’ve failed, without ever redefining for myself what creating a family of my own actually means. I was chasing an insular, closed system when I’m not an insular and closed person. Family is what happens between people, it’s the support you provide and receive, it’s the connections you build, it’s pushing and pulling toward maturation, and it’s witnessing. Every meaningful conversation I strike with strangers, the connections I have with my friends’ children, the dedication to my friendships, the dinners I have with my neighbors, the morning chats with my friends from the coffee shop, my Saturday afternoons at the farmers’ market, time spent with my family of origin, and every moment I’m with Busy is me creating and expanding a family of my own. Family is connection, and all I’ve ever wanted in my life is to connect with others. Just like my panic disorder, I’ve had a family this whole time. All that’s been missing was its name.
