This is Part II in a series of autobiographical essays tracing the different parts of my life. If you haven’t read Part I, I’d encourage you to start there.

It is hard to say what turns ordinary worry into panic, or what unseen line the mind crosses before fear takes residence in the body and becomes something larger and more consuming. But once it does, it moves in quietly—the way darkness overtakes a room at dusk—claiming its place as though it had always belonged, until panic begins to speak for the body.

For those who have never felt the swell of panic, it can be hard to understand. Panic does not announce itself with consistency or reason. It can manifest differently for different people. For me, it is pernicious and physical. It can arrive anywhere—at a movie theater, in an Uber, during a meeting, upon waking in the morning. There is no reliable trigger, no clear warning, only the sudden, unmistakable sense that something inside me has gone awry.

For most of childhood, or at least the part I remember, my parents were separated and I lived full-time with Mom. During those years, I yearned to spend time with Dad—to feel the unmistakable bond between father and child. Yet even then, my body knew something my mind did not. Each time Dad was to pick me up, my body grew tense; and when I knew he was on his way, it would revolt. My heart began to beat so hard I could feel it in my ears. A lightheaded sensation would rise in my chest, as if the air itself was thinning.

It is a very particular feeling—panic, that is. The chest grows heavy and exhausted. The stomach twists into knots and the insides churning to the rhythm of tachycardia. The nose and mouth feel constricted, as if covered by a semi-permeable plastic wrap, making each breath deliberate and labored.

One particular instance stands out—not because it was unusual but because it was so ordinary.

I was at Mom’s office after school, pretending the empty office next door was mine as I so loved to do. Dad called to say he was on the way to pick me up for the weekend. The mere anticipation of time together—time I desperately longed for—sent me barreling to the bathroom, doubled over, my body suddenly at war with itself. I couldn’t leave the bathroom. Dad waited for me in the parking lot. Knowing he was there—not just on his way but there—only led my body to revolt even more, as if some hidden alarm clock was going off, warning me of a danger I didn’t yet know existed. Was I sick? Was it food poisoning or the stomach flu? Or was it something more sinister—a truth my body knew before my adolescent mind could comprehend?

There is a certain cruelty in the body’s wisdom—how it speaks in tremors long before the mind can understand why. I loved Dad; I longed to spend time with him. And yet somewhere deep within the hidden chambers of my mind, I understood that to be with him was to step onto uncertain ground. One could never be sure which version of Dad would arrive—sometimes tender, sometimes volatile, and often not quite the version of him I hoped for.

No one teaches a child how to reconcile such disparate realities—indeed, the small and striving mind of a child, still growing and malleable, is not equipped to understand that sort of complexity. Yet still, children know a great deal about the world around them long before their brains mature in full. They know in their body, in their breath, in the tightening of their gut, in the trembling of their hands. They know in the silence between words and in the glaring eyes of a parent. And I knew—without knowing exactly—that while I loved Dad, my body feared him. Both were true.

That is the cruel inheritance of love when it is uncertain: it drives you toward fire for its warmth, even as it sears your skin, because the child’s heart would rather be burned by a parent’s love than to live without it. Love, tangled and unadorned, can wound as faithfully as it warms.

Only years later I would come to know the sensations I felt as panic attacks—back then they were simply my body’s way of speaking. But what my body learned as a child never fully left me: the quickening pulse, the tremble in the hands, the breath caught somewhere between the chest and throat, the opaque white color my skin turned when nausea climbed from depths of my stomach to the back of the throat.

When panic grows inside, the experts, in the kindest way possible, tell you to steady yourself—to master the body’s rebellion with the quiet science of breath. In the sterile language of medicine, it is called “cyclic sighing,” a fancy term for a way of breathing. You draw in air through the nose until your lungs are stretched, then take another small sip of air—just enough to expand the diaphragm to its full capacity—and release it slowly through the mouth until nothing remains but the hollowness of your lungs.

Medical experts say it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the body’s built-in recovery mechanism that slows the heart and steadies the breath when fight-or-flight takes hold. They tell you it is science, a way to trick the body back toward stasis. But what they do not tell you—what cannot be measured or explained in sterile medical terms—is that sometimes, even for those who don’t believe, it feels like a kind of prayer. It is not a request for deliverance but a desperate hope that the moment, that the feeling will pass, that the body still remembers how to be quiet again—that relief, however brief, is still possible.

At first, my panic attacks seemed connected to particular circumstances like spending time with Dad. But they soon began to occupy more and more space in my life. In the latter half of elementary school, I spent countless mornings in the front office of Blue Grass Elementary, begging Mom to pick me up from school. My stomach twisted; nausea rose like a tide I could not hold back. I pleaded to go home—to return to Mom, the only place that felt like refuge.

For a period those pleas were a near-daily occurrence. I was a deeply happy child but also one that seemed to be falling apart—yet there was no fever, no injury or ailment anyone could name. No one quite knew what to make of me, and so in a final attempt to pin my suffering to something concrete, Mom took me to the Children’s Hospital for blood tests. They came back perfectly normal. What plagued me was something lab results could not detect. So I carried on sick without being sick, a child whose body was speaking a language that evaded recognition.

As I grew older, anxiety seeped into almost every corner of my life. Like any kid, I traversed the neighborhood with friends, got invited to sleepovers, and tried to move through the world as if I were like everyone else. But there were signs that something was off. It became a small mystery among my friend’s parents why I was the one kid who never stayed the night even when all the others did. I invented excuse after excuse, but the truth was something I couldn’t fully explain. Each time I agreed to stay over, I would arrive and enjoy the evening just fine—that is, until bedtime crept close and panic began to consume me.

While my friends played video games or drifted asleep, I hid in the bathroom to call my mother, begging her to come pick me up. One night, I distinctly remember slipping out of my close friend’s house at the edge of midnight. I was not yet brave enough to walk the dark alone, so once I summoned whatever courage I had, I eased the door shut behind me and sprinted off into the darkness—my heart pounding, my mind convinced that I was fleeing danger even if no one was there to see it.

My anxiety also manifested in other, less physical ways. For a brief period, I was terrified of being home alone. It was an odd, illogical sort of fear because I felt perfectly safe outside; and so on summer days, I would sit in the driveway hitting tennis balls against the garage door or throwing baseballs against the side of the house, waiting for someone to come home. It was the irrationality of this fear that is most curious. By any reasonable measure—whether inside or outside—I was never actually in danger. If anything, being outside was more dangerous, a fact explained to me more than once in that patient, serious tone reserved for children who refuse to see reason.

Yet the thought of being alone inside our house—of being enclosed by its walls—somehow felt more threatening than anything that could meet me in the open air. Why is something I still don’t fully understand. But fear and anxiety do not obey the laws of probability or common sense; they follow the hidden contours of the mind, answering to truths yet to be articulated.

I was scared almost constantly during this time. On numerous mornings, I would slip through the shared bathroom into my brother’s room to lay on the carpet floor between his bed and the window. We were the only ones home, and the only way I felt safe—to find some sort of stasis—was to hide between him and the door. My brother was a menace to me growing up, an endless source of small, petty miseries. He took delight in getting on my nerves any and every way possible. Yet his adoration for me was always evident and unwavering, and in moments like these—and in moments when my fear was justified—he was someone I hid behind instinctively.

That fear followed me in other spaces, too. One weekend I was home alone for the day and did not expected anyone home until the evening. I spent the morning on the living room couch watching The Office, though “watching” is not quite the word. My eyes were on the screen but my mind was wandering—uneasy, alert, listening for every sigh and creak of the house. For hours, I startled at shadows and mistook gusts of wind for an intruder. Then came the sound I feared most: the giggle of the front door. A metallic tremor. Someone trying to get in. I stood behind the wall of the adjacent room, watching the door handle jerk and twist as though someone was picking the lock. I had been wrong so many times before, had talked myself down from so many false alarms, that even in the moment I wondered if what I was seeing was real or imagined. But then the door popped open, daylight breaking around the door frame, and my worst fear became real. Someone was inside—someone who did not belong there.

What happened next felt less like bravery than instinct. I leapt from behind the wall and threw my body into the door, slamming it shut with every ounce of force my 100-pound body could gather. I heard a scream—a sharp, startled pain. Once the door was locked, I pressed my face to a narrow window and saw a dark-haired man with his back to the door. Then I began to recognize a voice. When the man finally turned around, clutching his wrist, there stood my oldest brother staring back at me with eyes filled with a mixture of shock and fury.

Fear does strange things to the body. It does not ask for permission. And when terror rises high enough, when it floods every aspect of your mind, the body lets go. Non-essential functions fall away and control of the body dissolves. So it wasn’t until I unlocked the door and let my brother inside that I realized my shorts were wet and I was stilling in a pool of urine.

The world teaches us to call this shame, to treat it as a failure of will. But it is not a weakness; it is part of our evolutionary history and the human body’s oldest instinct speaking in the only language it knows: to survive. Long before any of us learned the names for fear, the body learned to make itself lighter, to flee faster, to startle a predator long enough to escape. Many who have faced fear, both real and perceived, have spoken of this—of how the body lets go in those moments when one’s courage demands more of them than their body can bear. The body makes decisions before the mind can form a thought. We all carry that same ancient reflex. At first, my brother was furious—understandably so, since I had slammed his wrist in a door—but he ultimately saw the wreckage of my fear for what it was. He later told me that what I did was, in its own way, brave.

What I did not yet understand—what I would not understand for many years—is that panic is rarely born from nothing. It is not the mind inventing danger for sport. More often, it is memory without language, fear without chronology. The body, faithful and sophisticated, keeps watch long after the threat itself has learned how to hide. And so the panic that followed me through classrooms and bedrooms, through sleepovers and empty houses, was not wandering aimlessly. It was orbiting something. It was waiting for me to be old enough to look back and see what it had been guarding me against all along.

My anxiety manifested in psychological ways, too. One of the cruelest features of Dad’s addiction was his ability to vanish for days at a time. I would call again and again. Each time my call went unanswered tightened a knot inside me. After a couple of days with no communication, I asked Mom to drive me to his house—a child’s version of a welfare check, born of worry and a hope I could never quite shake.

When we pulled up, his truck was parked in its usual spot. I stepped out into the winter cold and knocked on the front door. Still, nothing. So I did what I had done many times before when he’d locked himself out or when I needed something from the house when he wasn’t home: I crawled through the dog door into the finished garage upstairs. The cold hit me first—his house was only a shade warmer than the air outside—and then the familiar musk of stale cigarette smoke, a scent that clung to him and seemed to seep into the walls themselves. I opened the door from the garage into the main house and almost immediately Auggie greeted me with a gentleness that only made the silence feel more ominous. I walked down the dark hallway to the master bedroom: it was empty, save for the usual heap of clothes on the bed. The living room was the same—empty but for the flicker of King of the Hill playing on mute, like the house were trying to impersonate life in Dad’s absence.

I finally reached the guest room—the place where I slept when I stayed over, where I had so often dozed off waiting for him to emerge from the hallway bathroom—and I cracked open the door. In the darkness I could make out the faint outline of a body on the bed. So I stepped inside and tapped his shoulder, then shook him lightly when he didn’t move. When he didn’t wake, my first thought—cold and immediate—was that he was dead. And then without warning, he erupted. He shot up and screamed—something to the effect of “Get the fuck out!”—in a voice so raw and feral it seemed almost inhuman. It was a scream unlike anything I had ever heard before. The closest comparison is the chainsaw-wielding man in a haunted corn maze, except this was worse—far worse—because here there were no actors or boundaries. Dad never hurt me, and I never honestly feared that he would. But his display of pure, unadulterated anger was unforgettable.

One of the hardest realities to accept is that the body is often right long before the mind is ready, or even capable, of believing it. As a child, I mistook its warnings for weakness and its resistance for betrayal. I wanted my fear—my anxiety—to be an error, something that could be corrected or disciplined out of me. But fear, I have since learned, is not always a malfunction of the spirit or the nerves; sometimes it is the most honest form of knowledge we possess.

What my body learned in those early years—about uncertainty, about absence, about love that could vanish without explanation—never truly left me. It did not fade with time or yield to reason. It settled instead into muscle and breath, into reflex and instinct, embedding itself in the quiet places where memory outlives language. Even now when panic rises without invitation, it carries with it the residue of those lessons: that love can be unpredictable, that safety is never guaranteed, that silence can speak with many voices at once.

And yet the body remembers something else as well. It remembers how to endure. How to steady itself, if briefly, when the world feels unmoored. How to find small islands of quiet when certainty is nowhere to be found. This, too, is an inheritance—less visible or discussed but no less real—and it is the one that makes living possible.

That is what it means to live with fear without surrendering to it: not to erase what the body has learned or to deny how darkness can shape us, but to listen more carefully to what that darkness is trying to teach. To bear one’s light without pretending it was found easily or without cost. To recognize that panic, for all its cruelty, can be—and often is—one of love’s most distorted expressions: a vigilance born not of apathy or weakness, but of the simple, enduring truth that what gives us life can also shape our wounds.

A Note From Me:

I used to write a lot about my personal life when I was younger. But for a variety of reasons, I stopped. It is, after all, much easier to keep things to yourself and beyond the reach of others. But there’s also a quiet cost to self-containment—and something liberating about articulating your experiences and putting them out into the world. It’s an act of exposure, yes, but also of reclamation.

Since college, I’ve kept a journal filled with fragments of my life: moments I’ve tried to make sense of, questions I’ve wrestled with, small turning points that, taken together, shaped the person I am today. For years, I imagined gathering those fragments into a memoir. Perhaps that is still in the cards. But for now, I’ve decided to begin to share some of them here, in addition to my usual writing on politics, housing, and the rest.

I’ll distinguish these essays using the same name as the folder where they live, and the title I would give a memoir if I ever get around to writing one: (Re)Creating. The title is a reference to the idea that our lives are a continuous process of creating and recreating—that we are shaped not just by what happens to us, but by the ways we make sense of it and carry it forward.

I hope you find something of value within it.

There I was. Face down in the backseat of Dad’s white Ford F-150 with his hand forcing my torso into the floorboard of the back seat. Whether believed or not, his gesture created the illusion that somehow he could protect me from the man with a gun pointed directly at his chest. I looked up just once, catching only a glimpse of the black and silver handgun and the scrawny little man with his hands wrapped around its trigger.

I can’t recall if I recognized him. Maybe I did. I can’t say for sure. By then, my body was overtaken by the pounding rhythm of fight-or-flight. My heart was thumping too hard and too fast to think clearly—not because I was scared, per se, but because the intensity of the encounter grew slowly and then erupted all at once. The man with the gun had approached the truck with one of Dad’s employees—someone I had encountered many times before, usually in more amicable circumstances, and who, a few months later, would disappear after embezzling thousands of dollars from Dad’s company. Or at least that’s the story I was told.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was. Old enough to remember, but not old enough to know that it was an experience I should have told Mom about no matter how many times Dad asked me not to. He often asked me not to tell Mom things. Withholding the whole truth was a white lie after all. And a white lie was a harmless lie, he told me. Lies were okay if they didn’t hurt anyone.

Other times were more innocuous but no less unnerving for a child—like when he would lock himself in the bathroom when I spent the night. He would slip away quietly and only after my attention drifted from the living room television—where The Twilight Zone reruns played endlessly in the background—did I notice the bathroom door was closed. The exhaust fan hummed steadily, and a thin line of light seeped out around the doorframe. On the good days, he would reemerge after a few minutes. But on other days, he stayed sealed in that small, stuffy hallway bathroom for what felt like eternity. I would wait and wait. Eventually, I would knock. On the worst nights there was only silence. After enough time passed, anxiety would wash over me. I would bang on the door, begging him to emerge from the black hole that seemed to swallow him.

Alone in his living room, I would make sure the deadbolts were latched on every door. Aside from his dog, Auggie, I was entirely alone—and the weight of that silence wrapped itself around me. It was a strange, perplexing sort of abandonment. So often parents who leave do so permanently and without a notice, escaping into a new world, lost to everyone but themselves. But here, no one was lost. There was only a door—thin and tangible—between us. Knowing he was just on the other side, immersed in a world entirely apart from mine, yet unable or unwilling to be reached, made it all the more disconcerting. I couldn’t understand why he disappeared into that tiny hallway bathroom or why he wouldn’t answer my pleas—why he couldn’t offer even the smallest sound or faintest sign of life—partly because I didn’t yet understand the nature of the sickness that consumed him, or that he was sick at all.

Once it was dark, the sun having safely retreated beyond the horizon, I would retire to the guest room where I slept—its door directly across from that hallway bathroom. With Auggie curled up at the foot of the bed, I would lie there quietly, waiting, hoping to hear the soft squeak of the bathroom door as it reopened. But more often than not I’d fall asleep to silence, only to be woken the next morning by a tap on the shoulder and Dad’s smile, greeting me as if the night before never happened.

Despite whatever had occurred the night before, I loved to spend the mornings with Dad and his employees. He owned a tile company—We Tile It, a name as corny as it was endearing—that he operated out of the unfinished basement of his house. When his addiction was stable, or at least workable, it was easy to understand why his business was so successful. Dad was a deeply charming man who, despite his flaws, loved with a recklessness that made you feel like the center of the world. He boasted that he had never lost an estimate—that every person he quoted ended up choosing him. Everyone knew that wasn’t literally true. But he told the story so easily, with such sparkle in his eyes, that disbelief felt almost beside the point. He made you want to believe it was true. Dad was also wonderfully quirky. Every one of his company’s vans had “You’re Behind the Best” printed in block letters across the back doors—a line he thought was equal parts clever and true and, at the very least, always something to talk about. It was so perfectly him: a mix of pride and humor, the kind that made people roll their eyes and root for him at the same time.

His devotion to his employees was equally admirable. At the height of his business, he had a dozen or so employees and each morning they would arrive around seven in the morning to that dark, musty basement where Dad had spent the early morning hours preparing a breakfast of eggs, sausage, biscuits, and coffee. His guys, as he called them, would spend the next hour sitting around a dusty laminate table talking about anything and everything. Both Dad and his employees made sure that little Lowell, as they liked to call me, felt like I was just one of the guys. And I believed I was. Those mornings were a sort of contradiction, a maze of lessons both virtuous and unseemly. It was where I first learned the F-word—not what it meant exactly but when and how to use it. Yet it was also where I learned the quiet value of caring for the people around you—not perfectly but as best you can.

That part of the morning I loved. But as the clock struck 8 a.m., the trouble usually began. That was when the guys would scatter to their work vans and converge at the gas station for their weekly fill-up. I would wander around the parking lot, chatting with them as they waited for Dad to pre-pay the pumps. Then, one by one, they would drive off to their job sites for the day. Once it was just me and him, I often stayed in the truck while Dad went back inside the gas station. He would return with a plastic bag of snacks and drinks for the day, a Yoo-hoo for me and an energy drink for him. He often left his drink in the cupholder while he filled up his truck. The nosy child I was couldn’t resist inspecting it, hoping it was something I’d like, only to find a warning label stamped on the side cautioning against drinking alcoholic beverages during pregnancy.

Some of these days would start out perfectly ordinary. We would drive from job site to job site checking in on project until, at some point, I would notice a subtle but distinct change in his demeanor. Whether it was intuition or simple curiosity, I scoured his truck these days looking for a clue and almost always found one—another can with a warning label or an empty airplane bottle stuffed under the driver’s seat.

Each time, I confronted him, and like any child would, I accepted his answers without suspicion. The first time he told me it was just a mistake—that he didn’t know the drink had alcohol in it. But as it happened again and again, his story changed: all drinks, even the nonalcoholic ones, have warning labels on them, he said. And when on a particularly fraught day I found a fifth of vodka wrapped in a brown paper bag under the passenger seat, he insisted the mechanic who had worked on his truck the prior day had left it there. I believed him, if only because it is in a child’s nature to believe their parents. But even as he insisted he was telling the truth, he still asked that I not tell Mom. And I was too young and naive to know that the truth, when it is innocent, is rarely something that needs to be hidden.

That I successfully kept these moments to myself still conjures up a weird sense of pride. I was not a child built for silence. However mundane or embarrassing, I was always eager to narrate the small dramas of my life, much to the chagrin of my family at times. But in these circumstances, Dad’s pitch for my silence was compelling. If I told Mom about our dodgy encounter with the gun—or the countless times I caught him drinking in the car—she wouldn’t let me see him anymore. It wasn’t a threat so much as a subtle statement of fact, one that seemed almost to hang in the air between us. He was right. So I learned, in that small but irreversible way, how to keep a secret.

That was part of the deal to have a relationship with Dad: the quiet withholding of things I knew, even then, I shouldn’t keep to myself. Those sketchy moments—things I could never tell Mom about—were an ever-present feature of time with him. And whether intended or not, his repeated requests for silence were a lesson: nothing in life is free. Every experience exacts a price, and to live is to engage in a perpetual cycle of giving and receiving. Everything of value demands something in return. The hardships we endure—whether forced upon us or of our own making—exact their toll. Even good things, I learned, come with terms.

I didn’t understand it then but those moments became the architecture of our relationship—built not on trust but a shared understanding of what could and could not be spoken aloud. Silence was a cost of being a part of his world. Because to let someone else in would have meant losing him, or at least losing the version of him I idolized—the one who picked me up on weekends, who let me take the steering wheel of his truck on the backroads, who made ordinary life feel invigorating.

A child will accept almost any bargain if it means keeping love intact. And Dad’s love, however complicated or costly, was all-encompassing. That is the irony. For a long time, I tried to separate the disparate pieces of him—the good father from the broken one, the way he made me laugh from the way he taught me to keep secrets I shouldn’t have had to carry.

But what I’ve come to understand is that people are rarely one thing. Every human, in one way or another, is a collection of contradictions—kindness and cruelty, generosity and selfishness, light and darkness. That is what makes the human experience so complicated: it refuses to be neat or to let us hold only one version of the people we love. Dad’s flaws didn’t erase his kindness any more than his love absolved the pain he left behind. They existed together—contradictory, yes, but inseparable. That realization rests at the heart of what it means to love anyone. To love someone fully requires holding disparate truths together: to see fault lines without letting them occlude everything else.

That, I think, is the light Baldwin was speaking of: a love that lives in tension, that keeps searching for the good not because it is all that exists but because it is still there—at times unseen, dimmed by weather and fatigue, yet still there, like how the sun never ceases to shine even when the clouds obscure it from view. That light lives in every human being, waiting to be rediscovered each day, remembered and practiced again and again, lest it fade from view.