(Re)Creating II: When the Body Speaks

On anxiety, childhood, and the complicated inheritance of love

This is Part II in a series of autobiographical essays tracing the different parts of my life. If you haven’t read Part I yet, I’d encourage you to start there—it makes Part II make a lot more sense.

“The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up.” —Sue Monk Kidd

It is hard to say what turns ordinary worry into panic, or what unseen line the mind crosses before fear takes up 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 as dusk falls—claiming its place as though it had always belonged, until panic begins to speak for the body, and the body mistakes it for a command.

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 all-consuming. It can arrive anywhere—at a movie theater, in an Uber, during a meeting, after waking from a nap. There is no reliable trigger, no clear warning. Only the sudden, unmistakable sense that something inside has gone awry.

As an elementary school kid, I yearned to be with Dad—to feel the unmistakable bond between father and child. Yet even then, my body knew something my mind did not.

For most of childhood, or at least the part I remember, my parents were separated, and I lived full-time with my mother. 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 beat so loudly I could hear it in my ears, and I was overcome by a lightheaded sensation in my chest, as if the air itself had thinned. It is a very particular feeling—panic, that is. The chest grows heavy, almost exhausted. The stomach twists into knots, the insides churning to the rhythm of tachycardia. The nose and mouth feel 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 my mother’s office after school, acting as though 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 running 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. And knowing he was there—not just on his way, but there—only led my body to revolt even more, as if some hidden alarm had been struck, warning me of a danger I didn’t yet know existed. Was I sick? Was it food poisoning, 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 my father; I longed to spend time with him. And yet, somewhere deep within the hidden chambers of the mind, I understood that to be with him was to step onto uncertain ground. One could never be certain which version of Dad would arrive—sometimes tender, sometimes volatile, and often—too often—never quite the version of him I hoped for.

No one teaches a child how to reconcile 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 long before their brains mature in full. They know in their muscles, in their breath, in the tightening of their gut. They know in the silence between words, in the glaring eyes of a parent, in the trembling of their hands. 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 live without it. Love, tangled and unadorned, can wound as faithfully as it warms.

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

The doctors say it activates the parasympathetic nervous system—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 a science-based method, a way to slow the pulse and 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 the godless, it feels like a kind of prayer. It’s 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, no 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 East Tennessee Children’s Hospital for blood tests. The tests came back perfectly normal. What plagued me was something lab results could not detect. And 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, tried to move through the world as if I were like everyone else. But it became a small mystery among the 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—until bedtime crept close and panic began to gather within me, silent but merciless.

While my friends played video games or drifted asleep, I hid in the bathroom, calling my mother in a trembling voice, begging her to come get me. 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 breath sharp, 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 or hit tennis balls against the garage door, 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, practical tone reserved for children who refuse to see reason.

Yet, the thought of being alone inside our house—of being enclosed by its walls, unreachable and unheard—felt far more threatening than anything that could meet me in the open air. Why I felt this way is something I still don’t fully understand. But I’ve come to recognize that 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.

During this time, I was scared almost constantly. On numerous mornings, I would slip through the shared bathroom into the next room to lay on the carpet floor between my brother’s 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 behind my brother and the door. My brother was a menace to me growing up, and took delight in getting on my nerves any and every way possible. He was an endless source of small, petty miseries. Yet his adoration for me was unwavering and in moments like these—and in moments when my fear was not imagined but real—he was someone I hid behind instinctively.

That fear followed me in other moments, too. One weekend I was home alone for the day, not expecting anyone home until 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 wandered—uneasy, alert, listening for every sigh of the house, every creak, every gust of wind. For hours, I startled at shadows, mistaking a gust against the window for an intruder. Then came the sound I had feared all morning: the giggle of the front door. A metallic tremor. Someone trying to get in.

I stepped behind the wall of the adjacent room, watching the door handle jerk and twist as though someone were working a lockpick. 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. But then the door popped open—hinges releasing, 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 80-pound body could gather. I heard a scream—a sharp, startled pain—and when I pressed my face to the narrow window beside the door, a dark-haired man was stepping away from the door. And then I began to recognize a voice. When he finally turned around, clutching his wrist, I saw my oldest brother staring back at me—his eyes filled with a mixture of shock and fury.

Fear does strange things to the body. It does not ask your permission. And when terror rises high enough, when it floods every aspect of your mind, the body lets go. Non-essential functions fall away; control dissolves. So it wasn’t until I unlocked the door and let my brother inside, when the tide of panic began to slow, that I realized I had peed myself as I had charged the door.

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. It is the body’s oldest instinct speaking in the only language it knows: 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 the body letting go in those moments when their courage demands more of them than their bodies can bear. The body makes its own decisions long before the mind can form a thought. We all carry that same ancient reflex.

At first, my brother was furious—understandably, since I had slammed his wrist in a door—but he ultimately saw the wreckage of my fear for what it was. Later, he told me that what I did was, in its own way, brave.

What I did not yet understand—what I would not understand for years—was 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 unsophisticated, 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.

One of the cruelest features of Dad’s addiction was his ability to vanish, slipping into silence for days at a time. I would call over and over. Each time my call went unanswered tightened a knot of fear inside me. At last, after a couple of days with no communication, I asked my mother 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 sat in its usual place, unmoved, indifferent. I stepped out into the winter cold and knocked on the front door, listening to the hollow echo of my own insistence. Still, nothing. So I did what I had done too many times before when he’d locked himself out, or when I needed something from the house and he wasn’t home: I crawled through the dog door into the finished garage upstairs, the small passage I had long ago learned to navigate.

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 his dog, Auggie, greeted me with a gentleness that made the silence feel all the more ominous. I walked down the dark hallway to the master bedroom: empty, save for the usual heap of unclean clothes on the bed. The living room was the same—vacant but for the flicker of King of the Hill playing on mute, as though the house were trying to impersonate life in Dad’s absence.

At last, I 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, promising he’d be right back. I cracked open the door. In the darkness I could make out the faint outline of a body on the bed. I stepped inside, 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, screaming—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. The closest comparison I could summon was the chainsaw-wielding man in a haunted corn maze, except this was worse—far worse—because here there were no actors, no boundaries between the terror and the truth. Dad never hurt me; and I never honestly feared that he would. But his display of pure, unadulterated anger was unnerving.

---

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, its resistance for betrayal. I wanted my fear—my anxiety—to be an error, something to be corrected, silenced, 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, however briefly, when the world feels unmoored. How to find small islands of quiet even when certainty is nowhere to be found. This, too, is an inheritance—less visible, less 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, not to deny the darkness that shaped us, but to listen more carefully to what that darkness was trying to teach. To bear the light without pretending it was found easily, or without a cost. To recognize that panic, for all its cruelty, can be—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.