Small Signs: Living with Anxiety as an “Easy Kid”

I can still remember the first time I felt anxiety. I must have been around four or five. I don't

remember what caused it or where I was, but I recall trying to identify what I was experiencing.

To my young brain anxiety felt like when I would lay on my stomach on the swing and spin

around. It was the push of the hard yellow plastic into my tiny stomach. It was trying to catch my

breath as everything twirled around me. It was the world spinning long after I had stopped. It

wasn't until I was much older and began to venture into recovery from mental illness that I

realized the Spinning-Swing-Sensation was anxiety.

I spent about 15 years not knowing what the Spinning-Swing-Sensation meant, but when it

came I wanted it to go away. The feeling made it hard to focus in class at times. It made me a

constant people pleaser to kids and adults alike. It made me sad and scared and searching for

something toward which to target the feeling. Is it a stomach bug? Is it my upcoming spelling quiz?

Is this just what it feels like to grow up?

As a kid who was "outgoing but well behaved," nobody picked up on my quest for answers

about the Spinning-Swing Moments. I was a part of the performing arts from a young age -

dancing, acting, and singing in front of hundreds of people - so how could I possibly be a child

with anxiety? I seemed to have no fear.

My mother later told me she hadn’t considered that I had anxiety until I was 14. I was about to

give a speech at my Eighth Grade graduation ceremony and I was panicking because for the first

time I would have to talk in front of a large crowd not as a character, but as myself. She told me

to pretend to be a character like I usually did, and so I gave the speech not as Carin, but as Mia

Thermopolis from the Princess Diaries.

But that anxiety had been there all my life, building until it almost overcame me in my late

teens - to the shock of everyone, even myself.

So what does it mean to be one of those Spinning-Swing-Sensation kids? What is it like to not

be able to ask for help until you're no longer just spinning but free falling through the air, about

to crash and burn? It's frustrating. It's tiring. It's lonely. But it doesn't have to be.

If we start giving kids knowledge of what anxiety is and how it feels at a young age, perhaps we

can provide them with the right words to express what's wrong and ask for help. Perhaps mental

health treatment doesn't start with the Big Blowup or the Critical Crisis but with learning to name

that weird feeling in your stomach from a young age and giving our kids the tools to address

those feelings.

So here's to the kids who aren't quite timid enough or quite disruptive enough to be asked "Hey,

what's up?" Keep moving, keep asking questions. I promise, one day your swing will stop

spinning.