I think I have had anxiety almost my entire life, and it began when I was about 7 years old. But first, I want to back up a bit because this story began long before my seventh birthday. As a child, I was told that I was adopted from a very early age. I think it was because my parents wanted to reinforce for me that I was a very wanted child. My mother had surgery when she was very young, at about the age of 21 years and she lost one of her ovaries because of it. My father was later diagnosed with a low sperm count, and these two combined factors meant they were unable to have a child. They both desperately wanted a child, though, and so they decided to adopt. They chose me, a half-Korean, half-Caucasian baby half-way around the world, because I looked like a natural child they might have conceived would resemble. I know they meant well, but knowing that I had been rejected by my birth mother caused a huge amount of panic and anxiety in me. I thought that I must have been a very “bad baby” for my own mother to send me away. This preyed on my mind relentlessly in a roundabout way and nearly drove me mad as I tried to figure out what I had to do to be the very “best little girl” so my new parents would keep me and never send me away, too.
My Dad was a Nisei, a second-generation Japanese, born in Hawaii, grew up under a dictatorial, abusive mother who badgered him and beat him every day. He learned that love was conditional and carried those parenting skills into his fatherhood. From a very early age, I knew that no matter what I did, I could never measure up; I would always make some kind of mistake or disappoint him in one way or another. I have been thinking about this, trying to pinpoint exactly when my anxiety formally started.
I have a very vivid memory of being at Suzy Snider’s birthday party. We were in her parents’ backyard running a potato race, you know the game: you have a potato balanced on a large soup spoon and you are tasked with running the gauntlet (in this case to the fence) and back without dropping the potato. My father stands in the corner of the yard, and after I dropped my potato three times, he advances toward me, yelling. “Pick it up! Pick it up!” I turn to face him and am astounded by the look of pure rage on his face, his eyes bulging, the vein on his neck throbbing. I bend down, pick up the potato, put it back on the spoon, and start off again. It falls to the ground. Again, he screams at me, “Pick it up! Pick it up!” I freeze for a moment, then dutifully retrieve the potato and put it back onto the spoon, my hand shaking. I am aware of my face burning with humiliation and shame.
This scene repeats another three or four times until finally, I collapse on the ground, in a puddle of tears and fury. My father comes and stands glowering above me. “You didn’t do a very good job,” he says. I can only nod my head in defeat and continue sobbing.
Variations of this scenario repeated themselves often during my childhood, but I had conveniently forgotten most of those memories. It has only been recently, as I have been examining my lifelong struggle with my anxiety, that I have resurrected them. They are still painful and cause me to feel so much less than the woman I am today, it takes my breath away.
Anxiety is the unwanted gift that keeps on giving again and again
What began as a simple failure to win a race later became an almost unattainable battle to please my father. He was an angry, unforgiving man, and he did not suffer my foolishness or ineptness lightly. Whenever I disappoint him, no matter how insignificantly, his frown would crowd out everything else in my vision, and all I could see was his scowl. I wore this shame like a badge that only a firstborn daughter can bear. And once I had failed in his eyes, there was no way to reclaim my honour, no redemption. It became a very heavy burden to bear.
Fast forward to high school
I transferred to the local high school from parochial school along with my group of six close girlfriends. It was a relatively smooth transition, and we all settled into our new environment easily. I soon became involved with a theatre group that was located across town and busied myself with attending rehearsals and meeting people in that new community. Then one day, my world collapsed when I arrived at school one morning.
We don’t want to be friends with you anymore
I was told that my group of girlfriends no longer wanted to be friends with me. “What?” I simply could not understand why this was happening. They told me that they thought I had become very egotistical and “too big for my britches,” and they were finished with me. This rendered me to a status of persona non grata. They stopped talking to me, even stopped looking at me or acknowledging me in the halls. I was devastated. Once again, I thought it was because I was simply “not good enough,” because apparently, I was not good enough for them anymore. This was internalized as a profound failure on my part, and I sank into a deep depression.
My anxiety went undiagnosed for years. In fact, it wasn’t diagnosed until I was well into my fifties. At that point, I was put on medication to which I soon became addicted, and that was another problem I did not need.
In the intervening years, I met and married my husband, and we had four children together, but my anxiety always simmered on the back burner. It paralyzed me in ways I never knew it could. It kept me from being a good mother because I worried about everything about raising my children. As they grew older, the noise and constant tumult in the house sent me into a tizzy as I strove to control it, and my anxiety spilled out all over my family. I made everyone miserable by cracking the whip to try to keep the house clean. It was a losing battle, but I could not see that for years. The damage I did to my children because of it was enormous.
Anxiety steals your past and your future. I have learned that the only way to not lose myself in the tangles of my anxious mind is to stay firmly rooted in the present, and that is why I practice mindfulness. Mindfulness not only saved me, but it also became my lifeline. Today, my anxiety is mostly under control, or I should say that I manage it much better. It no longer controls my life like it used to. I have learned to live with it and, in some ways, have learned how to make it work for me. By that, I mean I use it to channel my physical energy in different ways: because I use the energy I get from the adrenaline to fuel my writing and my gardening. It feels good to take that energy and transform it into positive outlets in ways that were never possible for me back in the “bad old days.” My anxiety will probably always be with me, but it doesn’t feel like a demon that is hiding in the back of my closet ready to jump out and devour me when I least expect it. As time went by one of the biggest problems I developed with my anxiety was actually having anxiety about anxiety. I mean, having anxiety because I was constantly worried about when the next anxiety event would occur, how it would manifest and whether or not I would be able to survive it. There were so many times, I was convinced it was going to kill me in the middle of the night. Now, I am able to have a reasonably “normal” life because I no longer have to be on constant lookout for the next big anxiety attack. Having this freedom is a blessing, one that I am fully able to appreciate.
© D’vorah Elias 2025
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