No, I Didn’t Have a Traumatic Childhood (But I Still Got Anxiety)

I don’t know where it all began. Probably in the depths of my childhood.

That’s what all the experts say, isn’t it?

Question one on the diagnosing anxiety checklist: Did you have emotionally unavailable parents? 

Yes. And?

It’s not their fault. They did too.

And that generation fought in World War 2. No wonder they were emotionally unavailable.

Have you ever seen Saving Private Ryan?

Exactly.

And life will pile it on anyway, my girl. But more on that later. 

I actually had a great childhood, sorry experts.

I was the only child in the family home and spent the first ten years of my life in a sleepy Hampshire village. The annual Sheep Fair was a staple in everyone’s calendar. I had two, hard-working parents and spent every day after school with a childminder and a pack of other kids. I was confident - I was cast as The Star of the Show for the Christmas play— had a solo and everything, 'My Name is Twinkle', look it up, it was a best-seller in 2000... 

Every summer, we’d pack up the car and drive north to my Granny’s flat in the East Neuk of Fife. She had a window seat that overlooked the sea where I'd frequently be found curled up, reading behind the curtain I'd drawn to cocoon myself in.

There were big changes, sure - at the age of 11 I moved from our tiny village to an even smaller one on the west coast of Scotland. But even then, I kept doing what I knew how to do. I made friends easily; I invited people for sleepovers and played with the neighbours in the garden on sunny afternoons. I went to horse riding lessons and leapt over large fences on larger ponies.

Like everyone, I had a string of normal childhood fears. Things that go bump in the night, the Witches from the 1990’s film version of Roald Dahl’s famous book (unbelievably terrifying) oh, and my parents dying.

'I don’t want you to dieeeee' I’d bellow between sobs as I stood before them in my pyjamas, hours after they thought I’d gone to bed. The latest true-crime drama would be blaring from the TV (reader, pause to wonder where my fear of their deaths may have come from). They’d exchange glances, confused, before firmly reassuring me that nothing bad was going to happen before tucking me back into bed. I believed them and everything was forgotten by morning.

The fear of loved ones dying suddenly continued throughout childhood and wasn’t confined to my parents. Sometimes, my parents would leave me with my Granny while they went on their own holiday or back to work.

Free childcare? I get it.

But they weren't given a second to forget about me. I'd make frequent phone calls to my mum at her office, sobbing down the line because I was convinced my Granny had died in her chair during the afternoon run of 'Neighbours'.

It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility OK? She was elderly and slept a LOT during the afternoons. 

Mum would tell me to give her a gentle nudge to wake her and put her on the phone. 

'Will you stop calling your mother to tell her I died?' Granny would quip in her sharp, east-coast accent once they'd hung up.

These confrontations with mortality were not unfounded—my grandfather passed away suddenly when I was five. It was scary because I'd never seen Mum so sad. I've come to see these outbursts were normal experiences for a child to go through when they've seen the devastation and sadness death can create close up.

On the whole, though, childhood was easy. I knew how to do it—and I did it well.

Trust was just something I had; no effort required.

I didn’t question anything because I didn’t have to. I trusted my family, myself, and the world around me. It wasn’t about blind faith; it just was. It was simple. That didn’t mean everything was perfect all the time. I had fears. I had worries. But I could get reassurance from my parents and put them to rest when I needed to.

Like all of us, it wasn’t until I got older that things started to shift.

As life began to ask more of me—when I had to start making my own decisions and figuring things out on my own—that’s when I started to feel less sure of everything.

That innate sense of trust I had started to fade, and I was left to navigate a world that sometimes felt a bit dark. Where things weren't always simple or clear.