Hi Girija

The health concerns make sense after seeing your mother struggle with her health. 🩵

I don’t know your history, but you mentioned that your family was dysfunctional and experienced some bullying at school? When people experience difficulties like this as children they often develop a baseline level of anxiety. It takes a lot of intentional work to reduce the level of anxiety.

Fear is a high arousal state so the easiest way to shift it is to go to excitement because it is on the same part of the nervous system. Doing something physical and fun, like dancing to music. Or whatever it is you like. From there it is easier to calm down with gentle self-care and breathwork.

Worrying, you have to prove to yourself it is not worth your time and energy. Over and over again. Until it sinks in. You can plan without anxiety. And then you put it down because there is only what you can control. It all takes a lot of time and practice. 🩵

As for a sign from God, I feel like the complexity of life is the sign. What are the chances of all of this? Even having a phone or computer is a miracle.

Food used to be local and cyclic. You’d have milk in summer. Now we can have it all of the time and from different countries too. Vaccines, antibiotics and medical care prevent so many deaths. A child being born is a miracle. And if you go outside you see so many beautiful things. 🩵

Dear Girija:

One thing I want to say right away is how much I respect your emotional honesty. You look directly at what scares you, you name it clearly, and you don’t turn away from the parts of yourself that feel fragile. That willingness to look inside — even when it hurts — is not a small thing. It’s the foundation of healing. Nothing changes until a person can face their inner world the way you are doing now.

I relate to that very much. My own healing began in the same way: by being honest with myself about what I felt, by noticing the fear instead of hiding it, and by admitting how deeply my childhood shaped me. That emotional honesty was the prerequisite for any safety I’ve built inside.

And I want to be clear with you: my healing is not “complete.” I still carry anxiety in my body. Some of it is somatic — tics, Tourette’s — old fear that settled into my nervous system long before I had any control over my life. That part didn’t magically disappear. But I am safer within myself now, and I feel so much better than I used to.

The biggest shift came from peeling off self‑blame and replacing it with empathy for myself. I stopped treating my fear as a flaw and started seeing it as a child’s response to an unsafe world.

I also stopped seeing myself as “abnormal,” or as some kind of freak of nature — which reminds me of the title of your 2022 thread, “I want to be normal.” I began to understand that I was a normal child who had no choice but to adapt to abnormal circumstances. That change in perspective softened something deep inside me.

Another thing that helped — and I still repeat it every single day — is the serenity prayer we talked about in your other thread: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Whenever I feel anxious about a real‑life situation, I ask myself: Is this something I can change? If the answer is no, I let it go. And if the worry comes back, I repeat the question again.

None of this erased the past, but it made the present livable. And it’s something you can build too — slowly, gently, and with the same honesty you’re already showing.

🌿 Anita