Lately I've been watching my son navigate something I know really well. He doesn't have a name for it yet. But I do.
It shows up in the way he hesitates before saying yes to things. The way he needs time to warm up in a room full of people he doesn't know well. The way he'd almost always rather stay home than go somewhere unpredictable, even if the thing itself sounds good on paper.
I recognize it because I do all of it too.
Recently I got invited somewhere. Something I would genuinely enjoy, something I've actually wanted to do for years. And my first instinct was still no.
Not a considered no. A gut no. The kind that arrives before you've even had a chance to think it through.
And then the negotiation starts. We can't plan too far ahead with young kids. Childcare is complicated. What if someone gets sick? What if I get sick? What if I buy tickets and can't go? Is it worth the money? Should I even want to go if it feels this hard?
The thing about anxiety is that it's really good at finding legitimate reasons. Some of those questions are valid. Some of them are just the anxiety talking. And in the moment, it's almost impossible to tell which is which.
That's where my spouse comes in. He's my sounding board, my outside voice, the person who can see through the spiral when I'm too far inside it to find the exit. I've written about this before, about how fear has good handwriting, how it uses real evidence to make a convincing case for staying small.
But watching my son do the same thing has added a layer I wasn't expecting.
Because when I see it in him, I don't feel helpless the way I might if this were something foreign to me. I know exactly what it feels like from the inside. I know the weight of a room full of people you don't quite know how to be around. I know what it costs to show up anyway, and I know what it costs not to.
Which means I'm not guessing at how to support him. I'm working from memory.
We've developed our own language for it; if you've been around here a while you might remember the Minecraft health bar. It's stuck around because it works, for both of us.
What I want for him is to keep building on it. More language, more tools, his own sounding board someday. His own ways of telling the difference between a real barrier and anxiety wearing a disguise.
And I want him to know that saying no sometimes is okay. That protecting your energy isn't the same as giving up. That the goal isn't to become someone who never feels this way. It's to get better at working with it instead of against it.
Which, if I'm honest, is still what I'm working on too.
I said yes by the way. Tentatively, with the quiet caveat in my head that I might have to back out if life gets in the way, and honestly, the fear of having to do that is its own separate anxiety spiral I won't get into today.
But I said yes. And that felt like something.
Maybe that's what I'll tell him too, when he's ready to hear it. It doesn't always feel easy. You go anyway, when you can. And on the days you can't, or when you say yes and then have to unsay it, you try not to be too hard on yourself about it.
We're both still figuring it out.
Talk soon,
Tara
CEO of Chaos & Co.