Sometimes I look back at my childhood and wonder:
Did I somehow predict my anxiety diagnosis before I even knew what anxiety was?
I don’t think “predict” is really the right word.
I think I was experiencing things long before I had the words to explain them.
Now that I’m older and understand more about my mental health, I can look backward and recognize things younger me couldn’t.
And suddenly, a lot of my past makes more sense.
I Worried About Everything
In middle school, I worried about seemingly everything.
Every test felt bigger than just a test.
Every mishap could replay in my head over and over.
I questioned things constantly. What did I do? What did I say? What did someone think about me? Did I get something wrong? What if I made a mistake?
Mistakes felt huge.
I also remember feeling sad a lot.
I could feel incredibly alone even though I technically had friends. At the time, I thought those friendships were real. It wasn’t until after graduation that I started realizing some of those people weren’t really my friends at all.
I was surrounded by people, yet somehow I still felt alone.
But when I look even further back, I realize that my fear of getting things wrong may have started much earlier.
I Felt Like I Was Supposed to Already Know
Growing up, my mom wanted things done perfectly.
Sometimes I felt like I was expected to know how to do things without being given much room to learn them first.
But kids aren’t supposed to know everything.
They’re supposed to ask questions.
They’re supposed to learn.
They’re supposed to mess up.
I don’t think younger me understood that.
Instead of thinking:
I’m still learning.
My brain would think:
I should know this.
What if I do it wrong?
What if someone gets upset with me?
What if I disappoint someone?
Over time, making a mistake could feel like something much bigger than simply getting something wrong.
It could feel like I had failed.
And that fear followed me.
There Were Other Things I Couldn’t Explain
There were also things happening that I didn’t understand at all.
When I was younger, I would sometimes tell my mom that I thought I could hear the voices of nosy relatives.
To me, the experience felt real.
But it was dismissed.
Maybe it seemed like imagination. Maybe it seemed like something I’d eventually grow out of.
Except the experiences didn’t disappear.
They eventually became more intense.
Looking back, I wasn’t trying to diagnose myself.
I was a kid trying to tell someone:
Something is happening to me, and I don’t understand it.
Then I Started Hearing Someone I Looked Up To
There was a family friend I really looked up to.
I idolized him.
He valued perfection and could be very set in his ways. Even though I wasn’t his kid, I became afraid of disappointing him.
If I messed something up, I worried about what he would think of me.
Eventually, I started experiencing his voice, too.
Looking back now, one thing stands out to me: some of the voices I experienced seemed connected to people whose opinions mattered to me or whose judgment I feared.
I didn’t understand that at the time.
I just knew I was hearing them.
At Night, It Became Even More Confusing
Sometimes I’d go to bed and hear what sounded like my parents talking about me.
And there was an incredibly confusing part of it:
Somewhere inside me, I knew they weren’t actually talking about me.
But I could still hear it.
I’d lie in bed covering my ears, trying desperately to make it stop.
Are they talking about me?
Did I do something wrong?
Are they disappointed in me?
Did I mess something up?
I used to think I was somehow making myself paranoid.
Now I don’t think that’s fair to younger me.
I wasn’t choosing to be frightened.
I was experiencing thoughts, fears, and voices that I didn’t understand or know how to handle.
And underneath so much of it seemed to be the same fear:
What if I’ve done something wrong?
Then My Mental Health Tanked
By high school, things became much harder.
I started self-harming.
At times, I found myself drawn to the physical pain because it could feel easier to understand than everything happening emotionally.
There were also behaviors that might not have looked like self-harm to someone else.
I would wear hair ties around my wrists and snap them against my skin repeatedly, sometimes until I bruised or bled.
I would sleep to escape.
I would zone out.
Sometimes disappearing into sleep or my own mind felt easier than sitting with everything happening inside of me.
I didn’t have the vocabulary I have now.
I couldn’t neatly explain what was happening.
I just knew something hurt.
Then I Found Poetry
Eventually, I discovered another outlet.
Poetry.
And then art.
Suddenly, there was somewhere I could put things I couldn’t say out loud.
I could turn emotions into words.
I could put feelings onto paper.
I could take something painful and create something from it.
Art didn’t magically make everything disappear.
Poetry didn’t cure my anxiety.
Creating didn’t make the voices disappear.
But creativity gave me another way to express what was happening inside me.
Instead of everything staying trapped in my head, some of it could become a poem, a drawing, or something else I had created.
That’s part of why creativity still means so much to me today.
The Fear of Mistakes Followed Me Into Adulthood
Now I’m an adult, and I can still recognize that younger version of myself sometimes.
Especially at work.
I’m afraid of imperfections and making mistakes.
My boss has described herself as a perfectionist, and sometimes it feels like she expects the people working for her to meet that same standard.
And suddenly that old thought comes rushing back:
I should already know how to do this.
A normal workplace mistake doesn’t always feel normal inside my head.
Instead, my thoughts can become:
What if she’s mad?
What if I should have known better?
What if I mess up again?
Why couldn’t I just do it right?
It reminds me of growing up around expectations of things being done perfectly.
When you’re already afraid of making mistakes, being around people with high expectations can make that fear even louder.
Maybe I’m Not Actually Afraid of the Mistake
I’ve started wondering whether the mistake itself is really what scares me.
Maybe I’m afraid of what I think will happen afterward.
Criticism.
Disappointment.
Embarrassment.
Someone asking why I didn’t know better.
Someone thinking differently of me.
Feeling like I’ve failed someone.
So my anxious brain comes up with what sounds like a solution:
Just be perfect.
If I never make a mistake, nobody can criticize the mistake.
Except there’s one gigantic problem with that plan.
I’m human.
Perfection isn’t possible.
And someone else’s perfectionism doesn’t have to become the standard I use to measure myself.
I’m allowed to learn.
I’m allowed to ask questions.
I’m allowed to not know something.
I’m allowed to make a mistake and correct it.
“I made a mistake” and “I am a failure” are two completely different statements.
I’m still learning that.
The Voices Didn’t Completely Go Away
There’s another part of my story that doesn’t have a perfectly neat ending.
Today, I understand something younger me didn’t:
The voices weren’t actually those people talking to me.
When I thought I heard my parents talking about me after I went to bed, they weren’t secretly having those conversations.
When I heard relatives or other people I knew, that didn’t mean those people were actually saying those things.
I understand that now.
But understanding it doesn’t mean the voices simply disappeared.
They have remained part of my life.
That’s something that can be difficult to explain.
I can recognize that a voice isn’t actually coming from the person I associate it with and still experience hearing it.
I can logically know someone isn’t talking about me while my mind produces an experience that feels incredibly convincing.
For me, learning that distinction has been important.
Younger me covered her ears and desperately tried to make everything stop.
Adult me has something she didn’t:
Awareness.
I can question what I’m experiencing.
Is there actual evidence that someone said this?
Or is this something I’m experiencing internally?
I don’t have to accept what a voice says as fact simply because I hear it.
The experience can be real to me without the message itself being true.
So Did I Predict My Diagnosis?
No.
I don’t think I predicted anything.
I think I was experiencing symptoms and emotional struggles before I had the vocabulary to understand them.
Looking back now, so many pieces of my younger years look different.
The worrying.
The sadness.
The loneliness.
The perfectionism.
The fear of mistakes.
The fear of disappointing people.
The voices.
The paranoia.
The escaping.
The self-harm.
The poetry.
The art.
A diagnosis later in life can sometimes feel like someone finally handed you a dictionary for your own past.
Suddenly you have words for things you spent years trying to explain.
That doesn’t mean every childhood experience can be traced back to one diagnosis. Mental health is far more complicated than that.
But understanding myself now helps me have more compassion for the person I was then.
What I Wish I Could Tell Younger Me
If I could sit beside that younger version of myself now, I think I’d tell her:
You’re allowed to not know.
You’re allowed to ask questions.
You’re allowed to learn.
You’re allowed to get a test question wrong.
You’re allowed to mess something up.
You’re allowed to disappoint someone.
You’re allowed to be imperfect.
And when something is happening inside your mind that scares or confuses you, you deserve to be listened to.
I wish she had known that making a mistake didn’t make her a mistake.
I wish she had known she didn’t have to hurt herself to express how badly she was hurting.
And I wish she could have seen what would eventually come from those notebooks filled with feelings she couldn’t say out loud.
Because the poetry stayed.
The art stayed.
The creativity stayed.
And yes, some of the difficult things stayed, too.
My story isn’t:
I struggled when I was younger, and then everything went away.
My story is more complicated than that.
Some things stayed. But I’ve changed in how I understand them.
I’m still learning.
I’m still creating.
I’m still figuring myself out.
But I’m not that kid desperately trying to understand everything without having the words anymore.
Now I have words.
And I’m finally learning how to use them.
A gentle note: This is my personal experience and isn’t meant to diagnose anyone else. Hearing voices or having other unusual perceptual experiences can happen for different reasons and deserves compassionate, professional support rather than judgment. If you’re struggling with self-harm or feel like you may hurt yourself, in the U.S. you can call or text 988 for immediate crisis support.