I think a lot of people would be in a kinder and better place if we all remembered our childhood feelings more.

posted 05/14/2025

I have really bad anxiety. It’s frustratingly physical. It has always made doing a lot of things hard.

I used to physically shake when meeting new people, or making conversation, or being in public in general. I still experience varying degrees of it. It makes it hard to breathe, hard to focus my eyes, I involuntarily tense up so much it hurts.

It hasn’t really stopped me from living my life as much as it has made it incredibly painful to do so.

I’ve interrogated every part of it I can. I’ve gone through multiple rounds and types of therapy, multiple types of medications, mindset shifts, lifestyle changes, activity levels.

It still happens, though.

The physical sensation precedes any thoughts related to what’s happening. It’s hard to “mindfulness” away something that happens automatically in the body. It sucks, it’s fatiguing, it’s really unpleasant.

And like, yeah, sometimes you have to live scared. I get it, that’s fine.

I understand dealing with the reality I’ve been dealt, but still, holy shit.

So like, when I was really young, this sucked ass and I had no idea what was going on.

How would I have? Children are not generally that self aware yet.

(sorry children)

I’ve been like this for my entire conscious life.

No preschooler would easily pinpoint the reason they’re hyperventilating at random one day. No first grader knows what’s going on if they get random chest pains when doing normal parts of the school day, and stress headaches at night.

At the very least, even if they start to notice what is causing the problem, young kids are often not the most effective communicators. Especially not to adults. It’s hard, their command of the language is new, they haven’t experienced very much yet, their frame of reference is small.

I struggled heavily with that.

I was in a lot of emotional pain on a daily basis. I felt scared sick often, and I had no idea why any of it was happening. I didn’t have the vocabulary, experiences, or skills necessary to identify or communicate my pain. It felt like I was emotionally trapped behind a soundproof wall, unable to convey anything that I was going through to others.

Additionally, I remember the adults in my life being incredibly dismissive of what I was managing to communicate, often writing it off as a normal thing for a child to experience. I simply was not believed or taken seriously when trying to convey the part about it causing physical pain.

It blows that I remember feeling that way as a 5 year old. It’s feels really awful for so many of my earliest memories to be fear and pain and panic attacks.

However, it has made me feel very strongly about being kind to children and treating them like people.

It has made me always remember how horrible it felt to be powerless as a child, in pain, when the adults in my life were dismissive or cruel about it.

In that way, I have to admit that I am angrily grateful for it, I’ll say through clenched teeth.

In a “I had no other choice but to experience that, I might as well attempt to view it for what I’ve learned from it” way.

So much societal cruelty towards children is completely mindless on behalf of the adults doing it. People make very little effort to meaningfully empathize with children.

There are many obvious and severe examples of this. Adults will casually hit, grab, shake, yell at, demean, bully, or harass children. It happens both subtly and overtly, and everyone else just stands around and watches it happen, and somehow doesn’t immediately go “Hey what the Hell is wrong with you”. It also happens in less talked about ways, like how many adults regard children as property, as not earning any of their own agency or sense of self until adulthood.

I know previous generations were even more explicitly abusive towards children, but that only makes it more unbelievable to me how long we’ve all collectively put up with it.

It makes no goddamn sense. Like, are you serious? Is it that hard to be kind to a child? To be polite and respectful to them? I’m not saying to give them a million dollars, just dignity and good-faith in basic interactions.

How fucking miserable is it that we as a society suck so bad at respecting children that so many families can’t even easily clear that bar? What the Hell are we doing?

There’s a common agreement among an alarming number of adults that: kids probably aren’t going to remember much of what happens to them, so on some level a lot of things they see or experience don’t really matter.

It’s insanely fucked up to me that so many people can hear and agree with that sentiment, while simultaneously often harboring at least one bad memory directly related to shitty adults believing exactly that.

Socially, we tolerate stupid amounts of abuse for no discernible reason other than to accommodate the people who want to be able to do it. I guess.

I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with this since I started working in public schools as an adult instead of attending as a student. Meeting many different families, students, staff members and faculty. Continuously seeing the same casual cruelties emerge over and over again. Seeing it visibly harming the kids.

I think maybe we should all reflect more on our childhoods. I think it would help us choose kindness when we can.

Harm isn’t black and white. Attempting to be aware of ourselves is a lot healthier than living in ignorance. Accidents happen, unlearning shit-behavior isn’t linear or perfect, but anything is better than blindly mistreating others.