You're Not Doing Something Wrong All The Time
And you never were.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a healing newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.
You have to go to school to learn how to save a life, but there’s no prerequisite course for creating one. There’s no pre-parenthood required reading, qualifications courses, not even so much as an afternoon in training, watching VHS videos with a 20-question multiple choice test at the end. When it comes to creating and raising human beings, as long as you don’t hit or molest them, you can do whatever the fuck you want. You can even convince them they do everything wrong 100% of the time, because a child who lives in fear is easier to raise than one that has a mind of its own.
People talk about anxiety like it’s cute. Getting nervous before a big presentation at work or a tough conversation with a friend. That’s not anxiety, that’s health. That’s a healthy human response to stimuli that helps you focus and perform because your body and brain can tell that this is important to you. Anxiety is very different. Anxiety is being afraid, every waking hour, that everything you do, say, or even think is perpetually incorrect, and in need of correction. If your mind has been wired by authority figures since toddlerhood to believe that everything you do is wrong, you will live in real anxiety. You will barely live at all.