This is NBR's Life Kit. I'm Anya Kamenetz.

And I'm Corey Turner.

I want you to meet a little boy from central Illinois.

At five, he loves to draw and wear capes and play with a wooden sword that his dad made.

He has one big brother, two parents, and three cats.

But by eight or nine, he also has this constant pit of the stomach feeling that something's about to go wrong.

He doesn't know what it is or what to call it.

All he knows is he's scared of storms and high places.

When he flies on an airplane, he can clearly feel it breaking in half and imagines

what it would be like to get sucked out. Most of the time, nobody else can see all of this

worry, and he doesn't talk about it because it's either normal and nobody talks about it,

or it's not normal, and that's super embarrassing.

In spite of all this, he gets married. He finds a job he loves, he becomes a dad, but the worries

follow him until he has a panic attack in front of his kids. So after 40 years, he finally describes this fear to someone else, a doctor who very quickly

gives a name to this shadow he's been living with all his life, anxiety.

And this is a hard story for me to share, Anya, because it's my story.

This is me. And I'm sharing it because it's my story. This is me.

But I'm sharing it because it's also a lot of other kids' stories right now.

And this episode is all about how we grown-ups can help them.

So they don't have to live quite so long in the shadows.

Thank you for sharing, Corey.

Thanks for listening.

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