A scratchy throat. The first faint shimmer of a fever. That’s all it takes.
At that first sign of possible illness, an ancient feeling kicks in.
Not just worry. A full-body alarm that feels wildly disproportionate to a sore throat—like everything I’ve built is about to collapse, like I’m going to miss out on something I can never get back.
For years, I would try to reason myself out of it.
You’re a grown adult, I would tell myself. You’ll be sick for two days, maybe three. You have everything you need. This is not a crisis.
Perfectly reasonable. Completely useless.
I could follow the logic, agree with every word of it—and still feel the fear sitting there, unchanged, unmoved.
You can’t argue with fear. It’s there for a reason, and arguing with it makes the reason harder to find. So instead of pushing back, I got curious and went looking for where the fear actually started.
As a child, I got sick constantly—every 21 days, like clockwork. While other kids were out living their lives, I was in bed, watching the world continue without me. I missed birthdays. Soccer matches. Things that feel enormous when you’re six.
So when I finally understood that the reasoning wasn’t working—that I was essentially arguing with myself and losing—I started taking a different approach.
I stopped asking Why am I afraid? I started asking Who is afraid?
Not the 44-year-old me. That guy understands proportion. The one who flinches at a slight sore throat, the one who feels the floor drop out—that’s the six-year-old who learned, over and over, that his body was a trap. That health was something that got taken away. That the world would keep spinning and leave him behind.
I wasn’t reasoning with an adult. I was reasoning with a child. I was showing up with a well-reasoned PowerPoint presentation to someone who had absolutely no interest in my slides. Children don’t need a better argument or an explanation of why their fear is statistically unwarranted. They need someone to hold them while the feared thing doesn’t end them.
In practice, this looks like a quiet internal pause. Instead of marshaling arguments, I’ll sit with that six-year-old boy for a moment and just acknowledge him. Of course you’re scared. You missed so much. That was real. Sometimes I’ll put a hand on my chest, a small gesture of presence to the younger version of me.
It doesn’t make the fear disappear. That hurt six-year-old kid is still in there, and I’ve stopped waiting for the day he isn’t. Healing, I’ve learned, doesn’t mean the voice goes silent. It just stops running your life.
I set out in life curious about the cosmos. The stars, the physics, the vast machinery of what’s out there. And that wonder hasn’t left me. But the further I go, the more I think the deeper frontier is the one within.
Not just how does the world work—but how do I work?
Those questions have taken me somewhere no telescope ever could.
P.S. If any of this resonates—if you’ve ever noticed that your reactions belong to a younger version of you—there’s a framework worth exploring called Internal Family Systems (IFS). You can work with a therapist trained in IFS, or start on your own with Jay Earley’s book, Self-Therapy. It’s not a heavy read. It’s more like a conversation with the parts of you that never got one.
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