Pressing Play
When I was nine years old, I remember walking into my parents’ room. My mother was lying on the bed, reading — focused and still. I remember the feeling of my chest beating too fast, too loud, for my small body. I remember the tears collecting in my eyes before I understood why.
I stood in the doorway and asked, “Mama, sometimes I feel so scared and I don’t know why. It just makes me so sad and I don’t know what it is.”
She set her book down and looked at me. Then she gave it a name.
Anxiety.
The same anxiety that pulled me out of class from then on. The same anxiety I talked through with school counselors and therapists on quiet walks and in small, still offices. The same anxiety that tugged my extroverted self away from parties and friends. The same anxiety that finds me mid-soccer game, or in the moment before a math test I spent all weekend studying for.
So I learned how to hide it. Wipe the tears. Fix the smile. Say the right things. Tap my fingers and pinch my legs under the table until the feeling passed.
Now I am almost twice the age I was when I first learned that word. And somehow, it still finds me.
But now it finds me in a song.
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“Ribs” by Lorde is deep and aching and almost too full to hold. It sends shivers down my spine. It is beautiful. And it makes me anxious in the same quiet, creeping way — the kind I used to hide from in the back of my closet, trying to outrun something I couldn’t yet explain.
For the past year, I’ve kept asking myself: why?
Why do I return to something that makes my chest tighten? Why do I press play, knowing exactly how it will feel?
The only answer I’ve found is this: anxiety, something so sudden and unpredictable, can also be chosen.
It’s a paradox. The thing that once ambushed me is now something I can approach. If I bring it on myself — if I can press play and let it wash over me — then it loses its sharpness. It no longer catches me off guard, at least in that moment. It becomes familiar. Contained.
In a strange way, this has become my defense. Not avoidance, but confrontation. Not fear, but recognition.
Because when I choose it, I can face it.
And in that space, I can finally understand it.
So now, when someone asks me what anxiety is, I don't reach for a definition.
I just say: “Ribs,” by Lorde.
