There’s a season in life when learning happens through play.
Through trying, losing, recalibrating, and trying again—
while the stakes are still small and someone is nearby.
Life is the first teacher.
But sometimes those lessons are softened.
Failure is delayed.
Disappointment is managed instead of metabolized.
Not out of malice.
Out of care.
We learned how to protect ourselves from pain before learning how to carry it.
And then, quietly, something gets skipped.
Participation trophies skipped formation.
Performance anxiety reveals the cost.
And for others, there were no trophies at all.
No play.
Just responsibility arriving too early, without shelter or repair.
Either way, formation was interrupted—
by too much protection, or by none at all.
I remember the first time I realized no one was coming to tell me how I did.
The decision was mine.
The consequences were real.
And my body knew it before my mind did.
There was no applause.
No correction.
Just the weight of having chosen—and having to live with it.
That was the moment performance stopped working.
I didn’t hold myself together.
Something held me while I caught up.
Not answers—just enough steadiness to stay.
We learn how to show up before we learn how to fall.
We learn how to be seen before we learn how to recover.
We learn how to perform before we learn how to inhabit.
So when adulthood arrives—
with real roles, real consequences, and no rehearsal—
the body responds.
That response is often called anxiety.
A lot of that anxiety isn’t fear of failure.
It’s the fear of not knowing—
and not knowing where knowing is supposed to come from.
I don’t think anxiety shows up because something is broken.
I think it shows up because something unfinished is asking to be completed.
Anxiety is what happens when responsibility outpaces lived experience.
When judgment is required, but formation was interrupted.
When life moves from play to consequence without a bridge between them.
In that sense, anxiety isn’t the first teacher.
Life was.
Anxiety is the second.
Not to punish us.
To point us back toward what we still need to learn—slowly, honestly, without performance.
Not all anxiety teaches.
Some needs care, shelter, and time.
When all the world’s a play, performance keeps things moving.
But life isn’t a play.
Eventually the curtain doesn’t rise.
The role doesn’t end.
And there’s no applause to tell you how you did.
There’s just you, holding something real.
Maybe the work now isn’t to eliminate anxiety.
Maybe it’s to stop treating it like a flaw—and start treating it like information.
A signal that formation can still happen.
Even now.
Especially now.