Growing up, I didn’t know I had anxiety. I just thought everyone worried the way I did, constantly overthinking, expecting the worst, and living in a state of quiet fear. It wasn’t until I got older, after my mother had passed, that I began to recognize the patterns in my life as signs of an anxiety disorder. Only then did I realize she, too, had struggled with anxiety, and that some of what I carried could have been inherited. Later in life, driven by curiosity and a desire