Disclaimer
I first drafted this article in January 2026, completely convinced that crowds were the villain of my story. Kmart. Westfield. Sensory overload. A neat little narrative arc with a tidy lockdown-shaped explanation. It made sense. It tracked. I was ready to file it under “things I have figured out about myself.”
Then March 2026 happened, and my nervous system, ever the dramatic narrator, decided to drop a plot twist. Turns out the panic attacks weren’t really about the crowds. They weren’t about the lights or the noise or the press of strangers in homewares. The actual trigger, the genuine source of every chest-tightening, breath-hitching, where-did-my-nervous-system-go moment, was being around my older autistic sister. Specifically her. Not crowds in general. Her.
I’m still publishing this article because the broader point stands. Healing isn’t linear, nervous systems do recalibrate, and being kind to yourself through it matters. But I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t add this. Sometimes the obvious explanation, the one that fits neatly into a cultural narrative we all understand, isn’t the actual answer. Sometimes the real trigger is sitting much closer to home, wearing a much more uncomfortable shape, and your body knows long before your brain catches up.
Look at the bigger picture, sure. But also look at the specific picture. The uncomfortable one. The one you maybe don’t want to name. That’s usually where the truth is hiding.
I Used to Be the Crowd Whisperer
I need you to understand something about me as a child. I was gifted. Not academically*. Not athletically**. But in the specific and deeply underrated skill of navigating a crowd. While other kids were holding their mum’s hand, eyes wide, overwhelmed by the noise and the press of strangers, I was already plotting the fastest route to the showbag pavilion.
Every year at the Sydney Easter Show, it was the same production. My mum and I would rock up, and the second we hit that showbag pavilion, the second the crowd thickened and the noise swelled and the bodies closed in, bam. My mum’s panic attack would kick in right on schedule. Her face would go tight. Her breathing would shift. The sensory overload would land on her like a wave she hadn’t seen coming.
And me? Little Taurus chaos goblin, approximately eight years old? I’d take her hand, assess the situation with the calm authority of a tiny air traffic controller, navigate us both through the crowd, and still somehow come out the other side with my haul. Because the showbag was the mission, and the mission doesn’t get abandoned. I was, as they say, built different.
Or so I thought.
*ok, I was a straight-A student, and Dux of my primary school.
**ok ok, I was actually very physical. I danced for hours every day, played school sports, placed second or third in most athletics. You get the picture. I was a bit of an over achiever as a kid.
Then Scotland Happened
Fast forward some years. I’m living in Scotland. It’s 2020. The world, as you may vaguely recall, completely loses its mind. And Scotland, unlike a certain sun-soaked country I call home, took lockdowns very seriously. We’re talking strict. We’re talking two years of not being in a room with more than ten people. We’re talking constant vigilance about physical contact, about proximity, about who you were near and when and for how long.
It wasn’t fun. To describe it as not fun is doing a significant amount of heavy lifting. For two years, my nervous system recalibrated itself around absence. Around distance. Around the baseline assumption that other people were a potential hazard to be managed rather than a crowd to be navigated. My entire relationship with shared physical space quietly, completely rewired itself.
And I didn’t notice it happening.
When I got back to Australia, a country where lockdowns weren’t really a thing and COVID hadn’t touched in quite the same way, I assumed I’d just slot back in. Pick up where I left off. Dust off the crowd whisperer credentials and get on with it. Dear Reader, surprise surprise – that’s not what happened.
The Kmart Incident
My first time in Kmart after getting back. Ten in the morning. I’d only been back in the country for ten hours. The fluorescent lights, the sheer volume of stuff that put Primark to shame, the trolleys, the people browsing homewares with no particular urgency. No foot-print stickers on the floor telling people where to stand. It was normal. Completely, boringly normal.
And unfortunately, my nervous system didn’t get the memo.
It hit like a switch being flipped. The lights felt too bright. The noise felt too close. My chest tightened in a way I hadn’t experienced since watching my mum grip the showbag pavilion railing and breathe through her teeth. I stood in the middle of the homewares aisle, a grown adult woman with a matcha in her hand and sensible shoes*, and had a full panic attack surrounded by lamps and throw cushions. The irony of losing my mind surrounded by soft furnishings designed to create calm wasn’t lost on me. Maybe, not in the moment. But later, yes, absolutely.
*Three inches, instead of my usual four.
Westfield Chermside Did Not Go Better
If Kmart was the opening act, Westfield Chermside was the headline show. The scale of it. The food court noise bouncing off the ceiling. The movement in every direction at once. My nervous system, which had spent two years being carefully trained to treat crowds as threats, wasn’t interested in nuance. It didn’t care that I was technically fine and that no one was sick and that the threat had technically passed. It had new rules now and it was enforcing them with enthusiasm.
Pour me a prosecco, because my nervous system had left the room and was no longer even giving me side eye. It had simply gone. Packed a bag, sent a brief text, and departed. The panic was physical and total and absolutely baffling to the part of me that had been the child who guided her panicking mother through the Easter Show crowds like a very small, very competent shepherd.
That part of me sat in a corner feeling personally betrayed. How had I become her? When did my body decide that open spaces full of people were now a problem to be solved rather than a background condition to move through?
Four Years Later and Still a Work in Progress
Here’s the bit no one really wants to talk about. Four years on, I still get anxious in crowds. Not always. Not with the same intensity. But the anxiety’s still there, quieter now, more manageable, but present. And I’ve made my peace with that.
We have this cultural obsession with healing as a destination. As if trauma is a project you complete. As if one day you wake up and you’re fixed, fully processed, stamped and certified recovered. That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of it works. Two years of your nervous system learning a completely different set of rules doesn’t get undone in a fortnight because the world opened back up and you bought a return flight.
Healing takes the time it takes. Full stop. The only requirement is that you’re trying. That you’re aware. That you’re not outsourcing your recovery to everyone around you and expecting the world to rearrange itself around your anxiety. Because here’s the truth no one loves to hear: your healing is your responsibility. Not in a cold, you’re on your own way, but in a you’re the only one who can do this work way. Other people can hold space. They can’t do the holding for you.
The Showbag Is Waiting
The anxiety doesn’t get to make your decisions. That’s the line. It gets to be present, fine, acknowledged, understood, treated with appropriate patience. But it doesn’t get to run the day. It doesn’t get to keep you out of Kmart forever.
Go to Kmart. Go slowly. Go on a Tuesday morning when it’s quieter. Bring your matcha. Breathe through your nose. If your nervous system throws a wobble in the homewares aisle, let it wobble. Stand next to the throw cushions and wait for it to pass and then keep walking. Because on the other side of that aisle there’s a lamp that would look genuinely excellent in your living room, and you deserve to have the lamp.
I think about my mum at the showbag pavilion sometimes. I think about how she never let it stop her from going. She panicked and then she breathed and then she went back next year. Maybe that was the lesson I absorbed before I even knew I needed it. Not that you avoid the hard thing. That you go anyway, a bit shaky, a bit flushed, matcha slightly rattling in your hand, and you go get the showbag.
You always get the showbag.
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