Jan M Flynn
1 min readAug 4, 2019

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Oh boy, does this resonate with me. My long march with anxiety and panic attacks began when I was three years old and pulled over a bathroom cabinet. It wasn’t the crash of the cabinet and everything on or in it that sent me into a wailing tailspin. It was the skull-and-crossbones poison warning still visible on the label of the shattered bottle of ammonia. There I sat on the tile floor, stark naked and frozen to the spot by my terror. Meanwhile the death bottle spilled its evil, reeking liquid in a pool that surrounded me. The look of horror on my mother’s face and the rage on my father’s, when they came to see what I was screaming about, sealed the deal. Annihilation lurked everywhere. Who knew?

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Jan M Flynn
Jan M Flynn

Written by Jan M Flynn

Novelist, essayist, inner space explorer. GRIFFIN SPEAKER, book one of a middle grade fantasy series, coming from Disney-Hyperion in spring 2026.

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