The Fear of Not Being Enough: What Anne Shirley Teaches Us About Anxious Attachment

Anne Shirley – the red-haired orphan from L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables – does not stop talking.

She fills silences with stories, transforms ordinary moments into mythology, and narrates her own emotional landscape with astonishing precision. When something threatens her sense of safety, she doesn't withdraw – she performs. She charms, explains, apologises, elaborates. She makes herself vivid, memorable, impossible to overlook. And for a very long time, this works.

The fear of not being enough does not begin at Green Gables.

It begins much earlier.

Anne grows up without consistent care. She is passed between households, useful but unwanted, tolerated but not chosen. She learns that adults are unreliable, that homes are temporary, and that affection – when it appears at all – is conditional on being helpful, entertaining, or sufficiently grateful. Love, in her early world, is not something she can count on. It is something she must audition for, again and again.

What her nervous system learns is that closeness is not impossible, but that it requires constant proof. She must be bright enough, useful enough, charming enough to justify her place. Rest feels dangerous. Ordinariness feels like rejection. If she stops performing, she disappears.

This is the fear of not being enough forming early  – not as a belief, but as a survival strategy.

So. She. Does. Not. Stop.

She builds elaborate fantasy worlds where she is special, chosen, romantically destined. She creates meaning where there is deprivation. She transforms a plain room into a bower, a tree into a friend, loneliness into poetic solitude. This is not naivety. It is a regulatory strategy. Her imagination does not deny reality – it makes reality survivable.

When she arrives at Green Gables, the stakes feel familiar. Matthew and Marilla did not ask for her. They wanted a boy. She is, once again, the wrong child in the wrong place. And so she does what she has always done: she makes herself indispensable. She talks, explains, entertains, apologises for her red hair, for her lack of beauty, for the very fact of her existence taking up space meant for someone else.

The "with an E" moment is not about vanity.

It is about mattering. If her name can be special, perhaps she can be too. If she can distinguish herself – through spelling, through imagination, through sheer force of personality – perhaps she can earn what other children receive without effort: the right to stay.

From an attachment perspective, this is anxious attachment forming in real time. Anne wants closeness desperately, but her nervous system has learned that it must be secured through vigilance, performance, and preemptive management of others' needs. She does not wait to be seen. She narrates herself into visibility. She does not assume safety. She creates it through relentless charm and usefulness.

Matthew, quietly and without fanfare, begins to change this.

He does not ask her to perform. He does not need her to justify her place. He simply sees her – not because she is extraordinary, but because she exists. His care is not conditional on her brightness or her stories. It is steady, undemanding, present. For perhaps the first time in her life, Anne experiences attunement without audition.

Marilla teaches her something different but equally essential: that discipline, structure, and limit-setting can coexist with care. That being corrected does not mean being rejected. That she can make mistakes, be ordinary, fail to charm – and still belong.

These are reparative experiences. Not dramatic, not cinematic, but quietly foundational. Over time, Anne's nervous system begins to learn what it could not learn earlier: that closeness does not require constant proof, that affection is not withdrawn the moment she rests, that she can be wanted without needing to earn it.

Diana Barry becomes something else entirely.

A bosom friend. A secure base outside the family. A relationship Anne chooses, not one assigned to her by necessity or survival. With Diana, she is not performing safety – she is practising it. The intensity of her attachment to Diana is not pathology. It is Anne learning, perhaps for the first time, what it feels like to be chosen simply because someone wants her there.

This is earned security.

Anne's early attachment system was shaped by deprivation, inconsistency, and the relational reality that care was scarce and unpredictable. Her adaptations – hyperverbalism, fantasy, people-pleasing, hypervigilance to others' emotional states – were intelligent responses to an environment that required constant negotiation for safety.

But those adaptations carry costs.

The work of being enough is exhausting. The fear that ordinariness means abandonment does not disappear simply because the external circumstances improve. Anne continues to narrate, perform, and manage long after it is necessary – not because she is dramatic, but because her nervous system has not yet caught up to the fact that she is safe.

Many people do not recognise themselves in Anne's red hair or her bosom friend declarations.

They recognise themselves in the work of being bright enough to justify their place. In filling silences because silence feels exposing. In the fear that resting means being forgotten. In romantic idealisation as a way of making longing feel safer than real intimacy. In using words, stories, and charm to manage what cannot be controlled – other people's affection.

Some people notice this as familiar background. Others are beginning to recognise the cost: the vigilance that never quite turns off, the fantasy that substitutes for presence, the exhaustion of performing enough-ness even in relationships that no longer require it.

Both are valid places to be with this.

Anne Shirley is not a character who needs to be fixed. She is a character whose attachment system adapted brilliantly to scarcity – and who, through consistent, attuned relationships, begins to learn that she can rest without disappearing.

Recognition often shifts something, even without immediate action. Sometimes that's enough. Sometimes it creates curiosity about what it would be like to explore these patterns in supported space – to understand not just that performance felt necessary once, but how that shaped everything since.

That's the work we do with clients: pattern recognition and the careful work of understanding what adaptation has cost, without rushing toward change before you're ready.

We work with women who've learned that charm, brightness, and hypervigilance secure attachment – and who are noticing what that costs when the performance never quite stops. We have limited availability for new clients in early 2026.

Curious but not sure you want to commit? Book a free 15-minute consultation/ vibe check HERE.

Or reach out at: kr@thisiskindred.com.au

For a more structured way to reflect privately, Kindred’s Attachment Reflection resource is available HERE.

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This is the third post in our Attachment Tuesdays series, where we explore attachment patterns through fictional characters – partly because they give us emotional distance, and partly because Anne managed to make 'bosom friend' sound completely reasonable.