you worry the paper straw around the plastic cup and think about landfills and futures without cardboard sleeves. you are worried about prion disease and deer and mad cow. you are worried about the rising temperature of the earth and fungus ever since you watched the last of us. you are worried about teflon and microplastics and carcinogens and whatever else you’re being quietly lied to about. your mother used to harmlessly call you “a worrier,” which always oddly stung. you never felt like a worrier, you feel like a person. and besides, you’ve been told thousands of times that this is normal. everyone gets nervous sometimes. public speaking and business proposals and picturing people naked and how whenever they get nervous, they just-get-over-it, but that never worked for you. at some point as a kid you started to hold your breath in tunnels and under bridges. swallowed by the fear that if you inhaled, the ceiling would cave in. years of engineering and architecture couldn’t hold a candle to the diminishing air in your tiny lungs. the problem was that it worked, no tunnel or bridge ever collapsed, and your family was never devoured by the ocean surrounding the car.
you once broke a coffee pitcher by dropping it on the tile of your kitchen. you didn’t drink from it after, but you worried that there had been some previous invisible micro-break that had made you drink glass particles. you stayed awake for 24 hours, constantly dreading each swallow, waiting for the taste of copper to hit your tongue.
you got drunk two nights in a row a week after your twenty-first birthday, and you’re afraid you’re an alcoholic. you worry you’re like your dad, and then you feel guilty because your father isn’t that bad of a man. you get invited to a bar with your friends, and you decline, and then you worry that they’re upset you didn’t go, and then you’re worried that they’re actually grateful.
you hate being late, you worry about it. you go to grab lunch with a friend – no pressure, no emergency – and you still park the car an hour early. maybe you just don’t like surprises or change. you triple-check you locked the doors, and then go to bed, and then get up out of bed and check one more time.
you worry you’re being selfish and not a good person because how come you’re worried about your dog’s health and the itch in your eye or the mole on your back when you know people who are really very ill or who have it worse or who are genuinely struggling. then you worry that you’re being annoying by infantilizing them. then you worry that your priorities are wrong, that you should be more worried about the state of the dying planet.
you worry as you sit in the lobby of your therapist’s office that maybe she has forgotten about you. you worry about the time ticking down on the parking meter outside, and you worry your lip through your teeth until the skin breaks. you worry you don’t have anything to tell your therapist and that you’re wasting her time.
you wanted to be a person, is all. you wanted to go through life in a softness, to hold the world gently and have it drift past you listlessly. and instead you are a worrier. everything that touches you is hard and raw and sharp and unforgiving.