The Worrier in My Head

You know, I get so worried sometimes.

I’ll wake up feeling this terrible dread that I can’t pinpoint.

But when I blink the sleep from my eyes and look around, everything is fine. Chickadees rustle around in the feeder mounted to my bedroom window, my kitten lies curled in the crook of my arm, and morning sunlight slants through the blinds.

Outside, all is well.

Inside, it feels like ice water is filling my lungs.

There’s no reason for it.

But I never seem to take comfort in knowing this fear is as insubstantial as smoke, and that a wave of my hand should be enough to dispel it.

Instead, I make something up to justify the dread—to make my life fit into its imaginary mold.

If I oversleep by an hour, the whole day is wasted. If I have a long to-do list I made the night before, it becomes an unscalable mountain by morning.

I let this fear latch onto the things I love, until I can’t even look at my laptop without dreading the thought of sitting down to write—one of my favorite things in the world. 

It leaves me rotting on the living-room recliner, flicking aimlessly through videos of other people living their lives, my back aching from leisure, unable to move, terrified of the empty hours ahead and all the unfinished tasks I should be filling them with. 

Things came to a head this past Sunday.

I said goodbye to my little sister as she left for another semester of college. When I returned home after helping her move in, the house felt gutted.

I found myself surrounded by mounting responsibilities: preparing for job interviews, community events I had agreed to organize, the unfinished skeleton of a website I couldn’t bring myself to touch, all while trying to take care of myself and remain a somewhat functional human being.

Every new obligation, another faceless figure backing me into a corner.

I stepped outside to turn on the sprinkler only to find that my meadow had become the latest victim of my scattered attention. The leaves on my flowering perennials and native saplings had turned a sickly yellow, and the ground was hard-packed from weeks without water.

I turned the sprinkler on and, after watching it for a few moments, headed back inside.

When I went back out to shut it off an hour later, I found that it had stopped working. I waded through patches of drooping, waist-high black-eyed Susans, blue cornflowers, and purple coneflowers, stooped down, and dug my fingers into the soil.

Bone dry.

I couldn’t tell whether there was a kink in the hose or something wrong with the sprinkler itself. Eventually, I gave it up as a bad job.

I worried about that and everything else as I lay awake in bed that night, unable to drift off.

That is, until it started downpouring.

I laughed myself to sleep.