What, Me Worry?

\ˈwər-ē, ˈwə-rē\

It is hard for me not to worry; it is a habit I have long refined over many years.  As a young church-goer I was shocked to learn that worry was preached against in the gospels: it seemed to me an extension of faith.  There, however, is the page in my Children’s Living Bible and there the chapter and verse: “Will all your worries add a single moment to your life?” (Matthew 6: 27).  It would be some years before I encountered the sentiment out of its 1970s’ American paraphrase, and even then the talk of cubits and spans only reinforced what I had already grasped: there would be no escape either from my worry or from its censure, even from Hey-soos himself.  Though faith later wore out, worry did not.

It smoothed the slide into mental illness, it remained perceptible and active even when everything else was made quiet and still by Mr. and Mrs. Tricyclic (good for some, not at all good for me).  In my first year at university I was an outpatient of the then-Anxiety Disorders Unit at the Princess Margaret Hospital (which I defy you to say is not an excellent name for any kind of public building) where my groupmates and I harnessed ourselves to the discipline of CBT.  To the long-refined accomplishment of first-rate worrying, I was trained to develop a secondary voice, the reasonable interrogator.

She has served me well, this interrogator, and is effectively turned on students, too, when they enter into essay-related meltdown.  What, she asks, is the worst that could happen?  Is your assessment of the situation balanced, or are you catastrophizing?  Do the circumstances even justify this worry?  The reasonable interrogator politely talks the worrier back into her box, or otherwise confines the space in which she can work.  It’s a long time since I sat in the circle of the chronically anxious with the psychiatric nurse, but there is to my mind a thread that runs back to that time.  I suspect that a dash of CBT gives high-functioning people of all kinds something with which they can work that they like.  Reason!  Self-questioning!  A calm interior dialogue!

To let go of the other thread altogether, however–that longer, tauter timeline–seems impossible.  There is a baseline of exaggerated alertness that feels like reponsibility, even though that too might be illusory.  The señor observes my endless dialogue on this point with amusement: he is not a man to allow his worries an RSS feed of their own.  It’s really only at times of the year like this that I’m aware the worry engine is still turning over without much cause.  Hot, leisured January throws the rest of the year’s hive-like activity into relief.  It seems like an exaggeration, a parody, of how life might best be lived, and invites me to cast a cooler eye on my ways of usual ways of thinking and doing things.  I worry in well-organised, discreet and low-key ways.  I worry as others might train for a marathon.  I keep my worry on a simmer, in case I need to boil it in a hurry.  This is my small confession.

Tagged as: worry