Leave the worrying to me -- I'm a professional

I’m a worrier. If there’s something that needs to be worried about, well, you’ve come to the right place. If there’s something that doesn’t need worrying about, well, I’m your girl.

I’m not sure why I’m like this. I didn’t have a hard life as a kid and I’ve never had to worry about things like school or money or anything serious, really. Things come pretty easily to me and so the amount of worrying I do has no basis in reality.

The things I worry most about are people. When I was little, I couldn’t go to bed at night without telling my parents that I loved them, because what if they died in the night and never knew that I loved them? Yes, that was my thinking at age 5. I am petrified of losing my parents. Petrified. I am really close to them – I was an only child for many years until my brother came along, and my parents spent LOTS of time with me. I live a mile away from them. We’re a tight family. And I am scared to death of losing that. I am not afraid of dying myself – not in the least. But I worry about my family dying. I worry that my kids will never know their grandparents and know how phenomenal they are. I worry that my parents will never know their grandkids, or get the chance to be the phenomenal grandparents I know they’ll be.

Ever since Vannie died, I’ve worried about losing my brother. Not for any reason other than when you’re faced with the sudden death of someone young, you can’t help but think “what if.” Well, maybe you can, but I can’t. Especially because I took care of him all the time. He was MY baby. I carried him around and played with him and fed him and mothered him practically to death until he was 18. I let him go finally, but I still worry.

I worry about my friends. I worry that one day, we’ll finally reach the point where we’ve grown apart. I worry that we’ll stop talking to each other and never start again. I see statistics about how one in 5 women will get breast cancer, and I think “there are five of us – will one of us get that?” I know, it’s morbid. It’s not like I think about it all the time, but it’s there.

I worry about my youth group kids. I worry that they’ll make an irreversible bad decision. I worry that something will happen to one of them. I worry that my girl M, who’s at college in Greeley will come home after one year and back into the clutches of her overbearing, CRAZY father (I know you’re reading this M – I worry about that, ok?). Don’t come home! I miss you, but don’t come home! I worry that my boy D will get jaded by the way silly, stupid high school girls treat him and turn into a jerk. I worry that he’ll give in to the large amount of peer pressure that kids face. I worry that one day, he’ll stop telling me things because he’s scared that I’ll be disappointed. I’m scared that when I find out what he ISN’T telling me, it’ll be too late.

I worry about being alone. I worry that I’ll be alone forever. I worry that I’ll never have kids. I worry that I’ll have kids and then be so worried about them that I’ll have some sort of ridiculous breakdown. Oh the things I can find to worry about. I even worry about the cats. I know -- stupid. And the stupidest part is that they’re all purely hypothetical scenarios and also? I couldn’t stop them from happening no matter how much I wanted to.

But don’t YOU worry. I don’t worry all the time. I also obsess. And when I’m not doing either of those things, well, I’m probably making fun of people. I have to balance out my CLEARLY DUBIOUS mental health SOMEHOW, right?