This past Sunday afternoon my dad called and left me a message. I didn't call back for one reason or another... I was studying for my test on Monday, I had to clean my house etc. He called again on Monday evening so I then called him back yesterday and he said "Oh I'm so glad you called, I was beginning to worry that you fell of the face of the planet."
A couple months ago, when I was getting ready to drive up from LA my mom told me "Be sure to call and let me know when you leave because if you don't I'll start worrying way too early."So apparently I get my worrying capabilities from both sides. I am a champion worrier. I don't think that I necessarily stress and freak out about everything (although some might disagree with that statement), but I do tend to get inside my brain and obsess about things quite exceedingly. I worry about problems in my life and other people's lives. I worry about my friends and family. But my "specialty," if you will, is worrying about things I make up in my head.
I don't know about you, but if I go out somewhere I am pretty much guaranteed to run into the one person I happen to want to avoid at that particular moment-- unless I am thinking about the possibility of running into him/her.
You know, like the day you don't shower and are just wearing your gross stained sweatpants when you make a quick trip to buy tampons at the grocery store, that's the day you run into your ex. Or like the one time you lie and call in sick to work, that's the day you run into your boss on her lunch break.
I've found that if I have think about these possibilities, the chances that they actually occur are, in my experience, much smaller. So that's sort of what I do. It's like a checklist.
I tend to worry about people I love quite a lot. I worry that they'll get sick or hurt or mugged or injured in a car accident. I worry that they'll lose their jobs or get into trouble or something bad will happen to their kids. Because it seems to be the moment I stop worrying about things falling to pieces, they do. If I just go about my life and don't think about this stuff, that's when my sister calls to tell me she's been in a car accident. Or my dad will call and say my cousin died. Or my nephew got bitten by a dog on the face.
I do it for smaller stuff, too-- like when Jenny came to visit for the BlogHer conference. I had to leave before she got up so I asked her to let Bowie out of the bathroom and open the shades in the apartment. Because if I leave the shades down, Bowie will probably want to play with them and his method of playing often involves claws and destruction. So she said she would open the shades, no problem. But then I realized that on my way to clinicals that I hadn't shown her how to open them and it's kind of tricky because my shades actually slide from both the bottom and top of the window and if you pull the wrong cord it can be hard to set it right. So I worried for a moment that Jenny might not figure it out and then I worried that she might have left my straightening iron on or gotten locked out of my apartment since I had to take the keys. But once I had worried about these possibilities, it was like check! and I moved on. And none of those things happened-- all went according to plan. But if I hadn't worried about it, would it have?
