"Stressing out doesn't actually help anything. I can still care about something deeply, but worrying never helped make anything better. Caring deeply about things does ..."
Years ago, somebody close to me was going through something hard, and I noticed I was burning hours of my own day worrying about them. Sleep, energy, focus, all gone. I asked myself what the worry was actually doing for them. Nothing. They didn't even know I was doing it. So I tried something different. I called them instead.
There's another version of this that hits closer to home. When I was first diagnosed with herpes, I was running the worst-case scenario in my head 24/7. Every quiet moment got eaten by it. I didn't realize I was doing it until I noticed I hadn't really been present with anyone for weeks. The worry was a full-time job I never agreed to take. Putting it down was the first real choice I made about how I wanted to live with this.
Somewhere along the line, most of us got handed an idea that worry equals care. That if you're not anxious about something, you must not really care about it. Worth examining. Because worry doesn't actually fix anything. It just sits in your nervous system, eating energy, while the thing you supposedly care about goes unattended.
Worse, it can pull you out of the room. The people around you don't get the part of you that loves them. They get the part of you that's mentally rehearsing a worst case scenario. That's not care. That's just stress wearing a costume.
Caring deeply about something doesn't require anxiety. The two can come unwound from each other, even though they often show up together.
You won't get over a lifetime of anxiety in a day. Nobody does. But if you practice shifting from a sludgy mindset to an optimistic one, and letting go one day at a time, it does gradually release. The grip loosens. The room comes back. The people in your life start getting more of the actual you, less of the worried understudy who's been standing in for months. That swap is the whole game.
Your next step
Wherever you are on your journey, there's something here for you.
