NdukuOutLoud

On worrying and living anyway.

Apart from the childish things that used to worry me when I was but a child—like missing my favourite show or my friends not wanting to play with me anymore—everything I have worried about as a young adult, I still worry about today.

Only this time, it’s a “mature” kind of worry.

It is not the crippling kind. It is not the kind that keeps you ruminating over the same thing endlessly while the rest of your life stands still. At this stage, it’s worrying and moving anyway. Because nobody else is going to do it for you.

It’s really not as bad as it seems, though. We live with the quiet truth that anything we worry could go wrong probably will at some point. But we hope it doesn’t. And we eventually learn that the worrying itself cannot change the outcome.

We are always going to worry. We will always come up with what-ifs, mental images, and worst-case scenarios about how things could go off the rails. And sometimes, they actually do. Yet, worrying does little to nothing to stop it.

I am not sure if that’s a good thing, a bad thing, or just something else I should probably worry about.

I also don’t think it’s entirely possible to stop worrying altogether. But it is possible to not let the worry win.

While the details and the dressing might change, the core of our anxieties remains startlingly the same. I might not be stressing over whether my childhood friends want to play hide-and-seek today, but it might still cross my mind that my adult friends are having fun without me or leaving me out of particular activities.

At the core, it is the exact same thing: belonging, friendship, or whatever fancy name sociologists give it. Only the manifestation and the levels change.

The stage gets bigger, but the script is familiar. I will still worry that I said too much, or too little. I will still worry that I am not enough, or that I am undeserving of all the good things happening in my life.

Yet, like I said earlier, it’s not a crippling worry. It’s not the kind that stops me from doing the things I love and actually enjoying them.

Instead, it’s the kind that quietly accompanies me. Maybe it even protects me, keeping me sharp and aware.

And I think that’s okay. It should be okay for us all. We don’t need to eliminate every ounce of fear to move forward; we just have to learn how to walk side-by-side with it.