I’ve Become an Obsessive Worrier in My Forties
Illustration by kkgas.
By Rachel Kramer Bussel
A few years ago, my boyfriend left for work during a pounding rainstorm for his half-hour commute. I texted him an hour later to make sure he’d arrived okay. When I didn’t get a reply, I emailed. Then I called. When he didn’t answer, I was sure he’d been in an accident. I emailed coworkers of his that I knew. One of them marched over to his desk and demanded, “Call your girlfriend. She’s worried about you.”
He admonished me when he called back. “I’m fine; I left my phone in the car by accident. You don’t have to worry about me all the time.” What he didn’t understand was that I did, in fact, have to worry – or at least, it felt that way. Another time I walked the five-minute route to our house when I didn’t see him at the train station for my ride. When I walked in, called his name, and got no response, my first assumption was that he’d had a heart attack. I frantically searched for him, fully expecting to see him gasping for breath or passed out. I was ready to call 911. It turned out he’d left late to pick me up and we’d missed each other.
I believe I come by my worrying genetically; my late paternal grandmother wouldn’t call me when I lived in New York, because she’d be too worried if I didn’t answer. But as I approach my fifties, my worrying has ramped up. With each passing birthday, it feels like there’s more to worry about, especially since I’m preparing to adopt a child – my first. If my worrying feels unbearable at 47, how will I make it through the next decades intact?
Pervasive worry has crept from a small corner of my brain outward; now it doesn’t feel like something I do as much as an intrinsic part of who I am. The older I get, the more the stray worries I used to be able to set aside blare across my mind 24/7, like a news ticker. They often supersede my personal or professional victories, butting in like the ultimate underminers to put me in my place. My worries tell me: Don’t get too complacent or relax too much, or you’ll fall off your primary job. We’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen.
When I hear about someone I love struggling with their health or job or relationships, I offer support. I send cards and gifts. I call. I visit. I research resources. But those actions all feel fueled by worry. After all, if I’m not worried, do I even really care?
According to Ellen Vora, MD, psychiatrist and author of The Anatomy of Anxiety, I’m not alone. “I find that as women get older, we have more people depending on us, whether that’s children, aging parents, partners, or long-term friendships,” Dr. Vora says over email. “Worry can often correlate with how many people depend on us or how many people we feel at least in part responsible for.” Dr. Vora differentiates between worry, a cerebral activity, and anxiety, which can be cerebral as well as physical (with rapid heart rate/breathing and muscle tension). She’s more concerned about anxiety because “it can create more distress in a person’s overall life.”
Vora’s explanation tracks for me as I try to be available for each of my mid-seventies parents and 99-year-old grandfather, along with my partner, friends, and other family members. I’m also in the thick of perimenopause, which can be a time of increased anxiety due to hormonal changes. “You don’t have to solve other people’s problems,” my boyfriend often tells me, but my brain objects. I try to turn my worrying from an idle, stressful mental activity into action, and often I succeed, but in the back of my mind, worries still clamor for my attention. I see a therapist who I talk to about my worrying, and the times it veers into anxiety (or feels like it is), but even when I talk through my worries (some totally rational, some less so), they still exist.
When I asked Dr. Vora if I should be worried about my worrying, she gave an emphatic no. “If our worrying is negatively impacting our quality of life, then let’s find strategies to relieve some of our suffering,” she says. “But not from a place of ‘shoulding’ ourselves or saying there’s anything wrong with how we have been doing things up until now. Start by giving ourselves compassion and grace for this very understandable tendency, and then find strategies for expanding our ease.”
Some suggestions Dr. Vora had for how middle-aged women can combat worry and anxiety: “On a straightforward level, focusing on prioritizing better sleep, and practicing some degree of mind-body exercises to help enhance our capacity for self-soothing and self-regulation. On a psychospiritual level, it has to do with grappling with the uncertainty, vulnerability, and impermanence of this fragile human experience. Can we arrive at a relationship of trust and surrender to the unfoldings of our lives, no matter how vulnerable or challenging they might be?” I like that advice, but I also know that for me, it feels easier to cling to worry than to be that vulnerable, one of my most-hated emotions. Worrying feels proactive, while living with vulnerability feels the opposite.
Between when I pitched this essay and sitting down to write it, my ex-girlfriend and one of my closest friends died in her sleep at age 45. Despite knowing she struggled with her own demons, that was one eventuality I hadn’t worried about.
Her death has caused me to reexamine my worrying – and my mortality. If I were to die in my sleep tonight, would I want my last hours to be spent mentally cataloging worst-case scenarios, up to and including that one? Or living by the code of a tire cover I saw recently that said: ‘One Life. Live It’?
I don’t think I’ll ever identify as an ex-worrier. Worrying is too baked into my thought patterns honed over four decades. But I can try, slowly, to get closer to that vulnerable state, to embrace the fact that even if I were to worry 24/7, I’m ultimately powerless against everything except controlling my thoughts and actions. That will have to be enough.