I was always a worrier. I can remember lying awake at night worrying when I was as young as 8 years old. It’s either just a part my personality or it’s a disorder, or both, I dunno. But I have always worried.
Cross that personality with my life experiences and you can understand why I’ve been such a mess for a lot of my life. When I was 14 I very suddenly started having symptoms which were soon identified as a chronic digestive disease. No one at 14 is prepared for that, and I so didn’t understand what was happening. Oh, I’m sick. They’ll give me some pills that will make it go away. Whatever.
Except that’s not what happened. Instead those symptoms turned out to be the first sign that my teenage years were going to involve a lot of suffering. And they popped up so suddenly. One week I was fine, the next I was sick. I was blindsided.
How do I keep from having something like this happen again? Can I somehow prepare myself for it so that it’s not such a shock if it happens again? I convinced myself that the only way to be prepared was to imagine all the worst case scenarios and make contingency plans. Of course, that wasn’t a good idea. Those plans don’t really help you if the worst really does happen, and most of the time, it doesn’t happen, and you’ve just gotten yourself all stressed and upset over nothing. But I didn’t realize that for a long time. I felt like worrying was something I had to do.
It took me a loooooong time and lots of therapy and also an antidepressant to get me to where I am now. I don’t dwell so much. I realize that worry is unproductive. So, you can change. It’s sure as hell not easy, but you can change.