I've been having trouble sleeping lately, which isn't something that normally happens to me. Usually I'm so tired that I nod off around the end of whatever 10:00-11:00 show on television we happen to be watching; or I find myself reading the same line in a student's paper over and over and over again until my eyes blur. By then I'm usually so sleepy that I'm out by the time my head hits the pillow. But it's summer now. We've been staying up later, and enjoying the extra sleep-in time in the morning. I'm just not tired the way I usually am at the end of the day. The news lately hasn't made sleep any easier to get, either. This is what I tell myself during the day. But at night. in that vulnerable window of time when I lie there in the dark, laid open and made bare to the darker parts of my world, that's when worry finds me. It seeps into my mind, and finds its way through the cracks.
I worry about harm coming to my children
I worry about the news, and the unfathomable things happening near and far
I worry about the future and the world we live in and the how my children will make their way through it
I worry about my job
I worry about family members far away
I worry about the start of the new school year
I worry about the fragile, precious, vulnerable parts of my children
I worry about how I can't protect those parts, not really, certainly not all of the time
I worry about L., and his future
I worry about that alter-future of L.'s that is out there; the one we don't want to look at face-on. It's dark and frightening and may not even exist. Or it might
I worry about middle school, and will he make it?
Will it be break him? Will it be a turning point?
Will T. adjust to her new school? Will she make friends?
I worry about silly things, too--petty, mundane things made larger and weightier by the dark and the presence of sleep, just out of reach. They have a way of coming out of the woodwork at night, those worries.
L.'s therapist encourages us to help L. "count his worries" forwards and backwards. They become almost mundane, then, just words strung together. They are just that, too, if you think about it. We humans are so good at taking the here and now and slingshotting it into the future, turning whatever it is we're worried about into a reality before it even happens. I'm not an overly anxious person, but I've had enough glimpses into what L. goes through and lives to understand what real anxiety is like, and how it feels to be in its grip. Lately he's been consumed by an obsessive interest in the collapse of America. He worries about how this will come, and what the end will look like. He badgers us about stockpiling food and supplies, investing in gold or silver, mapping out escape routes, building bunkers, you name it. I don't want to dismiss his worries, because someone could easily dismiss mine, too, but we clearly need to rein them in. He can't turn them off during the day, the way most people do. His mind locks onto them and there is no prying it loose.
Counting my own worries here in this post gave me an idea. Yesterday L. and I sat down with a piece of paper and counted his worries. We looked at each one different ways. We drew lines through some of them, like the worry about not having a bunker, and the fear of our city flooding and disappearing under water. Some of them stayed on the list--too many, for my liking. But I'd like to try and chip away at that list each day, if we can--counting and re-counting, reducing them to just words strung together on page.