What’s a Worry Warrior to Do?

I remember putting on my white church socks and shoes on the morning that I sprained my ankle running from a dog. They were the socks with the frills around the trim. I had a love hate relationship with them because the lace trimming itched like crazy, but I loved the look of them paired with my white patent shoes and the flouncy floral dresses that were the norm for little island girls on Sunday mornings.

Some Sundays, I would go to church with a family friend who lived at the top of the hill on our road. That morning, I made my way up the hill, carefully dodging the rocks and roots that threatened to trip me. As I approached my neighbour’s house, I noticed her dog sitting on her front porch.

Unlike my ambiguous feelings about my socks, my relationship with this dog was strictly a matter of hatred. I know now it probably wasn’t much bigger than ankle height. But in my childlike imagination, it was practically a wolf. And vicious. That Sunday morning, I never took my eyes off the dog as I knocked on the door and he watched me with the same unwavering intensity.

After my first few knocks went unanswered, a panic began to rise in my chest. I began to knock harder and the dog began to growl. The more he growled, the harder I knocked. The harder I knocked, the more he growled. The panic overflowed into flat out terror. All at once, I concluded that not only was my neighbour not coming to the door, but her dog was going to kill me. Yes, the tiny dog whose growl was barely above a whisper was going to be the death of me.

So, I did the only rational thing I could think of. I took off down the hill at a full sprint, the little heels on my patent shoes digging into the dirt and the skirt of my church dress flouncing madly around my knees. Turns out, my shiny patent shoes weren’t made for high speed downhill travel and a sharp pain shot through my ankle.

My mother and I later found out at the doctor’s that not only had I sprained my ankle (and scuffed my patent shoes), but I’d also been running from a dog that never even left its post on the porch. It was all for nothing.

I wish I could say I outgrew that kind of over-thinking worry warrior behaviour. I definitely haven’t. I can think of at least three occasions in the past month that I’ve worried myself into a frenzy. Just like I turned that little dog on the porch into a man-eating wolf, I turn small problems into world-ending catastrophes.

I have a terrible habit of considering every possible thing that could go wrong in a scenario.

This usually results in one of three outcomes: 1) I get worked up over things that have an easy fix, 2) I scare myself into inaction, or 3) I make bad decisions out of fear.

Chalk it up to my being Virgo — if you buy into astrology — or my anxiety problems, but being a worry warrior is a full-time issue for me. An issue I’m trying to fix so I can put an end to the sprained ankles and emotional fallout that comes from making mountains out of molehills.

I’m learning to spend time talking back to the little voice in my head that whispers about disasters that haven’t happened yet, and probably won’t.

I’m giving more focus to opening the space between panic and reaction. I’m figuring out how to make my worse-case scenario vision something that inspires smart action instead of inaction. I’m working on living in the moment and leaving the worries of the future where they belong. I’m trying to think of solutions instead of worries.

It’s a work in progress, no doubt. But next time I’m standing at the top of the proverbial hill, before I start running, I’ll try to make sure that the wolf I fear isn’t just a pup.