Worrier Woman
Hello and welcome back to another Becca Carey therapy session. In good ol’ therapy style, I’m writing this sprawled along my couch as so many of my pieces get written. For the benefit of this piece, you’re all sitting in a stretched brown leather chair, worn down from all your note taking, tutting and sighing. Naturally, classical music is playing. Now, before you criticise my methods, you have to remember that a blog is cheaper than actually getting professional help. I am free to write almost completely uncensored, my editor is pretty lazy and doesn’t really bother to check what I write. And yes, my editor is me. What’s even better is that it’s available to me 24/7. Say it’s 2am and my anxiety comes a knocking or I’m feeling more dramatic than usual about something, I always have somewhere to go, metaphorically speaking. Physically, I rarely leave my bed. On the plus side, it doesn’t take half as long as the waiting list for the university counselling service. ( P.S. Get your act together Dundee) SCORE! Well, at least for me. You still have to read it.
I’ve spent a few months now divulging my inner insecurities to you fine people in the hope that they become easier to manage and so equally it might help people going through the same thing or if all else fails someone will tell me what the heck to do. Since I am a Class A self-diagnosed narcissist, a couple of days ago I was reading over some of my old posts. Mostly because when people mention something I said, I have no idea what they are on about. When I write a piece, it’s just like an exam. Once you have regurgitated all of the knowledge that is humanly possible to write in 2 hours, you walk out the exam hall and forget anything you ever knew until that point. That happen to anyone else? Or is that just my bizarre brain at it again?
Between the endless self-deprecating humour, cringey anecdotes and frankly horrendous punctuation which really should be better considering my grades in English and the fact that I am now desperately trying to learn TWO other languages when I clearly still need to master the one I’ve been working on for over 20 years. Oh dear, with that rant out of the way, I swear I had a point here. Oh yes, I wanted to talk about something I had noticed when I had been narcissistically reading them. From my extensive skimming, I have noticed a running theme had developed. It’s the kind of thing that isn’t obvious until someone points it out and then you can’t not notice it as hard as you might try, if you get what I mean? It’s this nasty habit that goes under the radar until you hear someone’s annoying laugh or the way they crack their fingers or something ( sorry Alex) You start to fixate on that thing until it drives you mad and you have to talk about it. So here is me talking about it.
Going through these posts, I see myself drawing on my past experiences-write what you know -right? Makes sense and in my 21 years, there’s been break ups and low self-esteem issues amongst many things that I am sure I will get to at some point. I believe that I have tried to write them in as honest a way as possible even if that is not always the easiest thing to do. Yet, on reflection, I couldn’t help but feel that I was missing something out. Any ideas? I’ll wait…
Sorry, just building the tension as if I haven’t rambled on enough. It’s one of those fancy writing techniques writers use to keep their reader’s interest just like when a really evil writer drops a cliff-hanger at the end of a chapter like when Steven Moffat killed off Sherlock and left the whole country screaming at the TV for 3 years.
Sorry, I lost my train of thought…yes, right, sorry that was really just an excuse for me to make a coffee. In all of these pieces, I write about my experiences like films I have watched. Now, I don’t mean the endless references but I do admit that that is a good guess. I’m referring to the fact that I’ve watched the film- I know the ending. The guys gets the girl, Simba is King and Becca lives to tell the tale…even if only just. I ruin the plot to my own story by telling you exactly how it ends. It gives you this skewed idea that I’m optimistic about things and that I have this superhuman ability that can tell that everything will work out. ( Can’t decide if this would be the best superpower or if nothing can really beat the ability to read someone’s mind.) Point is, I’m not Wonder woman, as much fun as kicking Nazi ass would be, I definitely don’t believe that everything just works out. Let’s be real my alter ego is more likely to be Worrier Woman ( don’t worry I didn’t break my back coming up with that) I blame the teenage dystopian fiction I grew up reading, it’s made my default setting worst-case scenario. I know it drives my friends and family insane and I am the first to admit that it is a really debilitating quality. If you are anything like me and I really hope for your sake that you aren’t, you’ll know how all consuming that worry is. You can’t enjoy the present because you are way too worried about what is going to happen tomorrow, next month, next year…
Why do we do this then fellow worriers? Well, I think it’s because it’s familiar. We almost feel guilty if we aren’t worrying and if I do say so myself that it MESSED UP. It’s our Wonder Woman set of armour, we would rather stay at a permanent level of unhappiness and dissatisfaction than risk it all and fail.
If this is a safe place where I can express my feelings and I like to think it is, My one crippling fear is that failure. I know we all are in our own ways. Nobody wants to fail a test or get fired or have any of the other million things that could go wrong in our lives go wrong.
My basic instinct is to run away from the things that I could fail at, to shy away from anything I’m not immediately good at. I HATE Monopoly, I admit that I am competitive and I hate to lose but I ALWAYS lose. I know that it’s s a bit of a stretch to say that losing at Monopoly, no matter how badly, can be defined as “failure” but you understand what I mean. I have avoided things I am bad at my whole life and when you combine that fear of failure with incessant stubbornness, well things are going to get a whole lot worse.
To give you an idea, let’s look back at where it all started: skiing in primary school. Picture this dorky 8 year old who looks spookily like me, fully kitted up to the point #that it is actually embarrassing for a beginner who had never set foot ( or a ski boot) on a slope before. The first time I went I couldn’t be more excited. I more than happily doddled off to my first lesson, my face beaming with ignorance to then promptly fall on my face. Oh, I cried and cried ( nothing changes) and I swore I would never go back despite looking ever so cool in my salopettes. ( I have scouring for a photo but I’m utterly heartbroken to tell you they were caught in a mysterious fire, the investigation is ongoing and the police are treating it as suspicious) . Now, I might be insistent but my mum is another creature entirely. She wouldn’t let me quit. She told me that one day I would regret it if I gave up that easily and just because I was bad at it ( and I was really bad) does not mean I should stop. Not everything is going to come naturally like my effortless natural talent for comedic timing and the only way I was going to get any better was to dust myself off and try again. Despite her wisdom, I kicked and screamed ( I really did put up a good fight for an 8 year old) but I reluctantly dragged my heels there the following week.
I fell. ( obviously)
I begged her not to make me go. I’m sure I probably promised her to wash the dishes for 3 whole months ( the equivalent of an 8 year old selling their soul) but she did not budge, as tempting as that offer must have been. Turns out my mum is just as stubborn as me ( how annoying is that??) .So, the cycle continued over and over until it got to the point where I genuinely thought I must be close to breaking my mum. I wasn’t. After a while, my mum agreed that I sucked ( Haha- she never told me as such but it helps to emphasise that I was really that bad) and she got me extra lessons. It was genuinely the best thing she could have done. She believed in me and invested that time, money and effort and guess what? I can now ski- it’s a miracle! Not well and I haven’t for a long time but without her, there are so many things I wouldn’t be able to say I could do. I would never have written my stories or played violin, I would never have got my higher maths, I would never have discovered my love for cooking and my passion for 80s music. She is the one who pushed me not to quit, to keep on going even when I didn’t want to and I will always always be grateful for that.
If I’m honest, I’m not going to be an Olympic skier. Shocker, I know. There are going to be things that I am just not going to be good at but that’s okay. There are things that you’re just not going to be good at either (sorry). If I’m even more honest, the reason that I am terrified of failure isn’t because I mind that I fail. Nobody likes it but it’s a unavoidable fact of life that I am trying to accept. I mean you haven’t heard me play violin but if you needed for some reason to hear what failure actually sounded like, it would be undeniably that. I’m terrified because I cannot bear to let her down.
If I hadn’t written a blog and published it everywhere committing to this half marathon, I swear I would have up and ran ( oops too soon) by now. I am scared that I will not finish my training, that I will collapse at this half marathon or break a leg because it’s me and my granny knee is willing to sabotage anything for this half marathon not to happen. So, if you ever wondering why I resorted to such drastic methods then that’s why. I wasn’t going to let myself give up. That push has and always will come from my mum. She has been my biggest and most avid supporter ( you have all seen her Facebook stickers!). She has read everything I have ever written and listened to every speech and rant I have ever made. There is no one on this earth I want in my corner more than her. She is an absolute warrior, an actual wonder woman and I know if everything is going to be okay if she is on my side.
Thank you Mum, this is for you.
