at least backwards is interesting

As I talked with Meg last night, I brought up the subject of my champion worrying, and how lately I've made progress in paring down that particular (exhausting) talent, which has stemmed mostly from my longtime idea that God doesn't really love me, and therefore life is scary. Addressing the root of the problem -- beginning, slowly, to bask in God's love and start to trust Him -- has begun to do wonders for one of my very worst habits. (Now that smoking is off the Bad Habit List, some other ones that I've laughed off as Not Being as Bad as Smoking have surfaced and demanded attention.)

I then began to recount a Cop's Daughter story, which took place the other night: A friend of mine was driving me home along the back roads of our hometown and telling me all about her experience in Sweden last year, and all the while she was talking I was staring at the sideview mirror, tracking the suspicious patterns of the driver behind us -- highbeams on, alternating between falling way behind and flying up to ride our tail -- and there were no convenient side roads on which to turn.

I interrupted Linnea's story to say, calmly, "Hey. I don't like the way the person behind us is driving. I think they're drunk. So why don't you pull over and let them around us so we can keep an eye on them."

She started to panic. "What? I didn't even notice! What do I do? Oh no!"

"Don't worry, it's no big deal," I said. "Just pull over slowly, right up there in front of that house. If the car stops behind us, then we'll take off in a squeal of burning rubber and drive home really fast. But I think they'll go around us, and then they can't crash into us from behind."

Meg started laughing. "This is one of the things I love about you," she said. "You freak out over these little insignificant things, but when something happens that would give you a legitimate reason to worry, you're the most cool-headed person I know." (This from one of the most level-headed crisis respondents I know.)

I laughed too -- she's seen a lot of both the petty anxieties and the calm catastrophes the past three years. Like the number of years I spent worrying aloud every spring and summer over tornadoes, which terrify me...and the time a tornado was actually sighted heading straight for the town I worked in and she called me at work to warn me and I said placidly, "Oh yeah, I heard about it. Well, I can't get home to Simon because it's hailing too hard, but there's a basement here, so it's okay. It's passing you over, right?"

Or the number of times I worried about mothers' reactions at the Center for the Homeless to any potential little accident that might befall their toddlers...and the time a little boy started choking and all the volunteers panicked and stood around him in a nervous circle and I heard the choking sounds and turned around and calmly brushed the volunteers out of the way, said, "Stand back, give him some room," knelt behind him and administered the Heimlich without batting an eye.

Or all the times I gnawed over the fear that someone would break into my apartment in South Bend, and all the times I started awake in the middle of the night hearing the creak of the house settling and thinking it was an intruder...and the time someone almost did break in, and I stood in the hallway gripping my shotgun and quietly waiting to see if they'd make it up to my door, an iron curtain of certainty having severed my terror from my conscious mind, so that I could only think, coolly, "Well...this is it. I'll kill someone if I have to." And I began mechanically going through the mental checklist Dad had given me -- don't touch the body, call the cops first, then a lawyer, then Dad...hopefully I can at least shut Simon in my bedroom so he doesn't get down the stairwell and outside -- while I waited to hear the sounds of the downstairs door splintering. (Fortunately the would-be intruder gave up and went away. People have asked me, when I tell the story of why I moved out of South Bend, why I didn't call the cops right away, and I always answer, "There wasn't time. To quote a popular expression, 'When seconds count, the cops are there in minutes.' ")

Or learning infant CPR in high school and thinking of all the horrible things that could happen to a child while I babysat, and almost weeping with pity for the gray plastic doll on whose back I was banging...and the moment two days later when the baby I was babysitting started to choke on a piece of one of the STUPID dried flower arrangements on the floor that I'd already complained about to his mother, and without pause I lifted him up, flipped him over, and thumped his back until he vomited and started breathing again. (Then I got all shaky and called my mom while clutching the baby.)

Or in the year after 9-11 when terrorist threats seemed to be everywhere, and a girl with whom I was loosely acquainted in college was telling me, tight-voiced and terrified, about the latest anthrax attack and worrying that biological warfare was about to break out over our own little campus, I shrugged and told her, "It's kind of unlikely that anyone's going to go after Grove City, there's nothing important here...and even if it does, we can't stop it, and it's too exhausting to live in fear."

She looked at me as if I were nuts, and I very well might be. I suppose it's that my vivid imagination gets me in trouble, but I'm one of the lucky people that isn't usually fazed by ugly reality. Growing up a Cop's Daughter has in a lot of ways prepared me for the worst of many situations, and dealing with a real crisis is just one more thing to be done. I might have nightmares of being chased by faceless monsters, I might turn pale at a newspaper story and feel sick at what happened to yet another innocent victim (but then I'm also evaluating where the innocence translated to foolishness and how the horror could have been prevented by a few precautions), but I snap into a different head space when reactions count.

So I'm a little backwards. But now I've started to confront the useless worrying I do, especially recognizing that if the worst were to happen, I wouldn't be worrying about it, so there's no point in worrying at all. Why borrow trouble?

Of course worrying is an old, old habit, one that I don't see evaporating overnight, but one on which I can whittle away bit by bit on a daily basis, converting worry to prayer, and turning and returning to my newfound trust in the constant, ceaseless, unchanging love of God, even in the most horrific of circumstances.

I'm looking forward to living free, finally, from my nagging little fears. If I'm not a worrier when things are dire, I don't need to be a worrier when everything is fine. There's no sense in that.

And now...on to a little exercise in celebration of my reborn lung capacity (three weeks entirely smoke-free, folks! huzzah!) and in hopes that it will ease this week's monthly unpleasantness. And then on to jobhunting. Whee...