We’ve all been there. You can’t get your mind off something that’s been troubling you for days, weeks, even months. The worry machine keeps running at night in bed, where your worst fears come to life. The bed is a torture chamber of thoughts, evil thoughts that control you, and you can’t get out of it no matter how hard you try to will away the worry.

Instead of fighting it, it would be better if you accepted it and rode the worry. For example, you worry about your job and whether you’re doing it well enough, and you worry that you’ll lose your job for several reasons. Maybe in actuality you hate your job and you’re trying to get out of it, so you begin making mistakes at work so they can terminate you and give you severance pay. Rather than fighting that thought, admit to yourself that you’re trying to get out. You hate your job so much. There. The worry lessens. You’ve been honest with yourself. You’re still losing sleep though. It’s a mental struggle for what’s right.

Anyway, it’s Sunday, and I have all the free time in the world. What should I do besides worry about things I can’t control? Now when I go for walks, the worry follows me for five miles before I get back home. The only time I’m not worrying is when I’m eating a cheeseburger, a big greasy cheeseburger with onions, tomatoes, pickles, mayo, and a sesame seed bun. It takes fewer than five minutes to eat one, and after I’ve digested it, the worry comes back to life. The cheeseburger was just a brief departure from that worry. I also lose my worry when I’m eating pizza, but I can’t eat those things every day or else I’ll gain weight, and I don’t want that either. I just eat those things once a week on a cheat day.

If you don’t worry, you’ll lose control. That’s what you tell yourself, although people say it’s a fallacy, that worry really has no function. Then why does it exist? What’s the purpose of worry when people tell you that? You know fear is a real thing. If there’s an imminent threat, it’s more than natural to fear it. That’s human instinct. And worry is a component of fear. Worry is just fear looping in your head like a broken record. It drives you insane. You wish you had an answer against worry, but it’s always there. If you’re not worried about something, you’ll worry about something else. You constantly have to have something to worry about. Your mind tells you that you have to be alert to any possible danger. It torments me as I stare out the window at a fern and an empty city bench with nothing on my mind but worry.

I want to take a train to Portland and never come back, but the worry will always be there no matter where I am. So Portland isn’t a viable escape. I suppose the only way to stop the worry is to accept it. I could be wrong. People tell me to quit worrying, which is easier said than done. I grew up as a worrywart and stayed that way through adulthood. And here I am, at my age, with worry controlling what I think and feel. I wish there was an answer to this all. Otherwise I would be better off. I can’t share what I worry about. It’s private. Just know that the worry is there and as persistent as always.

I’ve tried mindfulness techniques and breath control, but worry breaks through the thin fabric. When the actual threat is resolved, of course the fear and worry dissipate from my nervous system, only for a new worry to come about. Worry is an endless radio station that Anne Lamott calls KFKD or K-Fucked. I remember reading her book, Bird by Bird, where she explains that the mind races and never shuts off. All a writer wants is mental silence, which is not easy to come by. You just stare into space and hope that the worry fades. It stays in your mind permanently like ink and overrides the capacity a writer needs to compose. I wish I had the answer to this, but all I can do is help the reader relate to what’s being written here.