intimidated, I was terrified.
CHAPTER 7
I have found that four in the morning is the best time to worry. It’s that perfect hour wedged right in between getting a good night’s sleep and being fully awake. Four in the morning was not so early that I stressed about getting back to sleep, but it was way too early to actually rise and make coffee. So instead, if I woke up at four, I’d lie in bed and let my mind work through my Worry List.
I'd run through all the worries I had lined up for the day. I’d pick my top three and either figure out a solution or decide to continue to stress until I was convinced by a friend that I had nothing to worry about. As in, “Oh, Helen, you know that someone will step up and sponsor the t-shirts for the school fair. They always do!” Then poof, that worry would disappear because, yes, someone did step up to do the underwriting.
Before Merritt’s death, a typical early February Worry List consisted of items like the booking of a hair appointment, the probability of a terrorist attack at LAX, the likelihood of sex on the weekend with Merritt, and the location of that little card from the dentist about my next cleaning.
After I’d formulated the Worry List, then I could attack it with some action plan, right after that third cup of coffee and drop-off. Nothing I could do about the terrorist attack or that long-lost card from the dentist, so those items dropped to the bottom of my action plan. But there were worries I could jump on. I’d make that hair appointment! I’d book a bikini wax because Candy had made me see the errors of my razor ways, or at least shamed me into more maintenance in that area. I was on top of things!—or so I thought.
Back then, I really had nothing to worry about.
I’d always suspected that my life was pretty stress-free, but now I knew for sure that I had a good thing going. I used to actually worry about whether I was happy, whether I was making Merritt happy, whether Aiden was completely fulfilled. What a luxury to worry about happiness.
In recent days, my Worry List was filled with real worries about selling my house and getting enough money out of it to cover my debts and buy a crappy condo. I worried about getting myself more life insurance because, God forbid, what if something happened to me? I worried about the trees on the property being overgrown and crashing into the garage after a giant rainstorm, even though we’d just had them trimmed a year ago. I worried Aiden would start sniffing glue as a way to mask his anger, because I’d seen some terrifying statistic on teenage boys and glue-sniffing on Good Morning America . I worried that I would never have sex again with another real human being. I worried I would die alone.
At least these were honest-to-goodness worries.
Now I had a whole new frontier of worries to add to the Worry List: the workplace. My eight-hour orientation (Paid! Bringing home the bacon!!) prior to my first official day on the job consisted of a few hours at Human Resources, and then a grueling training session with Karen from Library. At HR, I had to fill out all sorts of paperwork, most of which seemed unnecessary for a temporary, 30-hour-a-week job. But Min Cho, the HR person, just kept repeating, “good to get in the system,” and I agreed. It had been so long since I’d been in a system of any kind, just draping my Huntington employee ID around my neck gave me a sense of accomplishment.
Then I entered the vortex of Karen from Library, bedecked in her red blazer. Karen took her work very seriously. I supposed if part of my job was to insure the health and safety of an original draft of the Gettysburg Address for future generations, I’d be a hard-ass, too. As a lowly volunteer, I’d never seen this side of Karen; now as a research assistant, I was under the scrutiny of a Master Librarian. My new greatest worry was about keeping my hands clean at all times so as not to “soil or stain the pages” with my,
CHAPTER 7
I have found that four in the morning is the best time to worry. It’s that perfect hour wedged right in between getting a good night’s sleep and being fully awake. Four in the morning was not so early that I stressed about getting back to sleep, but it was way too early to actually rise and make coffee. So instead, if I woke up at four, I’d lie in bed and let my mind work through my Worry List.
I'd run through all the worries I had lined up for the day. I’d pick my top three and either figure out a solution or decide to continue to stress until I was convinced by a friend that I had nothing to worry about. As in, “Oh, Helen, you know that someone will step up and sponsor the t-shirts for the school fair. They always do!” Then poof, that worry would disappear because, yes, someone did step up to do the underwriting.
Before Merritt’s death, a typical early February Worry List consisted of items like the booking of a hair appointment, the probability of a terrorist attack at LAX, the likelihood of sex on the weekend with Merritt, and the location of that little card from the dentist about my next cleaning.
After I’d formulated the Worry List, then I could attack it with some action plan, right after that third cup of coffee and drop-off. Nothing I could do about the terrorist attack or that long-lost card from the dentist, so those items dropped to the bottom of my action plan. But there were worries I could jump on. I’d make that hair appointment! I’d book a bikini wax because Candy had made me see the errors of my razor ways, or at least shamed me into more maintenance in that area. I was on top of things!—or so I thought.
Back then, I really had nothing to worry about.
I’d always suspected that my life was pretty stress-free, but now I knew for sure that I had a good thing going. I used to actually worry about whether I was happy, whether I was making Merritt happy, whether Aiden was completely fulfilled. What a luxury to worry about happiness.
In recent days, my Worry List was filled with real worries about selling my house and getting enough money out of it to cover my debts and buy a crappy condo. I worried about getting myself more life insurance because, God forbid, what if something happened to me? I worried about the trees on the property being overgrown and crashing into the garage after a giant rainstorm, even though we’d just had them trimmed a year ago. I worried Aiden would start sniffing glue as a way to mask his anger, because I’d seen some terrifying statistic on teenage boys and glue-sniffing on Good Morning America . I worried that I would never have sex again with another real human being. I worried I would die alone.
At least these were honest-to-goodness worries.
Now I had a whole new frontier of worries to add to the Worry List: the workplace. My eight-hour orientation (Paid! Bringing home the bacon!!) prior to my first official day on the job consisted of a few hours at Human Resources, and then a grueling training session with Karen from Library. At HR, I had to fill out all sorts of paperwork, most of which seemed unnecessary for a temporary, 30-hour-a-week job. But Min Cho, the HR person, just kept repeating, “good to get in the system,” and I agreed. It had been so long since I’d been in a system of any kind, just draping my Huntington employee ID around my neck gave me a sense of accomplishment.
Then I entered the vortex of Karen from Library, bedecked in her red blazer. Karen took her work very seriously. I supposed if part of my job was to insure the health and safety of an original draft of the Gettysburg Address for future generations, I’d be a hard-ass, too. As a lowly volunteer, I’d never seen this side of Karen; now as a research assistant, I was under the scrutiny of a Master Librarian. My new greatest worry was about keeping my hands clean at all times so as not to “soil or stain the pages” with my,
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