I am, by nature, a worrier, having seemingly emerged from the womb with an anxious disposition. As such, my frazzled nerves have found their outlet in various obsessions and concerns over the years. I turned 30 recently, so to mark the occasion I thought I’d compile a (by no means exhaustive) list of some of the things I worried about most in my first 30 years on this earth, and where I stand on them now – from the existential to the mundane.
Death
This one bothered me a lot when I was young, to the point that there was a period when I was afraid to go to sleep at night. It still scares the shit out of me if I really think about it, and has re-surfaced lately presumably because turning 30 reminded me that I am, indeed, mortal. But other than this past week, death’s existence is generally sequestered comfortably in a corner in the back of my mind. As my best friend’s mum told me when I was 15, “you just have to block it out.”
My parents’ dying.
My mum and dad had me at 38 and 45 respectively, so they’re always been older than most of the other parents. Just before I graduated university eight years ago, my dad went into cardiac arrest in front of me 5 times. After that, every ambulance siren was for him, and I would stand outside his bedroom door making sure there were no prolonged silences between his snores. Years went by without event and the fear dulled, and now it naps in the corner of my mind with my fear of death, re-surfacing when my dad needs a blood test or has a prolonged cough. I don’t worry about my mother’s death because for some reason she feels like the sturdiest woman alive, like she’ll wrestle off the grim reaper or buy more time from him via a careful balance of maternal charm and manipulation.
That this is it.
Since I was a child I’ve always wanted an extraordinary life (don’t we all?). I work from home a lot and still fret that this is it, that life is routine, not the shiny varied moments and adventures I thought it would consist of. For most of my life I wanted to be an actress. I felt destined for a combination of the magic of the stage, the embodiment of the other, and the super-humanness of fame. For the most part I’ve made peace with the fact that my one life on earth won’t be that, and have slowly learned that even if it was, whatever you do, there you are. (It also helps that I love the job I did choose.)
What I said when I was drunk.
I gave up drinking almost a year ago, so, as it stands, this one no longer applies. I do, however, still have phantom hangziety the morning after nights when everyone else was drinking and feel the need to comb through what I said in search of anything that could cause offence. Without the chemicals, however, this wanes relatively quickly. But I do still fear that I said or did the wrong thing when my coffee’s rendered me hyper or my ADHD medication has made me overconfident and verbose, evoking in concern that I ought to give up yet another thing.
What I was going to say the next time I was drunk.
This kind of incapacity for self-trust was a real killer, and quitting drinking got rid of it entirely.
Taxes.
A few years ago I miscalculated my taxes and out of sheer anxiety defaulted on my payments. At the time, the unopened tax envelopes evoked an amount of dread no SSRI could touch. Now I’m on top of it, and being on top of it is such a relief compared to not being on top of it that seeing the monthly instalment taken from my account doesn’t bother me.
Rejection.
The possibility of being rejected isn’t something I’ve ever sat around worrying about, but it is a fear that reliably and promptly grips me as soon as I like someone even a little bit. It’s a killer and at the top of the list of things I need to work on come 2026.
My looks.
Was it Kristin Stewart that said waking up and not hating yourself as a woman today is an act of resistance? I semi-resist. I feel hot a lot of the time, but I still worry that I look like the worst photos of myself, not the best, and that the chasm between me done up and just out of bed is too wide to be forgiven.
The volume of my voice.
This rarely crosses my mind now unless someone overtly tells me to be quiet. Perhaps this is because I don’t drink anymore so am less prone to in-public shrieking, or perhaps it’s because I surround myself with people who care more about the content of my conversation than the decibels it reaches.
That I sleep too much.
I’ve always felt safest and coziest when unconscious, but sleep less these days thanks to being medicated for my ADHD, no longer drinking, a hard-won sense of discipline, and learning that no matter how good it feels to sleep in, it feels better to have time in the daylight. So when I do, I try to give myself a break.
Fake tan.
To anyone who doesn’t fake tan this undoubtedly sounds pathetically insignificant. But doing the mental gymnastics of timing fake tan around certain events has underscored my entire life. How soon can I scrub it off without removing my entire epidermis? Is two day old tan fresh enough for a date? Then my OCD got in on the action: Will the date go badly if my tan isn’t perfect? Over the years I learned to embrace how I look pale and exposure therapied my way to not having to have my tan perfect all the time, but I still feel better with a tan and am beholden to the constant maths.
That I’m in trouble.
I have ADHD and as a child never shut the fuck up or did my homework on time, so a constant sense that I was in trouble or about to be was a pillar of my youth, and was a constant niggling feeling that I took into my first job. Now, being told off or anticipating being told off still makes me question my worth and skills more than it should, and calls to mind all the similar mistakes I’ve made in the past, but for the most part doesn’t feel like it’s a lifelong stain on my character.
That someone is annoyed with me.
In school I had a big mouth, and that mouth only gained power when alcohol was introduced to the equation. For most of my life the percolating concern that I would upset everyone I loved and ultimately be abandoned cast a major shadow. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when I stopped drinking, this mostly went away. I still worry that people don’t like me or that I’ve inadvertently upset someone, but it passes quicker and feels less heavy than when that fear is powered by ethanol.
That I’m a bad person.
Obsessing over whether or not I’m a good person stems from my OCD (in psychology parlance, it’s called moral scrupulosity OCD). OCD is a life-long sentence, so I will likely always feel an outsized amount of guilt when I say something wrong, spill a secret, or act selfishly. It has, however, improved since I quit drinking.
Money.
Money has always felt precarious to me. I do not come from a line of financially literate savers who spend money on the things that matter and scrimp on the things that don’t. I’m not great with money, and probably shouldn’t have chosen a career notorious for producing little of it. Nor should I be self-employed and live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. All of this to say, this one persists.
Calories.
Between the ages 19 and 20, I was anorexic, so for a while calories were my biggest and only worry, as if they had eaten all of the others. Today my eating is more instinctual and calories don’t play a huge role in my choosing what to eat. But I still know how many are in an apple (75), a pizza (about 1200), and a bowl of cereal (about 200), and though I don’t closely watch my eating, I rarely overeat.
My weight.
Obviously, this too was a big one. After a few years of post-anorexia weight fluctuations my weight settled and doesn’t tend to budge. Because it’s pretty steady I don’t worry about it much, but I’m not going to bullshit you: if it were to increase to a point that threatened my self-image, I would promptly have to lose it.
STIS.
When I first started having sex, getting an STI felt like the worst thing that could possibly happen to a person, but that fear lessened with age and check ups, which I suppose acted as exposure therapy. The thought of the longer lasting ones still evokes my hypochondria, but for the most part, I see them more as a nuisance than a shameful burden. Anyways according to Hannah Hovarth, all adventurous girls do.
Dirt.
Today, dirt scares me far less than it did when my OCD was at its worst, when I thought leaving a piece of dirt un-removed meant something bad was going to happen to me or someone I loved. At times of severe anxiety, however, I still attach irrelevant meaning to it, but for the most part, I exposure therapy my way out of it (I.E ignore it until it goes away).
Flying.
My fear of flying emerged from nowhere when I was 16, and flying back and forth to boarding school in Ireland. In an alliance of evil it joined forces with my OCD, telling me that if that fluff on the carpet remained there, I would plummet to my death on a tinny Ryanair plane. One day, the fear began to dissipate, and I now fly without anxiety for the most part, though my palms still drip during turbulence.
That I needed to give up alcohol.
I did, and I have. I’m not sure whether or not it will be forever, but worrying about whether or not I should drink again is better than worrying that I need to stop.
My intrusive thoughts.
One of the lesser known things about OCD is the intrusive thoughts it can incite, which can make you believe you are what you consider most abominable. When I learned that my intrusive thoughts were OCD-induced and that a lot of them were shared by my friends, I gradually learned to ignore them. They used to resurface with a vengeance when I was deathly hungover, and still do when I’m especially anxious, but for the most part, they’re dismissible.
That I’m spoiled
I am and have always been spoiled. I’m the only child of parents who had little, for whom parenthood is everything. I allow them to do too much and I’m getting too old for it. So yeah, this one, too, persists.
That my anxiety would never ease.
Every time I go through a period of severe anxiety I’m convinced that it will never pass, that I will have to be sectioned and live out the rest of my days sedated or in a state of hot panic. But it always passes. I read recently that even when something terrible or amazing happens, people generally go back to the same baseline of happiness. This knowledge of this stability is a comfort.
Imperfection.
My being a (selective) perfectionist emerged later in life, perhaps because ADHD made me the opposite of a perfectionist for the first half of it, and now I feel I have to make up for it. I still get anxious when I break self-imposed rules, or others’ rules, and constantly ruminate about it in my head. This is another one I’ll have to exposure therapy my way out of.
Injustice.
I know that this one’s reductively vague and covers a lot of ground, but if I list all of the things that are unjust that worry me this would be a political essay not a personal one. The injustices that have hit me most over the past few years have been police brutality and the genocide in Palestine, so obviously injustice still plagues me. (You can donate to the people of Palestine here).
That I’m fundamentally unemployable.
I’ve always felt like there was some kind of official, divine board that decided whether or not I was a good employee worth hiring and paying. There isn’t, there are just individual jobs and individual bosses. That knowledge is still sinking in.
That I’m romantically unlovable.
I read that this fear is the one therapists hear more than any other: that people worry most that if someone truly knew them, they couldn’t love them. Like the omnipotent board of employers, I feel like there’s an omnipotent authority of men deciding if I’m lovable or not. I often have to remind myself that there isn’t, that it’s a case by case basis of men and my unique relationships to them.
Disease.
In my teenage years I was a terrible hypochondriac. Any lump was a fast-growing tumour, a cold was symptomatic of a destroyed immune system on account of AIDS, and my sleep paralysis would inevitably kill me in my sleep. Today my hypochondria is under control. Sure, I worry when a lump or bump appears, but I’m rarely convinced that it’s the grim reaper in disguise.
That I’ll end up alone.
I think we all worry about this one. Again, it’s more of a percolating fear at the back of my mind than a sickening worry, but it’s there. It helps that I write about dating and relationships, so can generally tap into a more objective understanding of our fucked up dating epoch.
I’m now worried that this piece is too self-indulgent, and that I’ve inevitably left out character-forming worries that will come to me later to taunt me. But in the spirit of anti-perfectionism and exposure therapy, I’m pressing “post”.
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