On Worry

Welcome to What’s Helping Today, a newsletter about the everyday work of staying alive on earth, by writer Sandy Ernest Allen.

I am a worrier and have always been a worrier. I am descended from worriers, Midwesterners, Minnesotans. Growing up, people around me were always worried. I too became always worried. I worried about catastrophes to come, ones I imagined, ones I dreaded, some that did sometimes befall. But often the worst things in life, I’ve found, are not ones I ever thought to worry about before they became reality.

I grew up in an isolated enclave on the Northern Californian coast, surrounded by tan hillsides and the churning Pacific. Our only connections to the rest of the world were thin strips of highway, roads that were sometimes closed because of mudslides or an earthquake chucking some portion into the sea. I worried about quakes and tsunamis but mostly I worried about fire. As a child I was often aware my whole situation was something of a tinder box.

Nowadays, three thousand miles away in upstate New York, my worries are different. I worry about severe weather, even hurricanes sometimes (my community having been pummeled by one not long before I moved up). Here too now I worry about wildfire. But mostly I worry as a trans person these days. When I’m in public I worry about particular people. I worry if some concerning-looking truck I haven’t seen before drives by my quiet house. I worry often in a big vague way about my future in this country and wonder where I would run to, spinning the globe in my mind. (Then I worry that’s so privileged of me, that I might even imagine leaving at all.)

The thing about worry is it’s often wrong. So rarely does my worrying accomplish anything. Right now, like so many, I stare at the news. The news tells me to be afraid. The news tells me to pack a go bag. I contemplate this issue, that I don’t have a go bag. I contemplate what sort of scenario I am even preparing for. Amongst trans people, we’re talking about stockpiling hormones, we’re talking about how we’ll navigate a world that makes our life-saving healthcare even harder to access than it already is. We’re rushing to get documents updated and have surgeries, both of which I’ve done recently. Sometimes it all becomes too much, the worry; I drown in it. I succumb to a panic attack. I sob in the shower.

I understand intellectually that it’s unhealthy to be worried all the time about everything. It’s hard to catch one’s own worrying though. Hence my fidelity to brain cleaning and daily meditation, these practices I perform in an effort to stay aware of my inner world. (‘Brain cleaning,’ as I call it, or as its creator Nicole Sachs calls it JournalSpeak, to recap in brief, consists of 20 minutes of super unfiltered writing, which you then destroy, followed by 10 minutes of meditation.) Doing this roughly 30 minutes of work every morning, this can help me distinguish the signal from the noise, when it comes to my worry and my rage and everything else I’m carrying inside that I’d rather avoid.

In other words, I try to not let the worry drive, like I try to not let the rage drive, or the sorrow. Because worry is a shitty driver. Worry often mistakes imagined catastrophes for reality. Worry also often assumes everything wrong is my own fault. Worry makes me disconnected from the present and from other people.

Brain cleaning and meditation can help me identify sometimes when I have mentally moved into a future catastrophe that’s not yet reality, or when I am inflating my own culpability in said imagined scenario. As I do these practices, I instead try to re-situate myself in the present. I try to find myself where I am right now. I try to figure out how I really feel. Maybe allow myself to just feel it, for a moment.

When times are tough, as is certainly true right now, I try to lean harder on all my helpful practices like these, and like therapy and like staying in touch with trusted friends. Given I’m still recovering from surgery, I can’t do a lot of what I typically would like to self-care-wise — in particular yoga and taking baths, both of which are forbidden for eight weeks. Even a daily walk can feel like a big expenditure right now, given my low energy. So I try to do what I can. If I can’t do my ‘regular’ walk down the road, I just do a little loop around the backyard, visit the snowy orchard and forest.

I allow myself to go slowly. I pause and study deer tracks or a young evergreen. I remind myself: this is real, right now, not all the possible nightmares my screens.

How to distinguish productive worry from not, especially during objectively anxious times? This has been a preoccupation of mine for years — given I am an anxious person by default and diagnosis, and especially now given those who seem to want to decimate trans people have seized power and seemingly nobody will stop them. Trans people, we will never win by numbers alone; we are a tiny minority, absolutely powerless compared to the rest of you. It’s cis people who’ll have to wake up, if we have any hope here.

Right now it doesn’t look great.

What should I do about all this? I seek advice from people older and/or wiser, people who might know more than I do about what is real right now. But in truth I know none of us really knows what story we’re all living. That is ours to decide, I suppose.

So much to be worried about right now, it’s all consuming. Tomorrow’s inauguration. Los Angeles on fire, my heart catering. One of my best friends is out there and we speak often. He texted photos of ash on his windshield, described the plan for getting out should it come to that. I try to not to worry about him and everybody else, but I do anyway. I worry my worrying can’t help anything. That all my worrying does is keep me activated, my nervous system jacked.

What can I actually do? I contact my congressperson and tell him to give a fuck about trans people. I stare at my newsfeed. I look at gofundme links streaming by and wish I had more money. I tabulate when I can next refill my T. I pack a go bag in my mind. I write impassioned emails to my senators, begging them to help us. We are undefended, I plea. We are terrified.

I am worried, yes, but I’m other things too. Furious. Hopeful, if slightly. Still here, and oh so alive.

I’ve been thinking for some weeks about a phrase written on a cardboard coffin left outside the office of a transphobic politician in the UK, which read:

We will live out of spite.

A few podcast recommendations:

Regarding the negative health effects of worry, this topic comes up during this great interview about intuitive eating. What does it mean to actually listen to our own bodies, especially when we’ve long been trained ignore ourselves?

Here’s a highly recommended in-depth conversation between Laverne Cox and Kara Swisher. A great episode that contains a rapid fire myth-busting section worth listening to if you want stuff to say back to folks who are maybe still less informed when it comes to trans people.

I loved this discussion of LA in pop culture on Keep It. I’ve been reflecting these last weeks that so many of my favorite cultural artifacts are indeed not just set in but arguably about LA — Magnolia, The Big Lebowski. The Parable of the Sower. Six Feet Under, which I’ve been rewatching during recovery.

What’s Helping Today: tree.fm, which allows you to listen to various forests around the world.

Finally: This week, I hope you’ll take a few minutes to contact your senators and ask them to do everything in their power to stop this transphobic “sports ban” — both because it’s obviously evil bullshit and because of the world of discrimination it opens the door to. Call your Democratic Senators (obviously) but call your Republican ones too (why not). Especially if you are cis, please consider actually doing this. After if you want to tell me you did so, feel free to reach out (or on Bluesky). That’ll definitely also be what’s helping me today.

Thank you,
Sandy

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