Who Asked? // What if it all goes wrong?

I’ve struggled with anxiety since third grade, and probably before then too, if I’m being honest. So sitting at my kitchen table playing the Hamilton soundtrack to try to calm myself down enough to eat lunch is not a shocking experience for me to have. 

In this case, specifically, it was because I woke up the day before Halloween with a sore throat and a slight discoloration of my tonsils. Immediately, I spiraled. Oh god, I probably have strep, I’m going to miss all of my Halloween parties, I’m going to get so sick that I throw up, et cetera, et cetera. For added context, emetophobia, or the fear of throwing up, is something I’ve also struggled with for years. 

Panicked that I’d miss my parties or start feeling nauseous, I spent the next two days taking frequent pictures of my throat, Googling “strep symptoms” and grieving the pretty green dress I’d bought to be Tinkerbell that I’d never get to wear. This brings us to the Hamilton self-soothe strategy and a half-eaten bowl of chickpeas. 

I know I’m not the only person in the world with anxiety, and even people without a diagnosis can still spiral about something turning out bad or threatening carefully laid plans. There’s something terrifying in the unknown, something terrifying in the realization that we have very little control over anything. So if all of us face this problem so frequently, and so many of us can be entirely disabled by it, what do we do about it? And, of course, the big question — what do we do if everything really does go wrong? 

I picked the perfect schedule for next semester. I spent hours searching through the course catalog, consulting my advisor and scrolling through pages of Rate My Professors reviews, all to check my shopping cart two days before my enrollment period and realize that only two of my five classes were even still open. I had to completely rebuild my schedule. Of course, this is a small-scale example of things going wrong, but it still works as a microcosm for the general experience. 

At first, I was just mad. I almost snapped at my roommates over nothing and dove quickly into a rant about this “stupid school” that, in reality, I quite enjoy, and how I was going to “drop out and become a housewife.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s unlikely for my immediate future to mean running a household when I can’t even work up the energy to wash my sheets right now. 

After the initial emotional response, however, I settled. I acknowledged that I could still build a new schedule and my roommate sent me a couple classes she was in that I could look at. I stood up and dusted myself off. 

To be fair, that’s easy to do when the crisis is something as simple as not getting the classes you wanted. Therefore, I still carry fear with me all the time. I still spent three days panicking that I’d be too sick to go to my Halloween parties, eventually forcing myself to the doctor despite being terrified of taking an actual strep test. 

The doctor took one look at my throat, told me it was hardly irritated at all, explained that strep is way less likely than people act like it is and didn’t even end up testing me. I went to my parties, I had a great time and now I have a stuffy nose and an annoying chest cough. But despite inconvenience or congestion, I am alive. I am safe. I am incredibly, incredibly lucky that these are the kinds of conundrums that I face. Possibly losing out on $20 spent on Depop is not a world-ending disaster, even if it felt like it at the moment. 

But there are other things in our world that are absolutely terrifying to sit with right now. Global changes and war and politics and climate change and a hundred other massive-scale problems with a thousand moving parts — the kinds of problems that make you want to doomscroll on Instagram until your eyes bleed. And, even in our own personal lives, there are bigger problems than missing Halloweekend — things like my grandmother’s declining health or the disaster of a job market I must walk into. We are haunted by a thousand voices reminding us all the time that we exist on the tip of a needle, and one disaster could send our lives spiraling into a thousand pieces. 

The feelings of anxiety or panic that we face are only there to help us, and they’re working overtime in a world that seems more complicated than ever. But the ugly truth is that at the end of the day, no amount of worrying or panic will control whether things turn out in our favor or not. As much as I’d like to believe it, no amount of bartering with the universe kept me from developing strep throat this weekend. 

So is it even worth it? How much of our lives do we lose to the anxiety about a disaster that never comes? How much do we sacrifice to a practice that has no real power over the outcomes anyway? Worrying more about my classes would not have stopped them from filling, and worrying less about my throat would not have given me strep. It’s good to have a healthy amount of concern for our lives, just so that we don’t go walking into the road at any given moment, but we must know where to draw the line. We must know that things going right or wrong has nothing to do with how hard we cried about it in the shower. 

So what if everything goes wrong? Yeah. What if? All we can do is hope that we have the support systems and personal strength to buoy ourselves through any tragedy. It’s not about torturing ourselves before the lightning strike, but about becoming people who can handle the thunder that follows. As much as I like Hamilton, I would’ve preferred to be able to eat the damn chickpeas in silence.