On Worry
Week 06
The etymology of the verb “worry” traces to the 1500s, when it was borrowed from Middle and Old English and meant “to choke or strangle.” By the 1700s, existence evidently became so doomed that its use had to expand to metaphorically describe “anxiety or stress,” possibly referencing the very physical manifestation of anxiety as suffocation. To worry is, quite literally, to choke oneself.
Two years ago, around this time, I was walking around Tallinn and made a photo of a child on the street playing with a soap bubble. It was a pleasant capture, but now, when I saw that photo, I remembered how incredibly stressed I was. It’s probably the most stressed I’ve ever been in the post-Covid era. You’d think surviving a generational plague would make you feel like nothing else could be worse, but nope—all through November till February of 2022, I believed in my head that I was basically doomed. Having returned to do a master’s at 31, after seven years of working, I figured I’d been around long enough to be more intentional about what I wanted to study and where I wanted to do my thesis. So, I took my time that semester to find a topic. Nothing at companies felt interesting enough, and the academic options felt like reading Latin. I wanted a field I’d actually enjoy and a supervisor who could give me more than just an academic checklist. I was walking around in my head with all these reasons, but by late October and early November, it seemed I’d left it too late. The stress began to build up. In mid-November, I went back and forth with a professor whose class had changed my perception of machine learning. I didn’t know much about ML then, but I figured he was someone I could learn a lot from. I felt like an impostor, yet I pestered him for a thesis topic at the startup he’d cofounded, and he said he’d come back with ideas. Cool, I thought—I finally had something, until I got the topics and realised I knew nothing about anything. This was near the end of November, and the topic-submission deadline was around December 10th.
Things got worse because I was traveling back to India soon after, until Christmas. With him teaching and running a startup, it was already hard enough to get time from my advisor, and now I was stuck coordinating over email. I signed up for a topic I basically knew nothing about and started reaching out to find an examiner. I was a mess, and being entirely new to the whole thing, I was super stressed. I think I even submitted the documentation while waiting for departure at the airport. Through that trip, a constant nagging voice in the back of my mind told me I’d gotten myself into a hole. This feeling continued all the way through New Year in Tallinn and then through January, where I had huge bouts of impostor syndrome. After February, it died down a bit as I worked through and learned more about my topic, realising that, contrary to my own belief, I didn’t have the mental capacity of some prehistoric neanderthal—I actually did know a few things and still retained the ability to learn new things. All that helped calm me down but only because I was already immersed in the work by then. Like, of course, I was fine once I was actually doing it. But before that? The damage was done. Though not serious, I was a nervous wreck, and some close people ended up having to suffer for it.
I’m thinking about this now for a couple of reasons. Thanks to Google, I was reminded of the photo I made of the soap bubble kid from Tallinn. Tallinn is also one of those weird travel experiences where I remember only parts of it—some good and some dark. It didn’t help that there was also no sun and it was freezing. It’s one of those cities that’s been on my mind to return to, to walk the same streets almost as if to fill in the gaps. More importantly, I’m thinking of it in order to consider the act of slowing down. I’m trying to slow down my days, especially my weekends—by which I mean I’m trying to worry less about things that are not happening in the present. This is easier said than done, and, especially for me, it’s like wringing my hand through a cloth wringer while having a 20 kg kettlebell pulling my neck down as I skate through wet ice on one leg. It is painful, and it is not especially pleasant—like a cartoon version of a character that makes you simultaneously feel sorry for them but also makes the scene very, very funny. My brain is always jumping ahead to the next thing to figure out, fix, or mull over. The good thing is that almost no one sees it because, well, it’s not that intense outwardly—it’s all in my head—but I also haven’t been good at communicating it.
In moments of this particularly useless type of stress, I feel time speeding up and slipping away, and I want to run ahead with it. It creates this subconscious sense of already living in the future. This isn’t necessarily an uncommon feeling. We constantly place ourselves in a future version of our goals or plans because planning itself requires imagining what’s ahead. However, it is different from actually living in the future—different from quite literally foregoing the present and not being aware of it in moments. Similar to living in the past, where one might find themselves in their memories and not realising the passing of the present time, I can find myself, fully absorbed in an imagined future. I’ve come to realise that, though fleeting, it’s a kind of metaphorical self-choking, all too familiar to anyone who veers into needless worries.
This week, I booked tickets to India. I made some loose plans in my head, bookended around the weddings I’ll be attending, and slowly felt the feeling creeping in again. Having not even opened a suitcase yet, I already felt time creeping out of my travel window. “There isn’t enough time to do all the things I want to do,” I thought. Things felt packed before I’d planned anything. Sometimes, I feel this on weekends too, when trivial chores seep in and I’m left with no time to decompress. Next thing you know, it’s Sunday evening, and the weekend feels nonexistent.
Of course, this is all a bit silly, but it has allowed me to reflect on how many times in the past I have let myself get consumed by the unnecessary worries of things not in my control. Keeping myself to the cadence of writing by Sunday night has helped me slow things down a bit in my head, even though it feels less like a zen meditation and more like a frantic rush to get something out the door. (But no one serious has ever described writing as a zen meditation, so you see how I set myself up for disappointment already?) Regardless, zen or not, writing is one skill that allows me to examine things on a multi-dimensional plane. Here, I can let time slow down and allow myself to take a deep breathe or two.
🥘 Food
- Worry less, repeat basic pastas more 🍝
