I am a chronic worrier. I even have meds for that. I shudder to think of how bad the worrying would be without them, because right now? OHMYGOD IT’S BAD.
Fellow chronic worriers? Tell me you don’t feel me. Here are things only chronic worriers will understand.
1. You can’t sleep because you keep worrying that an airplane toilet will dislodge from its compartment the moment it flies over your roof and fall on your house, killing you and your whole family in a fiery poo explosion in the night.
2. You remember cutting all the plastic ring thingies that bottles of pop come in. All except the last. And you’re positive that will be the one ring out of thousands of uncut rings a tiny turtle will get stuck in and die.
3. You get halfway to your destination three hours away and have to turn around because you might have left the oven on. Even though you never cook.
4. You think you’ve left your hair straightener on in the bathroom everyday for a full week. You haven’t. Until you finally convince yourself to stop worrying about it, and that’s the day you do leave it on. So for the next year-and-a-half, you can’t make it through a single day of work without daydreaming you’ll come home to find what used to be your house is now a smoldering pile of ash. And you don’t even use that straightener anymore.
5. You’re certain the dentist will accidentally slip and cut your gums at your next routine cleaning, causing you to develop a flesh-eating staph infection that eventually requires amputation of half your face.
6. You suddenly panic while driving because you’re pretty sure your brakes will give out at any minute. Nothing even remotely suspect has happened to indicate this is a possibility.
7. You can’t fly without replaying Snakes on a Plane on a loop in your mind.
8. You’re convinced the nice elderly neighbor down the road moonlights as a serial killer and has at least 100 bodies piled up in his basement.
9. Every spider you see is a Black Widow and every reptile you encounter is a Diamondback even though those species don’t exist in your region.
10. You hang all your food in a tree while camping in case a bear invades the area and mistakes you for a side of baby back ribs. When you actually muster the courage to go camping. Because dude, bears are everywhere.
11. You stand at least 5 feet away from your single-cup coffee maker as it brews in the event there is an electrical malfunction resulting from shoddy craftsmanship. You’ve seen what they produce these days.
12. You refuse to change the channel with anything other than your remote control because you’re sure your flat screen TV will fall off your living room wall and smash you into a human pancake the second you walk up to it.
13. You legitimately worry about falling asleep in the bathtub and drowning in a cocktail of scuzzy water and Pert Plus.
14. You just know your child will be a social deviant because you caught him pinching his little brother that one time when he was three.
15. You’re convinced your coworker whom you’ve had exactly one conversation with in your entire life hates you because she politely declined your offer to share half your tuna salad sandwich the day she forgot her lunch.
16. You haven’t worn mascara or eyeliner in a decade because you might slip on a carelessly tossed banana peel or suffer a muscle spasm at the exact moment you try to apply them, thus causing you to poke your eyeball out.
17. You fear your child will forever be repulsed by the naked human form because he saw you get out of the shower as a toddler.
18. You beg your spouse to purchase the highest-end home security system because you are positive you saw that guy on America’s Most Wanted cutting the neighbor’s grass and fantasizing about what your liver tastes like the other day.
19. You haven’t sharpened the steak knives since your wedding day. You just don’t trust yourself enough to cut meat without taking at least three digits in the process.
20. You beg for elephant-grade sedatives anytime you have the most minor of medical procedures performed because you are 100% positive the staff will confuse your chart with that of the patient getting a lobotomy, and you know not a single doctor or nurse will believe the person getting a lobotomy when they say there has been a mistake, so you decide it’s best to just be in a near coma-like state when they inevitably come at your frontal lobe with an ice pick.
Wait, no, never mind. That last one is totally plausible.