What Was That Noise?

Anxiety: A state of being uneasy, apprehensive, or worried about what may happen; misgiving.

There is a psychology study circulating which is investigating why some of us are so susceptible to generalized anxiety. Admittedly, it's not easy to differentiate conclusively the many different factors that make some of us more anxious than others. For instance, it would seem to me that if you grow up with parents who fret about everything that you will be predisposed to worry more than others. I'm using my degree in Someone Who Thinks He Knows A Lot About Everything to make this conclusion.

What this study has determined is that some of us are fearful right out of the womb. Not many of us, but a small percentage. This is a totally anecdotal observation on my part, but a lot of the worriers seem to end up as alcoholics and drug addicts. I've always liked the phrase Free Floating Anxiety. There is actually a medical diagnosis called Generalized Anxiety Syndrome. Wonderful. Apparently some of us just worry about everything.

It was disconcerting to me hearing some of the conclusions. They appeared to be talking about me specifically. It takes some time in the morning and a pretty significant force of will to tamp down my inclination to simply assume that everything is going to turn out badly. For many years, if I heard an ambulance and a family member was out, I worried that something bad had happened. If I get a headache I assume it's cancer of the brain, and not a regular old malignant tumor, either. A bad, aggressive, inoperable tumor. I'm surfing the net, trying to find symptoms that confirm my diagnosis, using my degree in Someone Who Was Kicked Out Of Optometry College and the web site http://www.soyouworryabouteverythingtoo, out of the former republic of Azerbaijan.

It's one thing to worry when there's a reason to worry. I no longer walk down dark alleys in bad sections of town in the middle of the night to buy drugs, and if I did, I'd worry. Good worry. The problem is that I worry about things that may happen and it doesn't always help if I know intellectually, rationally that these things rarely happen. They may not even be real fears: bogeymen and monsters in the closet and weird diseases.

Excuse me for a minute. I think a monster got loose upstairs.