Letting It Go

As someone who has been through the worst case scenario…. I can tell you – it’s not easy to let go of the worry, or even the obsession with being worried.

It’s like a small panic button internally that goes off whenever I suspect there is an emergency. I find myself running into a room because I hear a groan or a frustrated response to something. I constantly feel on edge, because I think I am the one that needs to solve the problem.

But what does it take to let it go? It takes a lot of self control to not step into the middle of a problem and solve it. It also takes a lot of self control to let the phone ring and not panic, not reach for that phone every 2 minutes to keep calling, to check their status online – are they there?

I can talk reason to myself – that I’m conjuring up worst case scenarios in my head. But then I’ll remember the casual phone call I made that afternoon … to hear him tell me he was on a bus to the Toronto subway. I can talk reason with myself, but then I remember what happened that Tuesday afternoon I came home to find him.

Often times family members caring for those with mental health struggles carry the weight of never letting it go. What will happen if we let our guard down? I have… and then something bad happened.

I was asked once if I thought panicking would stop something horrible from happening. And the answer is no. I can’t stop what might happen. The truth is – someone is going to do what they want to do whether I scream at them or not.

There comes a moment when we need to silence the panic in our minds, to put down the phone, to remember that we also have to worry about ourselves. The panic and the worry won’t change anything, but it will change us, just not always for the better.

I bought a book on CBT a while ago and was flipping through it the other week and came across a saying by Eleanor Roosevelt, “You can be just about as happy as you decide that you are going to be.”

The decision is up to us. No matter what may or might happen tomorrow, we decide how much we get to worry about it.