Clever Girl

How I Stopped Worrying {About Everything}

They say write what you know and I know dread. It’s the most common emotion I’ve experienced in my life. Not anxiety. Not fear. Dread.

Dread isn’t like those other two. There’s a real utility to fear and anxiety. Those emotions can save your life. But dread isn’t a warning or a catalyst. It’s the realization you’re helpless to stop something horrific. And once you let it get its teeth in you, it can hold on for a lifetime.

I’ve heard it explained like this before:

Anxiety is walking through the woods knowing there’s a chance a bear may attack you. Fear is when you actually see the bear down trail, mouth foaming. Dread is when it’s running at you full speed…

Anxiety is the anticipation of tragedy. Fear is the possibility of it actually happening. Dread is knowing it’s too late and it’s your fault. It’s a completely useless emotion. Our brains smiting ourselves like a petty god. The only reason you feel it is because you believe you deserve it. As if hope deserved vengeance.

Irish or Tall

It’s a hell of a thing for a kid to carry around but I always did. I knew when I was a little girl I wasn’t like most people. I was different in a way no one explained, just tolerated. It felt like something was wrong with me and no one would tell me why.

My queerness was apparent before I knew what it was, but I always understood it wasn’t palatable. There’s a right and wrong way to look as a girl, even a right and wrong way to sit. I knew my clothes, interests, and books weren’t “girly”. I knew I hated dolls, dressing up, and talking about boys. I knew all of this wasn’t the correct shade of pink I saw on Saturday morning commercials.

Kids like me grow up knowing dread better than love. The malignant feeling that something unknown about me was as horrible as that bear ripping distance. So I did what any doomed girl would do. I stayed out of the woods.

I ignored my sexuality or anything that encouraged it because I was trained to see it as unacceptable. I wanted nothing more than to feel accepted, especially at home. So I stayed away from women in general, at least emotionally.

I had one super-close female best friend at a time (shocking), but the majority of my friendships were the boys my brother hung around. They felt safe because they were. None of those boys were anything but kind and funny, lovers of music and movies and video games. And I grew up thinking that feeling comfortable and friendly around boys meant I was straight, that liking a boy as a friend meant I had romantic feelings because I was supposed to.

When queer children are taught straight is our default setting, we believe you. Then we grow up thinking we’re broken and blame ourselves. It keeps us confused about who we are.

It’s why there’s such an effort to ban queer books and media for kids today. To a lot of ignorant people, anything even remotely “LGBT” is synonymous with sex instead of what it is; a normal identifier of a kind of person, like Irish or tall.

To this day there are people who display extreme discomfort when I say I’m a lesbian aloud, as if I just declared “I have sex with women!” as if there’s nothing else they can think of when they hear the word. They can’t separate identity from physical activity, which is concerning.

It’s also the reason why so many people over 35 don’t know they’re queer until well into adulthood. Compulsory heterosexuality is more common than psoriasis, but most people will never allow themselves to question who they are. They accept the default setting.

I couldn’t and that’s where my dread started.

First-Name Basis

In my mid thirties, about a decade into homesteading solo

I think being on a first-name basis with dread was how I was able to make decisions other people wouldn’t. Quitting my full-time job and cashing out eight grand in a young 401k to give self-employment a shot felt insane to most people.

I wanted to homestead full time and write about it for a living. Family, friends, and strangers alike made sure to tell me this was risky at every opportunity.

But these were people unfamiliar with dread, people that avoided the feeling of inevitable doom at any cost. I knew dread like a birthmark. The fear of failing at farming was nothing compared to what I’ve felt since I was 8.

And since my dream was homesteading I had nothing to lose. This kind of small-scale farming made my little corner feel safe in a chaotic world. The farm fed me, drove me, kept me safe and isolated from past traumas and future rejection. I thought this idealistic life would fix me. A place where animals and plants would know me as family and caregiver without judgment. I’d start there.

Farming was what I needed. I had to change my life from black sheep to shepherd before I could muster up the courage to kiss a girl.

I had to come out as a farmer first, prove that my identity and future was my own, not what I was trained to become. It took a decade living alone on a mountain, distance from my family of origin, training hawks, riding horses, thousands of pounds of pork and six published books for me to finally have the confidence to hug the bear colliding into me.

Which was my first step in defeating dread. Accept it. Do not waste your life expecting the worse or begging for scraps of approval. Be who you are. Try something hard. Stand up for what you believe in. Tell people you love them. Face the diagnose, the divorce, the drama and open your arms to the change it demands.

Suffering isn’t the bear, darling. It’s you.

Floorboards

Unfortunately, dread isn’t something you can truly kill, not entirely. You can spend a lifetime doing the work to thwart the heart of your insecurity, but dread is like a demon in a horror movie. You can exorcise it from one vessel and it’ll possess the next empty one.

I stopped fearing my sexuality years ago. Now live with the terror I could lose this farm. And once I make a mortgage payment, my dread doesn’t disappear. It floats from foreclosure into other things.

For example: Years of not knowing anything about owning a home (or maintaining a stone roof) meant the occasional broken slates sliding off with melting snow. Over the years, the house only leaked water indoors once. I called a slate repairman and the leak stopped. I didn’t think about it much after that. Onto the next problem.

What I didn’t know was just because a leak occurred where I could see it, didn’t mean there weren’t other leaks where I couldn’t. The rest was hidden in the walls, damage happening to joists behind floorboards and ceilings, slowly warping and weakening the structures of my life.

Last year, I spent any money I could get ahold of after my mortgage was paid each month getting a roofer to repair every loose slate. As far as I know, the water is no longer getting in, at least through that roof. But the damage that already happened is still there, emotionally and physically unmooring me in my own home.

Some nights I can’t sleep in my own bed. To do that, I have to walk across my bedroom and feel the floorboards collect in the center, just so. I can feel my body sink a little, like walking drunk. A slur in my motion that never happened the first 13 years living here.

If I am already stressed about other more pressing problems like dental bills, car repairs, and making a late house payment… the last thing I want to think about before falling asleep is that even if I manage to not lose the house to the bank, I may have already lost it to the bear. It’s too late to avoid damage from the past and too expensive to fix in the present. Not if I want to have a roof, a car, and teeth at the same time.

So the floors become dread. Under every step. Like smoke in an overturned glass, it fills me.

And once a friend comes and helps me repair some joists in a room (so far we’ve repaired the bathroom and kitchen), or an expert explains that ‘Yes there is damage, but the house isn’t structurally compromised yet’, explaining there are houses younger than mine in town with roofs like smirks and they aren’t condemned—I exhale and move on from floorboard dread to another topic. As if I convinced myself not being in a constant state of impending horror means I’m not being responsible. That if I slow my heart rate I’ll lose my edge, my need to write, my grit to remain. I didn't realize until recently how good dread is at training us to hate ourselves, a narcissist with teeth.

For me it was identity and stability, but we all have our bears. We all have something so big and terrifying we spend our lives trying to hide from it, kill it, or make it ride a bicycle in the circus—anything to not be devoured.

So I have decided to not feel it anymore.

Stress Kills

I have to. It is going to kill me if I don’t. A woman can’t live like this, with barbwire around her chest at all times. It tears up the body. It poisons the mind. It overworks the heart. Stress is the root of so many ailments that end us. And if I don’t stop living like this, I’m going to die from the fear of what *could* happen while missing out on the life I put myself through this for in the first place.

I am giving up dread. Not awareness, not concern, not action; dread. I’m keeping the buzzing anxiety and the wisdom of fear. I am going to continue to write like I’m trying to save my life.

I am going to continue to do the work that saves me: grow this substack, pay off this farm, fix these floors, and eventually help other farmers worry less so they can exhale occasionally, too. This is what is going to happen as long as I am alive to try. This is what gives me purpose, making the broken whole.

Get Busy Dying

When I feel the panic start to set in, make my stomach drop and fingertips go numb I remind myself that I’m going to die and I don’t know how or when.

That’s right. That bear charging at me doesn’t see the velociraptor of death attack from the side. Death occasionally surprises the hell out of us, which is insane because it’s the one thing none of us can avoid. So right now, in the exact situation I am in—I remind myself that if I knew I wasn’t waking up tomorrow—would I be scared of the slightly-shifting floorboards in a 200-year-old wooden house? Would that be worthy of wasting the last day of my life over?

No. It wouldn’t even cross my mind.

For someone this is their last day. It could be mine. It could be yours. For 150,000 someone’s actually. That’s how many people wake up every single day on earth not realizing it’s their last. Worrying about late bills and broken hearts when they’ll never fall asleep in summer grass again.

I am not ignoring the news or my bank account. I am not pretending I am happy when I am terrified. I am not pushing it down, putting things off, or pretending my dread isn’t happening. None of that. What I am doing is not letting it kill me by refusing to feel it in my body. It’s not real. It’s time to stop haunting myself.

I make sure that every day I am doing something to address the problems I have, regardless of how small the action. Even at my lowest, there’s hope in sweeping the floor you whisper secret oaths to save. You don’t tend something you plan to abandon.

When I feel my emotions spark towards dread, I stop whatever I am doing, get fresh air, and breath. Slow deep breaths in my nose and out my mouth. When my heartbeat slows down enough that I can remember I still have it, I’m reminded the countdown isn’t over yet. I remember there is a version of me ten, twenty, forty years from now screaming at 42-year-old me to not waste my flash of time entertaining dread.

I remind myself the same me that’s feeling hopeless in the present is the same me that never allowed myself to fail in the past. That all my broken things only need money to be fixed, from teeth to the rafters. That it’s a privilege to be worried about a mortgage and a farm. That the same woman who feels she can’t make the month is the same woman that made the last 14 years and 11 months of mortgage payments. That I drive by businesses in my town everyday that close up shop after a year or two, giving up because it didn’t make money or wasn’t fun. As is either of those things ever stopped me.

The entire world will tell a single, childless, gay woman she’s a mistake for a hundred different reasons but all of that means nothing when pulling new potatoes from dark soil.

I am still here. I will savor it every day. I will continue to farm, write, and repair damage I can and can’t see. I will do it motivated by love, not dread.

Stop worrying and start dying. You have a life to live.