Worrying isn't loving

I learned, in actions and in words, that people who love, worry.

That caring about someone means being anxious about them. It means anticipating what might go wrong. It means showing the anxiety, so that everyone can see it's there.

And I learned the reverse too, which is the dangerous part: if I don't show worry, then I'm not worried. And if I'm not worried, I'm not loving.

It's a tangle. It took me years to start unpicking it.

Care and worry aren't the same thing

Care is paying attention to someone. Noticing, asking, being available.

Worry is something else. It's being anxious in advance about something that hasn't happened yet, and it often comes with a certain performance: it has to be visible that I'm worried, otherwise it doesn't count.

When someone worries about me in that way, I feel it physically. It's energy coming in my direction, and it isn't light energy. It bothers me.

But when nobody worries, something curious happens: I go straight to thinking they don't care about me. Because that's what I learned was supposed to happen.

And then I repeat the pattern. Mostly with the people closest to me, which is exactly where I learned it.

What worry is really saying

It took me a while to get here, and I'm still at the beginning of this conversation with myself.

Worrying about someone doesn't mean I love them more. It means I don't trust.

I don't trust that person, or I don't trust myself, or I don't trust life. Worry looks like care but underneath it's an attempt at control: if I anticipate every bad outcome, maybe I can prevent them.

I can't. Nobody ever has. All that happens is that I get exhausted and the other person carries the weight of my anxiety.

There's another way, and I'm learning it

I've had examples in front of me of people who do this differently. People who trust, who don't anticipate, who don't panic.

For a long time I read that as disinterest. As a lack of love.

I was wrong. Those people trust far more than I do, and that's what allows them to be present without being anxious.

Paying attention with curiosity, rather than with worry. Wanting to know, wanting to understand how something works, rather than wanting to control what might go wrong.

It's radically lighter. And, from what I can see, it's radically more loving.

The part I still can't do

Something I've realised along the way: I often don't tell people things, because I can already anticipate the worry coming my way.

It isn't that I don't want to share. It's that I feel all of it, and if I feel it, it's already in me.

So the question I'm now learning to answer is this: how do I feel something without letting it in?

I don't know yet. But I'm excited about it, because it's the kind of learning that changes an entire life.

What remains

Part of me still protests. It says that if I'm too relaxed it means I don't care enough.

But the other part already knows it doesn't work like that.

Loving isn't worrying. Loving is trusting.