Worry Well

We were taught that worry means love. That if you care, you must carry fear. That to love someone is to fear for them. That to love yourself is to fear the future and plan accordingly.

But this is a spell—an inherited distortion. Worry does not mean love. Worry is fear that does not know how to stay inside its own skin, so it leaps onto others and calls itself noble.

Worry is not care. It is control.

When we worry, we reach into the future in an attempt to prevent pain, to protect what we cling to from harm. But the energy we bring is mistrust, not presence. Fear, not devotion. Worry believes that safety comes from managing others and ourselves, rather than from resting in trust. It does not see people as sovereign beings, but as variables to control.

And often, our worry takes the shape of this subtle, corrosive message: I love you, but I need you to be different so I can feel better.

That sentence lies at the heart of worry. It is a conditional love letter written in the ink of anxiety. And when it is directed outward, it feels like pressure. It says, I care about you, but I do not trust you. Your choices make me uncomfortable. Please be someone else, so I can stop feeling afraid.

This is how worry becomes a mask for shame. It is an entry point into the Shame Game—the attempt to offload what we do not wish to feel onto someone else. Instead of sitting with the discomfort of our own fear, we place it on others and call it love. We do not say, I feel helpless, or I am afraid of losing you. We say, I'm worried about your future, or Please do not make that choice. We try to make someone else responsible for soothing our internal unease.

Worry becomes a subtle form of emotional manipulation. It asks others to change—not for their sake, but to relieve our own discomfort. And the person on the receiving end learns this: If I do not make them feel safe, I am failing them.

And when worry turns inward, it sounds the same: I care about myself, but I need to be different before I can rest.

We begin to treat ourselves as a project to be managed, rather than a being to be loved. We shame our own uncertainty. We try to fix our own unfolding. We confuse vigilance with virtue.

This is where shame hides—beneath the layers of self-monitoring and over-functioning. We believe our worth lies in our ability to control outcomes. We believe that relaxing into trust would be irresponsible. We begin to live in a constant state of internal pressure.

Worry, then, becomes a form of emotional colonization. It spills across boundaries, occupying the space where another's sovereignty belongs. And it does the same inside us, colonizing our presence with tension.

It says: I do not trust this moment. I do not trust this person. I do not trust myself.

This is why worry does not feel like love. Because at its core, worry is a vote of no confidence. It is the mind’s attempt to compensate for the heart’s unwillingness to surrender.

To worry well is not to worry more gently. It is to transform worry back into what it was always trying to be: care, trust, and presence—a lesson pointing you towards growth.

Instead of What if they fail? say: I wish to trust in their path.

Instead of What if I cannot handle this? say: I wish to trust myself to grow through this.

Instead of rehearsing the pain, offer your presence to what is here. Instead of trying to protect through panic, expand through love.

Because every worry contains a sacred yes buried beneath the fear. And when you worry well, you find that yes.

You hold it. You breathe with it. You trust it.

Then, you return to yourself.  And in that return, you remember what worry made you forget: that everyone is sovereign. That you are sovereign. That no one exists to manage your fear, and you do not exist to manage anyone else’s path. True love honors freedom, even when it comes wrapped in uncertainty. It trusts that others may choose differently than you would, and still be walking their perfect path. It allows the people you love to be fully themselves—even when their becoming breaks you open. That is the kind of love that ends the Shame Game. That is what it means to worry well.