Worry, worry, worry.

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Recently I noticed a tweet from a journalist asking people to tell her what they worried about for a piece she was writing. Although I didn't respond personally, I watched as many of our mutual followers came back with a variety of things that kept them up at night. And although I kept schtum, it did get me to thinking about what I worry about. And it did make me realise that while many of the things I worry about now are the same things I worried about 5 years ago, I do worry about a whole heap of other stuff that didn't even come into the equation before I grew up. Back when I was child-free, out most nights and going into work on a Friday with a hangover was obligatory, the following words meant nothing to me:

Bullying.

Road traffic.

Sex offenders.

The sensible part of me, the part that is logical, knows that there is no point in over-thinking these things and that as Ava grows older I just have to let her go out into the big bad world. I have to let teachers, guide leaders and child-minders do their job without having a frantic mummy on the phone every 40 minutes making sure she hasn't choked on an organic carrot stick. But the irrational part of me, the part that starts to hyperventilate if she naps any longer than an hour and a half, can't erase these worries. To the point that I once even toyed with the idea of home-schooling her.

Not an option by the way, during a particularly stressful game of Trivial Pursuits I once declared that the Channel Tunnel ran to America.

I worry about my weight. I shouldn't but I'm female and a huge foodie so they kind of go hand in hand.  I am a product of societies insistence that being skinny makes you happy and/or beautiful. Realistically, I will never be dangerously underweight. Or even underweight at all. Anyone who follows me on Twitter will know how much I love my grub. But I still wish I didn't constantly want to be a few pounds lighter.

I worry about money. I've never been rich, I've never been particularly poor. I've done the student thing. I've done the backpacking thing. I appreciate money, understand it's value and I have always worked hard for it. But when you are suddenly responsible for putting food in someone else's mouth and when buying nappies comes before buying lippy, money becomes a much more scary concept. A couple of jaunts to LA and a bit of a Mac make-up addiction racked up a bit of debt in my younger years and although that is sorted now and I am way too neurotic to ever have a credit score that was less than perfect, money still runs through my fingers and always has.

I worry about relationships too much. I'm actually a relatively laid back girlfriend but I definitely overthink things at the beginning and the prospect of exploring relationships now I have a kid to think about is a little bit terrifying to me. But I think that's normal and it's something I am working on.

I racked my brains before I wrote this post, trying to come up with all the different things I worry about. I was pleasantly surprised that I only came up with three. And none of them held any real weight at all. Not only do I think that these are common complaints but there are also people in this world with a lot bigger things to worry about. What really struck me writing this is just how much less I worry about things than I did in my early twenties. 

When I had absolutely nothing to worry about....

I'm an over-analyser and an over-thinker for sure. But I don't wring my hands and pace the floors worrying about stuff. I don't crawl the walls at night wracked with insomnia either. What I have acquired over the last year is a completely different attitude to life. A sort of 'what will be will be' way of looking at things that some might call hippie or even lazy. If I feel out of sorts or if I feel unhappy then I take a step away from a situation because I truly believe in fate anyway. I believe that everything happens for a reason. 

Most of all though, I truly believe 'that everything is going to be amazing'.

And you can't be a cynic with an attitude like that.

Can you?