Last month I called my brother for an emergency chat. Sometimes life is overwhelming, and he is the only person in the world patient enough to let me chew his ear off for hours on end without judgment or attempting to give me clichéd unsolicited advice. “I am just fed up with worrying about absolutely everything!” I moaned at him as we sat down in a pub in Holborn.
I’ve written about in the past, but as a highly sensitive empath, I find it hard not to worry about the consequences of my actions, and struggle not to take on other people’s problems. This obsession with risk often leads me to decision paralysis, and I spend far, far too much time thinking about things that have either already happened in the past that I cannot control, or totally imaginary scenarios in the future which are yet to happen, and quite possibly never even will. Siblings are often opposites – and this couldn’t be truer of my brother and I.
He was given the cup half empty, and I was given the cup half full. He is one of those people who seems to glide through life. He expects little from others, doesn’t get too attached to outcomes, rarely frets about the worst case scenario and believes – not in a nihilistic but care-free way – that there is little point to life, and that the best way to live is really just to enjoy it.
It occurred to me that if I wanted to stop worrying, I needed to make a conscious effort to change the way I think. To change my outlook on experience. I’d heard a.
