This method acting, well, I call that living

Any dedicated and proficient stalker of mine would know that when I was little, I used to be a huge worrywort. I had to have a gross hospital test done to make sure that, at the age of, like, 11, I didn't have an ulcer. It was around then that my mom stepped up to the front lines to teach me how to not become hopelessly anal retentive before I passed the age that the word "anal" still made me giggle. I credit to her one of my current life philosophies, which goes along the lines of, "it's probably not that big of a deal."

A byproduct of that was also my general 'tude about assumptions. In the world of the Chronic Worrier, you assume that any minor detail happening around you has a worrisome implication, probably relating to something that you did wrong. In the world of Trying Not To Be A Chronic Worrier, you kind of stop assuming altogether. If everyone gets invited to go out to dinner except me, I consider the possibility that they simply overlooked me before assuming they deliberately excluded me. If someone is late, I figure it's because they ran into traffic instead of assuming that they're dead on the side of the road. For some reason I still think every honk in traffic is directed at me, but overall, it seems to me that this unassuming way of thinking is just more reasonable, considering that most people's intentions aren't particularly nefarious.

I've operated on this mindset for so long that I frequently forget that other people don't think this way. When living in a world composed entirely out of molehills, hearing someone try to claim that anything is a mountain, outside of AIDS and clinical depression, tends to strike me as blowing things out of proportion. I guess it's a bit of an unfair standard to expect that everyone will also fend off their instinctual self-paranoia, a practice that became habitual to me only after consciously inflicting it on myself for years, but I assume people will forgive me.