Jordan Rosenfeld

It’s hard to read the news these days. As I write this, wildfire rages uncontained in my old hometown of Santa Rosa, California, and other parts of Sonoma and Napa counties, taking out friends’ homes and familiar haunts. We’re barely two weeks out from the shooting massacre in Las Vegas, and hurricanes have devastated Puerto Rico, Florida, and Texas. Revelations about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s decades of alleged sexual assault and sexual harassment have opened the floodgates for women across industries to share devastating stories about their abusers. My heart can barely take it.

As an only child who grew up before the rise of the Internet, boredom was my constant companion. Summers were an endless stretch of riding my bike around town, reading, and staring up into the sky, imagining stories that I later wrote into my tattered journals.

There’s no way around it: I am chronic worrier. I worry about running late, but also about showing up to a party too early. About whether my moles have turned cancerous and whether my son is eating enough vegetables. Worries are the first things to pop into my mind when I wake. They creep into my evening meditations, and they unfurl onto the pages of my journal when I write.

Americans have a long history of loving workaholics. We revere entrepreneurs who put in 80-hour weeks and artists who toil into the wee hours. Indeed, for much of my life, I interpreted being overworked as a badge of honor. Now, in my 40s, I’m trying to unlearn that lesson.

We all want to better understand who we are. Some people turn to religion for answers; others go to therapy. And in the digital age, many of us simply fire up our smartphones and take a personality quiz or 12.

Nearly nine years ago, I received a call from my stepmother summoning me to my grandmother’s house. At 92 years old, my Oma had lost most of her sight and hearing, and with it the joy she took in reading and listening to music. She spent most of her time in a wheelchair because small strokes had left her prone to falling, and she was never comfortable in bed. Now she had told her caregiver that she was “ready to die,” and our family believed she meant it.

When I met the man who would become my husband nearly 20 years ago, we were a study in contrasts. I was drawn to Erik’s studious silence. He liked to spend his free time reading, hiking, and meditating. Meanwhile, I was boisterous and prone to hyperbole. My little day planner was so crowded with events that you could barely see the white.

I was raised with a skewed sense of the way money worked. My father seemed to always have it in abundance–largely through illicit means that I wasn’t supposed to talk about. Meanwhile, my mother struggled to get by on food stamps and a job selling makeup at a Macy’s Clinique counter. When I left for college, my brand-new checking account filled by my grandparents, I had no idea how to make my own money or keep track of it–let alone use it to plan for the future.

Growing up, I never dreamed about becoming a mother. Instead my fantasies revolved around bylines and books. As I got older, I dedicated much of my energy to getting my writing career off the ground—waking up at 5 am to write fiction before turning to my paying work, and sending submissions to literary journals. My husband and I talked about having a child one day, but in the meantime I concentrated on my career. I didn’t yearn for a baby. I yearned for a book deal, an artist’s retreat, a plum writing gig.

When it comes to the benefits of drinking alcohol, our Facebook friends are glad to be the bearers of good tidings. Scroll through your news feed on any given week, and you’re likely to be greeted by all kinds of happy news. A glass of wine has the same benefits as an hour at the gym. Drinking three glasses of champagne a week could help prevent Alzheimer’s. If you do happen to binge-drink, no need to worry—you can just drink more coffee to offset the toxic effects on your liver.

In June of last year, I stopped to visit my 65-year-old mother and her 58-year-old husband in the sun-bleached hills of Sonoma County, where I was giving a reading from my new book. My stepfather, an exuberant talker who usually defaults to a cheerful facade, greeted me with trembling hands and a slurring, teary ramble about the job from which he’d been unceremoniously laid off six months prior. If I’d only just met him, I’d have thought I was looking at the early phases of dementia or maybe Parkinson’s. Instead, I suspected that his symptoms were the result of pills–most likely prescribed by a doctor who had minimized or misunderstood the implications of his long history of addiction. I curled into denial and went back to my own life, two hours away.

I grew up in Marin County, California—a hotbed of holistic health, where “healers” of all stripes (legitimate or not) thrived. My own father was an acupuncturist who treated most of my ailments with tiny silver needles or stinky Chinese herbs. I went to the doctor only for routine physicals and shots required for school. Thus, I grew up believing that my body had the power to heal itself.

This post originally appeared at Role Reboot.