The Background Hum
Concern and contentment sharing the same ordinary days
Click the play button above if you prefer to listen to me read this piece.
Lately, I’ve noticed a low hum beneath otherwise normal days. Not quite panic or crisis, but a steady undercurrent of worry that doesn’t interrupt life so much as accompany it. Without announcement, it hovers while I walk the dog, sip my coffee, answer emails, fold laundry, scroll, laugh, read, get ready for bed. I’ve given this hum a name: background worry. Sure, sure I’ve had plenty o’ bouts with your garden variety anxiety, but in many ways, this hum is different. It doesn’t demand immediate action, trigger alarms, or fall clumsily toward deadlines. It’s a shadow character in the margins, quietly taxing attention, asking to be managed without fully resolving.
Background worry is exhausting precisely because it is softly ubiquitous. You can function with it, even have good days with it! But much like having too many tabs open, each background worry uses just enough energy-slash-brain-power to slow the whole (nervous) system down. For the first 35 years of my life, I treated worry as preparation. Childhood “taught” me that if I planned carefully enough, anticipated every possible problem, and stayed one step ahead of disaster, I could arrive at something close to perfection. And perfection, I believed, was what made you worthy of love (we’ve unpacked this a little in previous posts). Cancer had other ideas.
Getting it and subsequently fighting it showed me with absolute clarity that no amount of preparation - in the form of worry or planning - actually prevents the hard things from happening. What did come of it was a different instinct entirely: optimism. Not the glistening-veneer, toxic-positivity kind rooted in denial. The stubborn kind that takes the same impulse to prepare and redirects it toward possibility instead of catastrophe. These days my optimism avoids blind faith and rests instead on a staid confidence in my own toolbox. My optimism reminds me that even when the path isn’t clear, I have everything within my means to handle the situation. And even with this toolbox beautifully shined and at-the-ready, the hum remains. The difference lately is my refusal to let background worry run the whole system. Let’s look at some of the contributing factors:
