On What Makes Me Nervous

It’s not fear that shaped me, not really, not in the way some people mean it. I was never afraid of change, not even as a kid, though I didn’t chase it either. I’ve stayed where things mattered. By the time I’m done, I’ll have worked in four places over forty years, and that sounds about right. Change has never unnerved me, but restlessness has. I don’t like movement for its own sake. I like roots, even if they grow in unexpected soil.

And animals—I love animals. When I was five or six, big dogs terrified me, the kind with loud barks and sharp teeth. But somewhere along the way I stopped flinching. Maybe it was the way they look at you, not through you. Maybe it was learning to sit still long enough for trust to grow.

And money? I’ve never had a lot, but I’ve always had enough. That’s not a boast—it’s a way of living. I’ve chosen low pay for high meaning, and I’d do it again. My life hasn’t been rich in salary, but it’s been full in every way that counts.

But if you want to know what actually makes me nervous, I’ll tell you two things.

One’s old—been with me my whole life. I love people, truly. I listen well, and I care more than I say. But put me in a room with unfamiliar voices, and my skin tightens. My throat forgets its lines. I am quiet, always have been. I’d rather be the one making others comfortable than the one trying to prove I belong. Noise overwhelms me. Newness unsettles me. And though I’ve learned to carry it well, that kind of anxiety never fully leaves you—it just gets woven into the way you move through the world.

The second fear is newer. It came on slow, like a bruise you didn’t notice until it ached. It’s the silence around climate change. The shrug. The sleepwalking. I thought, naïvely maybe, that people would rise to it like they did with the ozone. See a problem. Name it. Fix it. But this time the danger isn’t out there—it’s in here. In the wanting. In the clinging. In the ache for comfort and more and ease. And I don’t have children, so this isn’t about protecting my own. It’s about the sorrow I feel for everything we’re willing to lose just to keep pretending it’s fine.

The trees, the creatures, the coral, the air. The quiet spaces that once felt eternal. And the fact that we can know the damage, predict it even, and still choose convenience?

So here’s to the friends I made after trembling through the door.
To the years spent in rooms where meaning mattered more than money.
To the people who still care—really care—even when it feels too late.

And here’s to the God who has hated our greed,
never blessed our power-hunger,
yet still refuses to give up on us.

Who judges us, yes—
but always with open hands.

Who, even now, invites us to cast our anxieties on him,
because he cares.

Not just for us—
but for the whole aching world.