Doom. Doom. Doom.

Full disclosure: I am a major worrier from childhood through the now.

I would literally lie in bed at night worrying about my future and the horrors of the world at least as early as age 9 or 10. Pretty sure I started my time-honored tradition of fretting before then. I can remember being horrified by visits to nursing homes when I was a child and seeing how the elderly lived in awful squalid conditions, often in constant pain. I never wanted to grow old - not that old, anyway. By age 10 I was quite aware I had no fear of death. My fear was of old age and being incapacitated. True horror lied in the fear of captivity though age and disability. When I was 10, I also became aware that I did not have a good relationship with my family. I saw bits on TV about genetic disorders like Huntington's Disease, which does not show up until patients are in their 30's and worried about the deep dark murky gene pool of mystery I came from. By age 12, I realized I was always going to have a below-average home life and I would then lie in bed and fret that my family relationships had already doomed me to be screwed up for life and there was nothing I could effectively do about it. I read too many stories about troubled children and teenagers who always came to a very bad end. By age 15, I worried I was born, even conceived, doomed. Religion represented a form of thought control more draconian than the all-knowing Big Brother of 1984. True creativity and individualism was not approved by God. Nor was dressing in a way your family did not like or hanging out with the unattractive.

Yeah, I've always been the beautifully morose creature I am today.