Someone I love got an inconclusive result for a very scary sickness and needs to undergo a second screening, and amidst many other thoughts, I realized that I'm more superstitious than I assume I am. I can't even bring myself to type out the specifics – who got the result? What is the potential sickness? It's as if putting these things into words makes them real, and I'm so desperate for them not to be. Even the idea of it – vague, intangible, hypothetical – is so scary I want to throw up.

I can probably trace the roots of my anxiety to superstitions like this. I always think that worrying about something will somehow prevent the thing from happening. As a kid I would envision my loved ones in tragic scenarios and make myself cry from stress and fear, but none of those things have become reality, and it's fed the belief that my paranoia saves all. A couple years back, something I never worried about in my life actually ended up happening, fueling this belief even further.

(Did some force take you because I didn't pray?)

The person in question is hopeful about the results, and has reminded me not to worry about it while there are no conclusive results: If it's fine, then the worry was for nothing, but if it's not, then there was no use in starting early besides making myself miserable. But my (admittedly harmful) line of thinking says otherwise—it makes me believe that if I simply worry hard enough, I can make the problem go away. If I don't say it, it's not real. So here I am, putting all my energy into worrying quietly, intensely.

The illusion of control is very, very attractive in scary situations. The idea that I can prevent bad things from happening to the people I love by wanting it hard enough is objectively flawed, but I'll die before I stop trying.