Laying Down My Anxiety

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?

—Matthew 6:25

There is one tiny thing I don’t like about summer: I’m not wild about swimsuits. It’s been years since I’ve had a summer where I wasn’t pregnant or nursing or post-baby-puffy. Even before that, I was never a swimwear model candidate. On my best days, I can look decent in jeans, but swimsuits don’t do me any favors, and as luck would have it, I spend a good portion of the summer up at the lake, wearing a swimsuit from morning till night. I love being at the lake, of course, but at the beginning of every summer, I have to do a little internal business, organizing my thoughts and feelings and phobias, getting myself ready to let everyone I know see me in a piece of clothing that could fit into a sandwich bag.

But as my friend Sara always reminds me, no one’s actually thinking about me as often as I think they are. Probably my friends are not actually counting the days till summer to see if I’ve finally turned into a supermodel. Probably they’re thinking about their own lives or current events or any number of things that have nothing to do with how I look.