When You Don’t Know the Ending

It’s weird how much harder it is to not worry about something when you don’t know the ending. When you don’t know what’s coming and all you have is the hope that it will work out okay, it’s harder. But when you look back on it, and you see how it turned out, the little things you used to worry about seem so pointless. Because you know how the story is going to end.

Like, if I had known in high school, that in college I would meet my husband and we’d fall in love and live happily ever after, I would not have stressed out about not having a boyfriend at any given time. Because what was coming was better than any guy at my high school. (No offense, I’m sure some of you were lovely people.)

Or the year we found out my husband’s job was going away and we spent the whole year trying to figure out what we’d do for money once the job once gone. Literally, the day after his last day with his old company, we got a job offer for a new job. And if we had known, it would have made the whole year a lot less stressful. But we didn’t know what was coming. We didn’t know the ending.

It’s easy to look back on these things and see that it was always going to be fine. But when you’re going through them, it’s a lot harder, because you don’t really know how it’ll turn out.

I wonder if you ever get to a place where you don’t worry about the endings, even if you don’t know what the endings will be. And in a way, maybe you can’t know the endings. Maybe that would spoil the story.