Anxiety

I have anxiety.  I inherited it from my Grannie Kinsey who passed it on to her daughter (not my mom, my aunt) who passed it on to her daughter.  It also somehow made it in to my genetics (which I'm totally going to complain about to God if I ever make it to heaven because my genetics consists mainly of the bad parts of my dad mixed with the bad parts of my mom PLUS red hair, poor vision discovered during the phase of big, ugly plastic glasses frames, and bad teeth...thank goodness for contacts and braces!  I have made peace with my hair color even though it is the result of a genetic mutation...)

Where was I?  Oh...anxiety!

Last night, Emily came in to me and said "Mom...what color is this dress?" and showed me a picture on her phone.  I looked at it and said "oh my goodness, how can you even see it?!  You'll have to turn up the brightness on your phone!"  Yes...I have reached the stage of far-sightedness along with my near-sightedness.  In other words...I'm old!!  So, she turned up the brightness and I looked at it again and said "It's blue and black" and handed the phone back to her.

She got all theatrically excited and said "oh my gosh!!  I see a white and gold dress!!"  She was totally serious and my first thought was "Oh my gosh!!  She must have a brain tumor!! OR something is terribly wrong with her vision...probably caused by a brain tumor!!"

Now...to be fair to myself.  My sister had brain tumors that eventually caused her to have a seizure and die so I think I should be allowed to have a fear of brain tumors.

I didn't know that this was a thing floating around the internet until later.  I didn't know that half of the people that looked at it saw a white and gold dress and half saw a blue and black dress.  I just knew that the picture she was showing me was clearly a black and blue dress but she was seeing a white and gold dress so SHE MUST HAVE A BRAIN TUMOR!!!!!

So...being the mature, reasonable person that I am, I said "Emily...get out of here, you are freaking me out!!"  Then I started pacing.  Then I went and played the piano (it's what I do when I'm stressed).  Then I sat down with my computer and "Googled" "Do brain tumors cause you to see different colors"?  That's when I saw (along with the big "llamas on the loose" story that I had completely missed out on) the big "What Color Is This Dress?" story that was hitting everyone's news feed on Facebook.

Emily was still theatrically excitedly talking about it to Jared (who had seen a blue and black dress) as they cleaned up the dinner dishes.  He started to explain to her in a very scientific way (that I was only half listening to) why her eyes saw it differently than other people and Gary looked at me and said "how does he know these things?!" to which I replied "I don't know...he's a boy!  Boys just have all sorts of useless information in their head.  You have it.  Your dad had it.  It's the useless information gene..."

He's so lucky!!  The useless information gene does not cause the blood pressure to rise to stroke level the way the anxiety gene does.

I've discovered my superpower!!