There’s something perplexing about love.

I thought I knew love when I told my parents and sister growing up that I loved them, and meant it from the bottom of my baby heart.

Then I thought I knew love when I met my future husband at the tenderly angsty age of 14.

It wasn’t until much later, though, that I was positive that I had finally met love when I gave birth to my own baby girl.

Love has so many faces and facets—and not all of them constantly reflect the light.

This last month, I’ve been in a dark internal space filled with worry and concern for my daughter’s health—but I didn’t consciously acknowledge that this was even happening until it was basically over; when my little girl was healed and perfectly fine again.

Worry eats at us in the strangest of ways.

As a former anorexic, I still have occasional body image issues, but now I’m nearly always aware that these damaging thoughts come from poor mental and emotional coping skills rather than actual discord with my physical self.

In other words, for years, I used my eating disorder to cope with personal issues that have nothing to do with my body or with food; my eating disorder merely functioned as a poorly working tool for this purpose of stress relief (ironically adding stress and making the pre-existing ones worse to boot)—until I taught myself, through much hard work and determination, new and better ways to deal with myself and with my life.

Regardless, it’s still ingrained in me to pick on myself physically when I undergo something internally that I don’t want to confront—like a problem relating to someone I love that I have no control over—and an eating disorder gives a false sense of control.

I’ve always been the sort of person who over-thinks nearly everything; I think it might be tattooed onto my DNA somewhere.

I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with this either. I know that it inspires my writing; this constant self-analysis and analysis of my world and its occupants.

Likewise, I know that my curiosity serves my intelligent self-education, my continual craving for learning, and my thoughtful digestion of as many materials in my subjects of choice as I can get a hold of. (One of the reasons that I adore studying yoga is that the research is never ending.)

Still, worry, fear and exaggeration of reality are not useful in life—or inside of us.

They strip away happiness and leave a shiny veneer of insecurity—and these are not things that I want to present to my daughter as she grows and learns about life herself.

My daughter is seemingly my opposite in many crucial ways.

For example, the way that I methodically and rationally hunger for order and controlled circumstances and outcomes is not implanted on her DNA—actually, she might be allergic to it.

She’s bold. She’s naturally confident. She tries everything without being shown first. She wants to figure it out for herself—and she has the belief in herself that she can. (Thank God.)

Apparently, I was the way that I am now even when I was her toddler age—and my husband was more like my daughter. Nature vs. nurture? I’m not sure, because if I didn’t believe strongly in nurture then I wouldn’t try so hard to be a good parent, but I’m telling you, there is something to this other nature thing.

At the same time, my neurotic self-assessment and natural state of worry is exhausting—and as a mother, I have no room for energy leakage.

Raising a healthy, happy girl means that I must be a healthy, happy woman.

I must acknowledge and accept myself—and I must find beneficial ways to deal with the situations that life hands me—because life hands us both good and bad.

Life isn’t fair. Sometimes perfect people hold perfectly horrible cards.

So what do we do? With all of this worry?

Well, I’m not planning on going back to being anorexic—especially while raising a female—but I’ll probably always have a propensity to be mentally driven.

For me, this means finding positive ways to express my mind and my nervous energy.

I write. I practice yoga. I read. Yet the one thing that’s helped me the most is the same little thing that’s caused me more anxiety than anything else I’ve ever experienced—my daughter.

Just like it’s true that life isn’t fair, it’s also true that the best things in life are free—and that they take work.

John Burroughs said,

“For anything worth having one must pay the price, and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice—no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.” 

My work right now is learning when to let go—when to let my little girl have her own life and her own struggles, and to know when she needs me to step in and monitor, and when she needs me to let her fall and figure out how to get back up on her own. Somehow, I have a strong feeling that this will result in a lifetime of effort for me.

Here’s another thing that I’ve learned through my yoga studies: when we worry, we take power away from others.

We’re by default saying that our way is the better way; that we know better; and that our minds are stronger and smarter than theirs—not true, of course, and we don’t even mean it this way, I’m absolutely well aware. However, it’s true—this is how we worriers make other people feel.

I have to grab my daughter’s hand when she needs safely led across the street, but the pure delight of her being the first to reach up and grab mine is gloriously indescribable.

And that’s just the thing—by backing off, we have the ability to be caught by surprise that their way was, in fact, the best one all along.

When I get in touch with my worry I create the power to let it go (because ignoring issues only makes them temporarily invisible, you know).

I get in touch with my worry, and then this means that sometimes I have to swallow it, or learn to live with it.

My daughter does need me—she’s only two-and-a-half—but even in her tiny stage, she needs to maneuver a few bumps in the road herself—so that she learns proper coping skills for her own life’s journey.

I know that I don’t want to watch her go through an eating disorder like my parents did, and maybe I still will—or maybe, just maybe, I’ll find the strength to stop looking at her and her life through the scope and experience of my own.