Score One For Sitting With Anxiety

My neighbor has bamboo. While I worry about its invasive nature at times, I've grown to really enjoy that bamboo: the rustling of the leaves is quite lovely. So yeah, my neighbor has bamboo. And a wood fence. Despite its loveliness, sometimes when the bamboo meets the wood fence, a horrible horrible whining noise ensues. A "sets my teeth on edge" noise. It was only when I recently painted my house that I identified the source of this noise that's been going on for months. Knowing what it was somehow made it worse. "The bamboo. The bamboo!!!" There's a reasonably simple solution- well, turns out there are several. My neighbor regularly thins the bamboo. So all I needed to do was ask if she could thin the offending pieces. But once I decided to do that, I felt I HAD to ask her as soon as possible, despite having survived months of the noise. If I didn't ask right away, I might never get to. And she might move, and the new neighbors might not want to thin the bamboo. And I might have to live with the noise forever, and I might never sleep again due to the noise. Really, I thought all this, despite not having lost any sleep to speak of in the months the noise had occurred.

So of course my neighbor, who's always out in her yard, was nowhere to be found for more than 48 hours. I stewed and stressed during those hours. Actually, once in the middle of the 48 hours, I did see her on the porch. But by this point, I had realized that the waiting was really good for me. So I waited some more. My sense of urgency waned.

And then I learned that another solution involved me just pushing the offending bamboo behind other pieces, so they could no longer hit the fence. The bushy leaves at the top keep the stems anchored in the new spot. Ah, silence! So, yeah, having solved the problem, I can't tell what I would have done otherwise, but I really did experience that decrease in anxiety even before the fix, and I really really love it when that happens.