My Worries Have Worries

by Laura Villareal

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Last updated August 24, 2025

About this Poem

Does Laura Villareal have hope for change? It’s hard to tell from the magical realism of ‘My Worries Have Worries’; magical because she’s turned her worries into independent, wicked, mischievous, compelling creatures; real because we all know how truly difficult it is to break out of a cycle.
The speaker is alone: ‘I built little matchstick houses’ and ‘my past & future entwined into disaster’; ‘I worry about their health’ and ‘I mother them’. ‘I can hear them’, she says, as they destroy the protection she’s established for them: ‘all I’ve built burned down’. Even then, even after the worries have torn down what she has erected, there is no turning to other people; instead the speaker remains tied to this most self-giving, self-destructive concern: ‘I’ll reconstruct their home’.
The magic is the characterisation. The real is the isolation. Where are the friends? Where are the phone calls? Where are the moments when life – work, the news, demands of study, deadlines – take a person outside of their self-contained whirlwind? The tableau of isolation is tragic and also utterly believable. It took me many reads before I began to wonder about the actual human company, the actual lacking human company in this poem. I do not believe this speaker has zero friends, or bad ones, but I do believe they feel alone. Worry can send us into ourselves: these couplets and tercets are predicated upon a drama that traps the attention of a person in an audience of one.
Isolation isolates, even though it’s close to a universal experience. And we give much of our intimate attention to that which is parasitic: drawing energy from our energy, depleting our capacity to look toward what might actually nurture.
It’s interesting that the materials for these worry-homes of Laura Villareal’s are both flimsy and conflagratory: matchsticks. Her little worry-beings are the arsonists of her construction, setting fire to the containers she provides for them. Yet the construction of their buildings with matches implies that she, too, wishes to set something alight. For years, I’ve taken delight in the scent and sound of matchsticks going up in flames. The flare. The suddenness. What is to stop her burning that which burns her? Herself, it seems.
I mother them
the way I do anyone I love
they ask if I love myself
I tug the sleeves of my sweater
The worries are not the real worry; the real concern is the relationship with them. They are loved. Without them, what would happen? When they are unhoused, ‘I’ll reconstruct their home’. She justifies this pathology by projecting dependence onto little beings that clearly hate her: ‘they’ll wait for me’. She then universalises: ‘anyone would do the same’. Here, even the ‘I’ is absent, as if the speaker knows how passive speech is often a place to hide a bomb.
I read ‘My Worries Have Worries’ as the attempt to employ art for the purposes of self-reflection; to externalise a drama in the hope that the drama can find its completion. As we have it, the end – defeated, appealing to the ‘anyone’ of everyone – is not an end. There’s insight in this unresolved final stanza. We are left with ache: I am trying to change, and I don’t know how. I admire the poem’s use of art, humour, exaggeration, drama and hyperbole.
Hidden in the theatre of the relationship between the worrier, her worries and her worries’ worry-babies, other information is planted: wit, first of all, yes. But this is followed by horticultural information – ‘garden’, ‘tomatoes, cilantro, & carrots’; the knowledge that henbit is a plant useful for holding soil together during winter storms; thatched roofs; watered gardens. The speaker is someone attuned to nurture: and, while capable of considering the nourishment of others, is neglecting to nurture herself. This is not a secret. This is known: hence the drama, hence the delight, hence the self-confrontation. The land is calling her to feed on what it provides.
The repeated ‘I’ of the poem seeks to distance itself from the things that demean and undermine the sense of self. It’s not easy, and ‘My Worries Have Worries’ unfolds, not as a culmination of, but during, the drama of self-improvement. The poem is intelligent about time, namely because it describes an unsuccessful attempt that doesn’t result in giving up. There will be other, more necessary dramas: between housemates, friends, spouses, family members. These relational tensions have the possibility of enlivening, sharpening, hurting, healing and thrilling their participants. These interpersonal exchanges await, and will benefit from the awareness, emerging here, that the whirlpool of self-destruction thrives on the attention it demands.
Villareal stages her work as an externalised example of drama therapy: personifying elements of the self into distinct entities, thereby escalating the conflict in order to consider what change might be possible. It is perfectly clear that the worries cannot be trusted: they are progenitive, producing babies upon babies, destroying then renewing their own burnt populations. They’ll eat anything: what grows, the ‘henbit of me’, as well as time ‘my past & future’. They thrive on attention, and while they are insightful – ‘they ask if I love myself’ – they have no interest in their mothering other’s self-improvement: they need places to live, places to burn, new places to live, fires to dance around, rituals to enact, sacrifices of time to consume, worried gods to wait for. Reading ‘My Worries Have Worries’ my deep pity and empathy are with the speaker. However, my respect is with the writer: a person clear about what needs to burn. The writer is aflame, not with rage, but with art: art that will heat, not harm.