I am a worrywart. It’s a common thing to be in today’s society, where we are given so many things to worry about naturally — the strength of the economy, our job security — that worrying becomes an integral part of our everyday lives.

But for a true worrywart like me, worry branches out into places in my life it should never, ever be. Some of my most irrational fears have occasionally become nightmarishly scary simply because I’ve had a little too much time on my hands to worry about them.

For instance, if I think about it long enough, I’m convinced someone is going to break into my apartment while I am in the shower and stab me (and no, I have never seen the movie “Psycho” — I think if I ever did, I would freak out).

Most of the time I just need someone to say to me, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” It truly does not matter in the grand scheme of things that I got a B instead of an A on a test, just as it doesn’t matter if I got my favorite shirt at the Salvation Army or Salvatore Ferragamo.

However, I have found that sometimes the small stuff really does need to be sweat — some things that may seem small at first grow bigger and more important upon closer inspection.

Do you remember English classes in middle school, when you were first learning “correct” grammar? Regardless of the fact that I can’t seem to apply most of the concepts I have learned accurately whenever I speak to anyone, I remember those lessons clearly. Back in those days, I didn’t question the rules of English pronouns. You use “I” to refer to yourself, and “he” or “she” to refer that person over there of the male or female sex. That was easy.

But I also didn’t flinch the day I learned that simply using “he” to refer to that person over there whose gender didn’t matter was the “proper” way to do things. These days I have a problem with this pronoun usage — using “he” to refer to a human being in general hugely marginalizes half the human race.

Surely a woman is not a “he.” A woman is a “she” — at least that’s what we learned in English grammar, so what’s going on here? That’s blatant gender disagreement! Our grammar instructors should have been in an uproar over this bastardization of the English language.

But no — this rule went unchallenged for many years, so, since the grammarians didn’t want to fight the good fight for our beloved language, feminists have fought it for them.

The fact is that when someone uses the pronoun “he” to refer to both sexes while speaking in the third person, people will consciously know they are referring to both sexes while subconsciously picturing only a male in their heads. I know when I read “he” I think “male,” and I would bet you anything that you do, too.

What does this do to women? For one, it leaves them out of the picture entirely. If people don’t understand — or in some cases don’t care to understand — that “he” implies “he and she,” to them it will only apply to a male figure.

Take, for instance, the Bible. Throughout the entire book (which was written by men, may I dare add), the human race in general was referred to as “man”, “he” and “him.” In the book of Romans, Chapter 14 alone has nearly 40 male-gendered pronoun and noun references. While Paul’s words must also apply to women since we are all a part of God’s creation, it surely doesn’t seem that way — his gender got in the way of his writing.

It’s only natural to think of every person in terms of yourself, so it was easy in the past for powerful men to label things in terms of their own gender in their writings. To them, everything really was addressed to “man.” But for women who have to read these texts, where is our relation to it? If “she” isn’t written in, where exactly is “her” place?

It is unfair to have to bring women into existence separately from men, as if they were an alien group, unfamiliar and strange — but those are the rules of language. It is very awkward to have to repeat “he and she” over and over in the context of things, but it’s the only fair way we have to make sure we are speaking for both sexes equally.

We need to begin an overhaul of the English language. We can start by creating a non-gender-specific way to refer to that person over there whose gender doesn’t make a difference — because that person is still a person and that’s all that counts.

To this day when I tell people about this theory, I hear some of them say, “That doesn’t matter, it’s insignificant.” But just replace “he” with “she” in the context of a male-gendered reading sometime and see what it does for your perception of significance — you’re likely to come up with a whole new meaning for your reading.