Un-catastrophizing
Learning how to stop negative fortune-telling.
Since I was a kid, I’ve had an inclination to create narrative out of my daily life. I’m endlessly curious about people, even in passing interactions: who are they, where are they going, how are they feeling? Navigating the world through a storytelling lens was fun for me a lot of the time — until it wasn’t.
During my senior year of college, I was riddled by understandably high levels of uncertainty. I went to film school and had spent four years being constantly told that the next phase of my life would be very difficult as I tried to establish a creative career. My mental storytelling mechanism began catastrophizing — this was once described to me as “negative fortune-telling.” I trained my mind to project the lowest possible points of narrative structure onto my actual experiences — if characters face constant obstacles, dead ends, and soul-crushing defeat, shouldn’t I too? My brain attached to this version of storytelling: what’s the worst that could happen? Talk about a bummer way to live life.
When I was 23, I was in a romantic relationship that was barreling toward a breakup. Rather than try to fix our problems or end the relationship myself, I started prematurely listening to breakup songs on a loop. If I memorized Alanis’ lyrics before my own heart was broken, maybe it would make things easier. It didn’t. I started shutting down around my boyfriend, aware of becoming cold and avoidant but also feeling like that was the best course of action since the end was inevitable. After a disastrous trip together, I sat across my boyfriend and dissociated as he broke up with me, vaguely self-satisfied with being proven right — I knew this was going to happen! When the regret over my anxious/avoidant behavior set-in weeks later, negative fortune-telling correctly didn’t feel satisfying at all.
Despite learning the lesson that being prepared for hard feelings (i.e. shout-singing to “Jagged Little Pill” in traffic pre-breakup) didn’t soothe them, I spent the rest of my 20s believing that going down the “worst possible outcome” imagination rabbit hole was helpful because it protected me. Or at least, it gave me a false sense of control. Negative fortune-telling actually caused me more pain by making me live through a version of painful outcomes in my imagination first, then again if/when the difficult event occurred.
Every iteration of pain stings, even when you anticipate it. Living in feelings prematurely is a waste of both emotional and physical energy. (Plus, when you listen to “Jagged Little Pill” in anticipation of a breakup, it dampens its power when you most need Alanis.) My obsession with predicting hard outcomes also made me behave in several profoundly annoying ways:
I acted like I knew how things were going to go in relationships — did you know people hate when you predict their behavior?
I shut down emotionally .
I adopted a victim mentality when things didn’t go my way — woe was me!!!
I avoided conflict, determined not to navigate difficult situations, which led to even more conflict.
I started seeing my current therapist after the dissolution of a meaningful friendship. I saw the role I’d played in our downfall - and how anticipating its end was a self-fulfilling prophecy - and wanted to figure out how to avoid similar behaviors in the future.
My therapist changed my mindset with two simple words — and a lot of sessions. She encouraged me to start thinking, “We’ll see.”
In moments where I get caught up in negative fortune-telling, I started to interrupt myself with a casually thought, “We’ll see.”
“We’ll see” works for me because it allows for all sorts of possibilities — it doesn’t feel like an overly optimistic facade. (Though wondering “what’s the best that can happen?” is a helpful exercise when I feel scared.) “We’ll see” doesn’t live in the negative. “We’ll see” is an invitation to explore experiences with an openness that I used to avoid out of self-protection. (My therapist also has helped me focus on “collecting data” in life to make informed decisions, which my inner student loves.) Thinking “we’ll see” has led me to write and perform a one-woman show in New York and Los Angeles, date until I found someone I mutually connected with, and start writing in formats beyond screenwriting.
I thought this post going in an entirely different direction — I was going to write about being recently encouraged to question some of my writer brain impulses because despite best efforts, my storytelling brain still distracts from reality sometimes — but the great thing about Substack is it allows me to practice, “We’ll see” with my writing. I never know how an idea is going to present itself as I start a post — that unpredictability is what helped me fall in love with narrative in the first place. Maybe saying, “We’ll see” is the ultimate way to narrativize life — try it. Or don’t. We’ll see.