On Preparing For An Empty Glass
So, I have talked a lot here about catastrophizing and the fact that I find it a critical flavor of autistic scripting. Underpinning this is the idea that anticipatory anxiety is better than compensatory, because the latter actually can lead inappropriately and disastrously to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
It was on my mind this week because while it’s true that traditionally my birthday and New Year’s are fraught with existential despair, this time around the latter effectively passed without incident. While I did on the Eve have brief pangs of existential angst because the book I’ve been reading reached its chapters on quantum mechanics and cosmology, it was fleeting.
I’ve told my therapist more than once that while I brace for the impact of these two annual days marking two different moments of reckoning the end and the start of another year and all of its attendant orbital and psychological mileage, when those days come I let them come as they will.
Catastrophizing as a thing is a thing that’s generally frowned upon. It’s not what the culture we live in wants to hear. I’ve wondered sometimes if people are concerned that catastrophizing just becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. My own view is that it’s like anything else: taken to extremes, it can be dysregulatory, but its absence, for me, would be just as dysregulating.
Anyway, my point is this: the generally uneventful passage of New Year’s—Eve and Day both—disproves the idea of catastrophizing as destiny, and further is evidence that at least some of my self-regulatory processes in fact are operating as they should. The fact that I bear the load of anticipatory anxiety as a hedge against the more problematic compensatory kind isn’t leading me to have bad days just because I prepare for them.
I can’t speak for how it is for anyone else, but for me pretending, believing, or insisting that everything will be fine (or, if it isn’t, that I’ll manage)—in other words, to always be looking at the glass as half-full—is a non-starter and a recipe for disaster. So, let me catastrophize. We’ll all be better off.