What’s the opposite of catastrophizing?

I can spiral up, as well as down

Another Sunday, another ‘the world is too bleak for me to write about what I actually planned to write about’ excuse. While I’ve spent my recent weeks with the curtains drawn on any possibility of joy shining through, I decided to embark on the ever-exhilerating adventure of looking at how my own actions and natural way of being have contributed to righteously fucking myself up.

So last year I wrote a piece about one of my favourite pastimes - catastrophizing. I discussed my superpowers of mass destruction of my mind and happiness via my ability to laser focus in on a spec of reality and paint a torrid picture of an alternative reality resembling the Upside Down (Watch Stranger Things). 

However, I failed to mention that I am also incredibly capable of spiralling upwards. 

I can dream up a Utopian world drenched in torrential jubilation from a mere flicker of an eyelid, an utterance of a phoneme, how the silk of a scrunchie brushes against my skin…basically the most banal of occurrences can make me romanticise about a life I haven’t lived. Halsey really spoke to me when she said, “ I know I've got a tendency to exaggerate what I'm seein.” So imagine the eruption of idealism that is triggered when I’m actually working towards something I desperately want. 

Yeah, it's a bit mad. 

I plan for the potential if’s of said reality coming to fruition. “If X happens then I’ll need Y, and I’ll need to do Z instead of the A I’m currently doing. Oh and I’ll need to move B to make space for W.” 

I build an entire dreamland in my head around the best case scenario while planning the logistics in the real world. Fantasising about how your dreams can break through the walls of your imagined Utopia and merge into your actuality is actually a lot of fun. It breathes the excitement of new possibilities into an existence that needs a refurb. The idea of the continued evolution of your life is arousing, especially after a period of seemingly endless stagnation. 

But, if I fail to achieve the goal that I had firmly set my starry eyes on, it's not simply the end of that dream but it's the collapse of the entire world I built around it. It’s letting go of a version of me that I was happy to befriend, build a relationship with and allow to be a permanent fixture in my life. So after a series of failures, it’s like I’m in a perpetual cycle of highs and comedowns. All down to my own doing. All down to dreaming so big that it might be perceived as delusional. Just because something is possible, doesn’t mean it's probable. Or even if it is probable, a realist would most likely say ‘don’t get your hopes up’ or ‘do your bit and forget about it until you get an answer’. 

But I’m just not like that.

If I can’t indulge in euphoric fantasies around potential realities then what’s the point of doing anything? Admittedly, that sounds pretty bleak but I just feel there is a literal world of possibilities out there that are waiting to be discovered and my seemingly delusions of grandeur are a way for me to explore those realms until I reach said place. 

I’m not trying to yuck anyone’s yum around the idea of contentment and I can see the danger in my pursuit of the extremes. Especially as a recovering alcoholic with a history of depression. I’m continuously catapulting myself to nauseating heights and letting myself plummet to breathless lows but I don’t really know how I can be any other way without staying true to myself. I’ve said it many times before, I am a person of extremes and I’m still figuring out a way to do that safely. But I think the nature of being the way I am means I’m going to push to see how far I can go until I break. And I will most likely write about that broken experience and you might say, “Bruh, you literally brought this on yourself.” So I might be infuriating, self-indulgent and just damn annoying but that’s a-ok with me because I accept myself as the fallible human being I am. I like the word unapologetic.

And what about that saying, "Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."

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