Don’t fear the worst; imagine the best instead

There’s likely a perfectly rational reason things don’t go as planned. Stay calm

Few things set my heart pounding like the jangle of the phone at 3 a.m.

Our phone number resembles that of a neighbourhood pizzeria closely enough that we get the occasional call from someone wanting a pizza delivered. It’s not a big deal — except when the calls come, as they invariably do, in the middle of the night.

Few things set my heart pounding like the jangle of the telephone at 3 a.m. In an instant, I am wide awake — and terrified. Before picking up the phone. Who calls in the middle of the night with anything other than terrible news?

That’s my default: I don’t think “wrong number” or “someone calling for pizza — again.” I think something dreadful has happened. I assume the worst.

If I didn’t stop and order myself — out loud, sometimes — to think rationally, I would be plagued constantly by this catastrophic thinking. As it is, it plagues me much of the time.

Some years back, during a long weekend in Maine with a friend, I called home on Sunday morning — when there was no reason to believe my beloved would be anywhere but there. So when there was no answer, I panicked. I tried the house again. Then again. I was now officially frantic.

My friend, amused but obviously irritated by my behaviour, tried to calm me by walking me through entirely feasible explanations for the fact there was no reply: he was mowing the lawn. Out jogging. He didn’t feel like picking up the phone. (He does this on occasion.)

I envied her for her calm, for the logic of her thought process. She asked, “What are you thinking?” I was too embarrassed to tell her “grave car accident” or “fell in the shower and hit his head.”

And so it was hugely validating to hear poet Richard Blanco read an excerpt of a poem that was about the deep anxiety he experiences when his partner is late arriving home or doesn’t answer his cellphone. Blanco, who was U.S. President Barack Obama’s inaugural poet in January, was a guest last Monday of Terry Gross on Fresh Air, an interview show that airs on National Public Radio. Appropriately, it was President’s Day.

Blanco, 45, is the youngest of the five inaugural poets — the first was Robert Frost at JFK’s inauguration — as well as the first Latino and the first who is openly gay. Born in Spain to Cuban exiles, he arrived in the United States at the age of six weeks, grew up in Florida and now lives in Maine with his partner, Mark — the person in the title of the poem Killing Mark.

“Monday he cut off his leg chain sawing, bled to death slowly while I was shopping for a new lamp. Never heard my messages on his cellphone: ‘Where are you? Call me.’ I told him to be careful. He never listens.

“Tonight, 15 minutes late, I’m sure he has hit a moose on Route 26. But maybe he survived. Someone from the hospital will call me, give me his room number, I’ll bring his pyjamas, some magazines.

“5:25, still no phone call. Voice mail full. I turn on the news, wait for the report, flashes of moose blood, his car mangled, as I buzz around the bedroom, dusting the furniture, sorting the sock drawer.

“By 7:30 I am taking mental notes for his eulogy, suddenly adoring all I have hated: 10 years worth of nose hairs in the sink, of lost car keys, of chewing too loud and hogging the bedsheets.”

When Mark finally arrives, Blanco scowls at him: “‘Where the hell were you? Couldn’t you call?’ Translation: I die each time I kill you.”

Gross, too, could identify. “Who hasn’t had those horrible imaginings when the person they love is late?”

Blanco said a friend had observed that the world can be divided into two kinds of people: the ones who panic when you don’t call — and the ones who don’t realize that they’re the ones not calling.

But Mark understood that his partner had written a love poem, “and I think it helped him to understand sometimes why I do get so out-of-control neurotic. It’s just out of that sense that something is going to slip away in a minute,” he said.

If catastrophic thinking can be defined as ruminating about irrational worstcase scenarios, the first step in dealing with it, as clinical psychologist Ron Breazeale observed in a 2011 post on the Psychology Today blog, is to identify it for what it is. The second is to come up with best-case possibilities — just as my friend did that morning in Maine.

But if negative thoughts are persistent, he continued, that may relate to the core values that drive our emotional reactions and beliefs: I imagine the worst much of the time, for instance, because my mother was — and remains — someone quick to imagine the worst. My brother is the same way.

“Flexibility in being able to question and change these beliefs and values is often the key to managing catastrophic thinking,” Breazeale wrote.

Sensible advice. To follow it, of course, I’d have to be somebody else.