How do you manage your fears about the future?
I fear about my future a lot. Sometimes I manage those fears, sometimes I don’t.
In many ways it’s also not just about worry about the future but worrying about the past. It’s living a life that Craig Jenkins describes as, “being haunted by possibilities… fretful that some burnt bridge or wrong turn has quietly and imperceptibly wrecked everything.”
The best thing we can try to do for ourselves at this moment, whether or our own, or with a therapist, is to try to understand the causes of our worries.
Human beings tend find a perverse comfort in searching for patterns, often in places where there isn’t rationally supposed to be one. It’s why we see depictions of animals when we look at the clouds, but it’s also why we feel that events in our life always have a larger meaning and are doomed to be cyclical. I faced a lot of heartbreak and cruelty in my family life growing up, some of those events have not only affected my current behavior towards myself or people I care about, but they have also created this constant persistent suspicion that I am doomed to have bad things happen to me or that I’m going to repeat my self-destructive behaviors to the point where I have ruined the only good things in my life.
One of the largest manifestations of my fear of the future that I’ve noticed is that I constantly procrastinate on my responsibilities. Small menial tasks such picking up the phone to call someone or responding to an e-mail give me anxiety. Long term goals such as turning my health around are always projects that I want to start tomorrow and not now. Perhaps in a weird way to cope with that resulting feeling of emptiness that comes from knowing I’m sabotaging myself, I daydream. I daydream a lot. Throughout the day in my head, entire scenes that take place in the near future are acted out and all of them feature a projected and perfect version of myself, where my insecurities are gone. In those daytime fantasies, I’m in perfect shape, I’m in love with someone who loves me back, I have forgiven my mother, and I don’t have to worry about money. Meanwhile, despite having these lucid visions, I act helpless, putting off doing what I need to do in my life to bring me closer to realizing those dreams.
I know I’m not alone and thankfully, there’s a lot of theories that try to really explain this phenomenon. There’s evidence that we see our future selves not as ourselves, but as a distinctly separate people—and we think of them essentially as complete strangers. Procrastination falls in line with this. When we put something off, we are making an explicit decision for our future selves without their consent, sabotaging them in the process and not fully realizing they are us. We’re not connected with our future selves enough to have their best interests.
These are some of the driving urges behind the persistent feeling of brokenness in my life and for years I have fought them, just as I had tried to fight every dark and self-destructive thought that I have ever entertained. Don’t fight them. They are a part of you and it’s okay to be afraid and vulnerable. Learn to work with your brain, rather than against it. For example, don’t try to see your future self as you, it’ll be a waste of time. Rather, learn to love your future self as a separate entity, accept that this person lives in your head. Learn to love that person to the point that you want to take care of this person and to make decisions that lift that person up.
In fact, learn to disassociate your past self as well and to learn love it equally. It was a younger version of yourself, and making mistakes is a part of being young. Tragedies that were out of your control aren’t doom to happen again. My past self needed more love in his life. I’m no longer that person, or at least I don’t have to be.
A lot of my fears are also rooted in the idea that I want the best life possible, that out of all the parallel universes in which versions of myself exist, that I live in the absolute best one. Subconsciously we often tend to treat our lives as if they are a novel in progress. That there is a narrative arc. There isn’t a narrative arc. There’s a beginning, but it isn’t always followed by rising tension, a singular climax or even a resolution in the end. Some people’s lives sure seem like that, but the reason we’re drawn to their stories is because they appear to be written like one. For the vast majority of people it just doesn’t work like that. Not everything resolves itself and we don’t always end up living happily ever after. At first this made me even more anxious, but I realize now that I have the chance to create multiple beginnings. That whole fear that something bad will happen to you sooner or later? That’s a narrative! There is no narrative in your life unless you force yourself to have one.
Learn to also notice your feelings when you’re not worried as well. When I remember the times where I felt comfortable of my future, I realized I wasn’t happier. A few months ago I was restless, I felt like I had plateaued and got too comfortable and it was depressing in a very different way. For a while, I felt I was going to keep doing the same thing for the next few years and life was on autopilot. I was letting others make decisions for me. It took an unexpected job change and a subsequent relocation to realize that I’m not done yet, and there are more things that I want to do.
Ultimately, we must accept that despite our best efforts, there will be times of great importance to us that are left to be determined by the decisions of others. Whether it’s an admissions committee, a judge, a more powerful colleague, a partner, or even a child, it is other people who will decide the outcome of some of the most significant turning points in our lives. It’s scary and it’s supposed to be. We don’t like feeling uncertain, but it’s not just a feeling. The uncertainty is very real and we have to accept it. The only thing we can determine is the type of person we are when we meet those faceless gatekeepers. I still have a long way to go, but I want to be prepared. And with that I ultimately must learn to love my present self as well, not in spite of all of its flaws but because of them. I need to acknowledge my strengths and my weaknesses, and to learn to nurture myself even if it means making tough decisions or doing things I’m uncomfortable doing.
I don’t know where I’m going to be in the next year, or how I’m going to get there. If there are major changes in my life, I’m not sure if they will be instantaneous changes or incremental. What I do know is that the change I have most power over, are the incremental ones. It makes sense to start with those. I know I will still be afraid, I know I’ll have plenty of reasons to be afraid. I’ll also have plenty of reasons to daydream again as well. But just as I need to change things in my present to confront those fantasies, I need to also change things in my present to confront those fears. It’s hard knowing exactly what I need to do, but in my experience, most of it falls under continuing learning to love myself, to take better care of my body and to improve upon my skills little by little. I’ll start with that.
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