What If

Daring to hope

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be?”

—Marianne Williamson

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

I’m currently listening to the audiobook of Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, which is so good I often have to pause after a chapter to let her piercing words make their way to my core. One chapter that particularly stuck with me was Aches. In it, Doyle describes the Ache as something that has haunted her since childhood. It’s the unsettling feeling that arises in the middle of relishing time with a loved one—the realization that one day, it will all come to an end. When she eventually faces the death of her grandmother, she finds out that dealing with the dropped shoe is less paralyzing than waiting for that shoe to drop.

Listening to Aches got me thinking about all the ways I anticipate the other shoe dropping. My own aches revolve less around death and more around failure. When I was younger, I truly believed I could do anything. My dream as an elementary schooler wasn’t to become an engineer, but rather a professional soccer and tennis player with her own fashion line. As I grew older, this unabashed self-assurance shrank into caution. I experienced disappointment. I experienced failure. I experienced giving it my absolute all and still watching everything burn to ashes. With each additional reality check, I learned to temper my childlike idealism with this all too familiar line—"I don’t want to get my hopes up.”

In adulthood, my brain discovered ways to protect against disappointment through two of my favorite cognitive distortions—fortune telling and catastrophizing. Let’s say I want to publish a book. Fortune telling would steer my brain towards all the ways things could go badly. What if nobody reads it? What if it receives horrible reviews? What if you sink as a writer? Catastrophizing would throw out the worst-case scenario. What if airing your vulnerabilities will turn you into a social outcast and you’ll have to spend the rest of your days living on a remote island in Southeast Asia? These fears are quite effective in protecting me from falling. Unfortunately, they are also quite effective at preventing me from living.

I have spent the past years studying psychology, so I’m able to call out these cognitive distortions when they arise. But some days when I need extra ammunition, I bring in my statistics background. Nothing calms my fears like a probability distribution. Yes, there is an unknown, above-zero chance of things going wrong. However, the more horrendous the imagined calamity, the less likely reality will align with imagination. In other words, the worst-case scenarios are extreme outliers, data points on the far edges of the distribution. Outliers are called outliers for a reason. They do not represent the larger story told by the majority of the data. This is the objective truth, even if my cognitive distortions convince my brain otherwise.

Author and mindfulness teacher Tamara Levitt explains—negative thinking is in our evolutionary biology. Our brains are wired to over learn from negative experiences, but under learn from positive ones. This tendency helped our ancestors evaluate threats and avoid danger. However, if we allow our negative What ifs to become predictions rather than just thoughts, they can form a cage that keeps us from taking action and carving out the life we deserve. Sometimes we’d rather stay stuck in this small but familiar cage than face the discomfort that comes with realizing our own potential. In the words of Marianne Williamson, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

Years ago, my mentor taught me an exercise that I still use to this day. For every negative What if that I can think of when embarking on a new endeavor, I think of the corresponding positive What if. What if this book finds its way to the readers who need it the most? What if realizing this dream is more important than any outside opinions? What if you soar as a writer? What if airing your vulnerabilities will heal not just yourself but all those with a wound in the shape of your words?

How does it feel to imagine things going right? Absolutely terrifying. Leaning into possibility means I am getting my hopes up. It means there is a shoe that can drop, because the shoe is no longer safely tucked away in the closet. It means I will need to roll up my sleeves and put in the hard work of writing my story rather than letting it slowly fade away.

Allowing myself to dream of success feels vulnerable, uncomfortable, and a touch naïve. Yet when I think back on all my biggest wins, I realize I achieved them because I had the audacity to dream. There is always a chance that things can go wrong, but it’s important to remember that there is also a very real chance that things can go right. How might we show up differently if we allowed ourselves to envision the good just one minute longer than the amount of time we spend ruminating on the bad? To open our hearts to a brighter future is an act of courage. It doesn’t mean we do not fear failure. It means that we are strong enough to take steps forward knowing that whatever awaits—failure, success, or something in between—we will be capable of receiving with grace and compassion.

Journaling

Can you think of something that you’ve been scared to try? How does it feel to imagine it all working out?