Don't forget to cast yourself in whatever horror flick you've got playing on your brainscreen

Fear is miserably inaccurate

Everyone has their coping thing. Me circa 2002.

In the times I’ve disclosed that I had cancer as a twenty something, people that haven’t had a serious life-changing illness earnestly told me they, “had a cancer scare once.” They describe to me how terrifying it was to talk to a doctor or wait for test results. They usually wrapped up with, “so I can’t even imagine!”

I’m quite sure they can imagine since thinking about a test result had their fret motor running so hot that it created an event to be retold for years to come. That’s the power of imagination right there. It is a genuinely scary thing to go through. I betcha that the scenarios they came up with were devastating. Our brains can take a perceived threat as seriously as a real one. It also doesn’t compare whatsoever to the years-long experience of an actual cancer diagnosis and treatment. Or the physical, mental, and financial aftermath if you’re “lucky” enough make it through the first part¹.

I don’t think I’ve ever been asked about those details though. Really. Not once. It’s hard to believe. Or maybe it isn’t. Might be for the best since the details are more in the unpopular genres of frustration, ableism, and restlessness.

Had anyone taken a minute to ask or talk more about my experience they might have noticed a couple things. The obvious one is that I’m still around to talk about it. The real treasure unearthed though is that my story of weathering one upheaval after another reveals a super important fact: most of the time when we’re fretting about the worst possible thing happening, we forget to cast ourselves as an active player in the scenario.

Anxious anticipation usually takes the form of a nebulous terrible that happens at or to you. We usually leave out the reality that our living, industrious selves will be there. Regardless what actually happens, we’ll still be interested in things, fighting for things, and likely worrying about other things both trivial and deeply consequential. My experiences have shown me that when shit hits the fan we’re gifted with a powerful hyperfocus. Nonessential things fall away. We’ll have important things to do. Stuff to handle. And you know what? We’ll do them in any capacity available to us.

But I get it. It’s about the unknown. It’s about change. And the idea of an unwelcome force imposing change can send the mind ablaze with scenarios of defeat and destruction. We’re at risk of defaulting to passive captive mode in the face of uncertainty. It’s hard to imagine yourself in a scenario that you didn’t choose as anything other than f*cked.

We only know that whatever it is could upset the balance of things as they are. That alone can whip us up into a tizzy that blinds us to the reality that we handle change every day. That we are all already doing pretty well playing roles in a game written by someone else. We probably have several examples in our lives where we’ve done just fine when change was thrust upon us, or learned from the times we didn’t. Either way, we didn’t implode. That’s not exciting enough for our minds to hold front and center though. We’ve got to hold it there ourselves.

If we’re to consider the latest neurological theories, our brains are predictive reactor machines² fed by previous experience and, now in the modern world, media and information intake. It’s pretty much that annoying wellwhatabout person in a staff meeting.

In an article titled, To Be Energy-Efficient, Brains Predict Their Perceptions Anil Ananthaswamy writes:

"Through predictive processing, the brain uses its prior knowledge of the world to make inferences or generate hypotheses about the causes of incoming sensory information. Those hypotheses — and not the sensory inputs themselves — give rise to perceptions in our mind’s eye. The more ambiguous the input, the greater the reliance on prior knowledge."

The point is that when we are facing the unknown it’s likely that we’ll be horribly inaccurate either by overestimating the terrors due to a previous bad experience or because we’ve clicked on too many fear-mongering articles or seen too many disaster movies. Or the inaccuracy comes in the form of obliviousness because our brains won’t let us conceive of something we haven’t experienced before. That lends itself to normalcy bias³.

So I think when FDR said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, he really meant to say don’t let your default mode network chew up all your main character scenes.

I’m not the master of chill. I wouldn’t plant this piece as a flag of certainty or assume it applies to everyone. But I am an esteemed professor of hindsight currently lecturing at WTF University. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. You can’t think yourself up an accurate blueprint of the future. You can only try to make it there.

1. Yeah I know that’s not the first time I’ve mentioned the whole physical, mental, and financial aftermath. There’s a lot of repeating that needs to happen to counter the annoying and inaccurate myth of cancer survivor heroes wrapping up treatment, putting it behind them, and going out to live their best life amongst empathetic and supportive people.

2. More about that here in this Wired article Your Brain is a Prediction Machine. Here's what to know to have it shape reality. For a critical look at this newer theoretical concept, check out Aeon’s article The problem with prediction: Cognitive scientists and corporations alike see human minds as predictive machines. Right or wrong, they will change how we think.

3. The United States is currently under the spell of normalcy bias. Jan 6, corrupt SCOTUS, declining healthcare, obscene income disparity, threat of Christian Nationalism despite numerous professional warnings, etc.