Borrowing Trouble

My coach used an old idiom with me the other day: that some people have a habit of “borrowing trouble,” and it landed. I’ve always avoided borrowing things generally (except my neighbour’s tools, after my ex walked off with ours in the split), but it turns out I borrow trouble constantly. I borrow it every time I let my thoughts drift into a negative future.

When I start thinking ahead, I get fearful, and my imagination reliably jumps to the worst possible outcome, even though experience has taught me the worst almost never actually happens. My default future setting seems to be worst-case scenario. I’m still not sure if that’s something I was born with or something I learned.

I grew up in the eighties, when the big cultural fear was nuclear war. Movies like Mad Max, The Terminator, and Threads cast a real shadow over how the future felt back then. School reading lists had The Chrysalids, Brave New World, and 1984. As that particular fear faded, roughly around the time I graduated in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, new ones rose to take its place: conflict in the Middle East, climate change. I’ve spent my whole life absorbing whatever the ambient cultural fear happened to be and layering it on top of my own personal ones: tragic death, poverty, unhappiness.

I lived inside an imagined, fearful future, and the worst part was how much it warped my present. I’d change things dramatically in the here and now just to make that imagined future feel less certain. Or I’d do the opposite: rip the bandage off early, forcing the bad thing into the present just to get used to it ahead of time. No wonder I was unhappy. I was spending all my actual present moments either dodging an imagined future or bracing for it.

Then I became aware of what I was actually doing. The divorce, and the downward spiral that came with it, triggered it. I couldn’t understand how I’d ended up this unhappy. Eventually I realized my own thoughts were the actual culprit, with a lot of help sorting that out, some from Byron Katie’s work, some from my life coach.

My coach would point out, in real time, whenever I drifted into future-thinking, and I started tracking just how miserable that habit reliably made me.

That was step one. Noticing. Step two has been actually building better futures to picture instead, which is much harder. My thoughts still default to bad, and I can get stuck there for a while. Today I lost a good four hours to it, after my ex started arguing about how we’d split the kids over Christmas. I went straight to ripping the bandage off, picturing myself utterly alone for the full two weeks of the break. Then I remembered what I’ve actually been practicing, and started building a different picture instead. A good one: I’d get the kids in the morning, when they’re still buzzing with excitement, and he’d get them for dinner, right around the time I’m usually running on empty anyway. That’s actually what he wanted too. It would work.

I only landed on that after burning a whole day borrowing trouble first. I’ll get there faster next time.

Renée

Renée

My days these days are mostly advocacy, with my kids always first, and hiking, biking, and cold plunging worked in whenever I can. Winter cold plunges aren’t for everyone, but there’s a strange kind of beauty and calm in it that I’ve come to need.

Separation was a journey. It took time, and it taught me most of what I know now.

I write about what I learned along the way, and about the family justice system I ended up spending years inside of.