Picture this: It’s a cloudy Sunday afternoon and you’re alone at home. The house is clean, the coffee is fresh, and breakfast is ready. Let’s say you’re eating something like a Korean BBQ pizza because you found an AMAZING frozen pizza deal at the store and couldn’t wait to try it….again… but this time for breakfast.
Life is good, the pizza is good.
But then- The Drama
As you’re cleaning the dishes, you hit a plate on the counter. Ceramic flies. Some of the breakage flies up and brushes your eye lash. You self-audit for physical wounds, but you realize something far scarier than ceramic is surfacing: imaginary disasters.
What if that got in my eye? What if I’m blinded and step on a piece of the broken plate? What if someone breaks into the house and punches me in the face? WHAT IF MY GOVERNMENT STUDENT LOAN PAYMENTS START AGAIN?
The Doom
With these thoughts comes the adrenaline rush and the shallow breathing. The pizza goes from sitting comfortably in your stomach to feeling like a boulder. In 30 seconds, you’ve gone from peaceful breakfast cleanup to doom scrolling in your own brain.
After a minute or two, you wake up from the spiral. You look down and realize you’re still holding on to what’s left of the plate. Actually, you realize it’s the whole plate- only a small piece chipped off.
No burglars, no injuries, and no mess to clean up. You’re safe.
The Delight
This week has been full of moments like that for me. Maybe you’ve had a few yourself?
There is a great quote by Seneca that says:
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”
I agree with this dead dude. Most of the time, reality is quite manageable. It’s our untrained imagination (and sometimes past memories) that can cause the problems.
It’s important to remember that the imagination is a tool for us to use, not a tool to use us. We hold the remotes to our brains, and if the channel you’re on is getting too heavy, it’s okay to change it.
I think I’ll switch mine back to pizza now.
-Leo
💬 What about you? What’s the last thing your brain turned into a level 10 catastrophe but really ended up being a level 1 situation?
The lofi INFJ 
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