Imaginary problems

I’ve always had a pretty active imagination.

When I was little, my friends and I would play Cops and Robbers, Restaurant, School, etc.

I was writing stories, even way back when, fraught with misspellings and sounded-out words.

I even had an imaginary friend.

His name was Sam. The top half of him looked like a mouse standing upright, with oversized ears. But where his feet were supposed to be was the gooey stuff that snails and slugs use to get around. He was an alien of some kind. But I don’t remember much about his personality. (But with looks like that, who needs a personality?)

For most people, their imaginations fade as they get older. Mine didn’t. It just morphed into something unfortunately more realistic. Now, armed with a never-ending onslaught of information from the internet and 24-hour news cycles, my imagination creates worst-case scenarios that cause me great anxiety, instead of make-believe stories just for fun.

And most of the dreaded fantasies that run rampant in my unguarded mind as I try to fall asleep at night begin with two of the most dangerous words in existence:

What if…?

And to be sure, you don’t have to have an overactive imagination to be plagued by this form of incessant make believe of worry. All you have to be is a mom. Actually, all you have to be is human.

I didn’t mean to leave out all the un-moms out there (women, men, children, all with completely legitimate anxiety of their own). I just remember my imagination reaching unprecedented levels of fear when I become a mom.

I once heard a quote that said:

Becoming a parent exponentially increases your capacity to love and fear in ways you never thought possible.

I had heard the love part. I was simultaneously bracing for it and looking forward to it. But the fear I was not prepared for.

Suddenly, I saw/see danger everywhere. That van with the blacked out windows. The man with shifty eyes walking slowly through our neighborhood, with no dog in tow. I have even been in potentially dangerous situations, in the heat of the moment, thinking through if-thens. If this person makes this move, I will do THIS. And I can instantly come up with three or four plans to get myself and my kids to safety. Just in case.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be cautious. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be aware of our surroundings. (Put down your damn phone!) I’m not saying we shouldn’t have an in-case-of-emergency plan for our family. I’m not saying we shouldn’t take self-defense classes. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be prepared.

What I’m talking about it imaginary problems. Imaginary obstacles.

What-ifs are nasty little things that attach themselves to your brain, redirect critical brain activity away from reality toward imaginary problems, can sap your energy and leave you spending your life playing defense against all the evil what-ifs out there in the world.

I know I’ve told this story before, but it’s just so good and super applicable to this topic, I’m gonna tell it again.

I was visiting a therapist several years ago and the what-ifs were spilling out of my mouth like poisonous vomit. I mean, there seemed to be no end of things I was freaking out about. To be clear, things that had not happened and were not currently happening.

My calm, soft-spoken counselor patiently waited for me to spew out any remaining demons and when I finally stopped for breath, he leaned forward in his chair.

“Okay, see if this makes sense. Depression comes from looking back, regrets about the past, failures you haven’t gotten over. Anxiety comes from looking forward, into the future, where the what-ifs live, preparing for potential regrets and failures…”

My hand shot up like a student a classroom. “I’ve got both of those!”

He smiled. “Right. But when you live in the past or live in the future, you miss the life you were meant to live RIGHT NOW. RIGHT NOW is all you were meant to live. This is where real life happens.”

I sat in silence for a moment, then asked him to repeat the whole thing so I could completely ingest it. Brilliant.

My other therapist, who has known and treated me for years, pointed out that my greatest source of stress is trying to get out in front of problems to try to prevent them from happening, instead of trusting myself to handle them as they come along.

Nailed. It. (This is why these people make the big bucks.)

So my Land of Make Believe is no longer Sam and me swimming in rivers of chocolate and playing with our pet manatee. Somewhere along the way, Sam disappeared, my chocolate river dried up and the only other beings living there with me are those annoying What-Ifs. Some are little and annoying, like chattering squirrels. Others are big and scary, like bears waiting to chase me down and eat me alive.

A Beautiful Mind is a beautiful movie about a brilliant schizophrenic who refuses all treatment and determines to think is way through life with his genius, yet handicapped, brain.

With all the powerful scenes in the movie, it’s a minor moment that’s my absolute favorite. Found the clip on youtube (really just the first 30 seconds are what I’m referring to, ignore the subtitles). A man approaches Professor Nash after one of his classes to inform him of his nomination for a Nobel Prize.

As the man addresses the professor, Nash looks at him, pauses for a moment, stops one of his students exiting the classroom and asks her, “Do you see him? Are you sure?” She giggles and assures her teacher that the man is there. Only then does the professor engage him in conversation. “Forgive me, I’m just always suspicious of new people.”

You see, his mind had lied to him many times and was still lying to him. He saw people who weren’t there, had conversations with imaginary friends. So over time, he resolved to make sure whomever he met was actually real before he would start talking to them.

I am just beginning to practice the discipline of making sure my ‘problems’ are actually real before I engage them or spend any time trying to solve them.

Check out these two versions of 2 Corinthians 10:5:

We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ (NIV).

Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ (KJV).

Oh, how it pains me to see my weaknesses in my own children. Caroline inherited my imagination, for better and for worse. And as anxiety tends to do, it waits until its victim is tired and still, desperately needing sleep. Then it pounces.

One night several years ago, Caroline was telling me all the things that were worrying her and keeping her from being able to sleep, so we looked up 2 Corinthians 10:5.

“So you know what that means? When there’s a thought roaming around in your mind that’s freaking you out, you arrest it.”

“Like with handcuffs?” she asked.

“Exactly,” I continued. “You drag it into the interrogation room, you know where the cops shine a bright light on you, get in your face and ask you a bunch of questions. You start doing the same thing. Turn the light on and ask it, “’Hey, are you real? Are you a real problem or just one that’s PRETENDING to be real to freak me out and keep me awake?’ And if it’s not real, it’s OUT. Lock it up in jail and ask Jesus to get rid of it. If it IS real, you call Jesus into the room and ask Him to take over from there, so you don’t have to think about it anymore. Got it?”

She looked at me skeptically. “Seriously, Mom?”

“Hey, you’re the one lying here awake. It’s up to you. I’m just telling you what the Bible says to do. And it tends to be right about this kind of thing.”

She rolled her eyes and then smiled. “Okay, I’ll try it.”

We prayed, I kissed her goodnight and as I closed the door, I wondered why it was so easy to explain to someone else and why it was so hard to actually do it myself. (Welcome to life coaching.)

God is not going to give me courage, grace and strength to face things that, um, don’t exist. He is not going to enable that kind of nonsense. He is teaching me to discern what is real and true, and what is a lie from the enemy.

I’ll close with a quote from the great theologian Mark Twain:

I’ve suffered a great many catastrophes in my life. Most of which never happened.

The enemy loves to distract us with imaginary problems and what-ifs to keep our minds from focusing on REAL problems that God has put us here to SOLVE.

So let’s do our detective work and make sure we’re spending time on the important stuff, not the problems we invent just to make ourselves more important.

Now you’ll have to excuse me. I have to go make sure Sam has fed the manatee this morning.