I’m not sure about you, but I just love getting ahead of myself on oh-so many things. I have found this to be a trend among several friends in recovery. Take, for example, a housemate at my sober living who held on to one major reservation when it came to quitting booze for good—she wouldn’t be able to toast at her wedding. So her sponsor immediately asked her, “Do you even have a boyfriend?” She did not.
“Okay,” the sponsor said. “Let’s deal with that when it happens.”
I am a master at the “cart before the horse” thing. While this is great fodder for humorous personal essays, it can also stop me from going after a goal or a job or even some dude I have the hots for. I make snap judgments and then spend hours agitated and fretting over some hypothetical situation as though it’s actually occurred.
I have always done this when looking for permanent work: I first consider the commute and then the pay rate. This, in many ways, is self preservation, because you know how these job postings are when it comes to actually being transparent about rates, right? (If you don’t, here’s the deal: they aren’t. They make you go through the entire application process, submit references, and then go on an interview before they mention “Well, we can only pay you $15 an hour.”)
You’re like WTF?
Unfortunately, because employers do this, folks like me debate about whether to apply in the first place. If a job is based in Santa Monica, let’s say at Google (why Google would hire me I have no idea since I can barely add nine and four), I wouldn’t take the job unless they paid me a very nice salary, given driving from the east side of Los Angeles through the disgusting smog-ridden cluster-fucked traffic of central LA to the west side is hell. I’d rather work for $15 an hour down the street in a restaurant kitchen. This ends up leading me to essentially never apply to jobs on the west side of Los Angeles. It’s possible that over the years I’ve missed some fine opportunities by assuming the worst.
Recently, I applied for a job as a copy writer for one of the very few massive media outlets that actually exists here in LA. I read the job description and interpreted the requisite qualities of “self-motivated,” “driven” and “full of ideas” to mean “Everyone here is 22 so you better be able to keep up.” Then I decided “I’m too old for this job. Those 22-year-olds are working 90 hours a week for crap pay and they don’t care because they just want a byline on one of those absurd viral quizzes.”
Still, I’m making progress. Because this time, before rejecting the idea outright, I decided that filling out the application, which took all of 10 minutes in the end, might still be worth my while. If they actually bothered calling me for an interview (they didn’t), I might be able to do further investigation on whether the office is in fact spearheaded by kids almost young enough to be my…well…kids. And I could worry about whether I’d be too old for the job down the line if they actually hired me.
Then, of course, there’s the man thing. This is a tricky thing to write publicly, but I’ll try to do so without hopefully being offensive. Like many people, I’m attracted to guys of any race, religion or creed. At the same time, all of my serious boyfriends—the whopping three I’ve had since I was a teen—have been white. Or, one was Argentinian, but still white. So whenever I get the hots for someone who isn’t white, and I do often, I immediately wonder what my family will think if we actually get together and it gets serious.
No one in my family has ever said “Only come home with a white dude” but since all the gals in my family always come home with white dudes (or Armenian, and I guess that’s white), I have no idea if that would even be an issue. Truthfully, I don’t think it really would be—I come from a fourth-generation Los Angeles family, which means we’re used to plenty of diversity. (I can say, however, that my family would be absolutely tickled if I came home with an Armenian man who had just proposed.)
But to even consider what my family will think of some dude I’m with before going on a date? Well, that’s fairly ludicrous. I do the same with guys who I have decided might want children. I never want to have kids, so when I meet any guy under 50 who’s interested in me I’ll assume, “He wants kids. There’s no way he doesn’t want kids. This isn’t going to work.”
That’s a fairly silly assumption to come to before even hitting a first date.
Recently I learned a bit about the brain and why it does what it does; according to this book I read on Buddhism and neuroscience, we are actually hardwired to remember the negative and worry constantly, as our middle brains and reptilian brains are still very much functioning and working very hard to ensure we survive. This part of our brain (not the cerebral cortex) evolved to remember negative events so we don’t die.
“Red berries will kill you! Green berries OK!”
The book elucidates how our fears and overthinking and conjuring of so many hypotheticals isn’t actually a sign of pathology or neurosis so much as it’s just leftover baggage from the time when we used to spend each day running from tigers and poisonous spiders and trying to suss out what berries might potentially kill us in a millisecond. (I’m paraphrasing science here. Humor me.)
After learning this, and also working to alleviate it through mindfulness meditation, I started to feel less shitty about my putting the cart before the horse pattern. Maybe it isn’t neurotic or “alcoholic” or getting ahead of myself. Maybe it’s just me trying to make sure I don’t go down the wrong path and get eaten in the process.
No matter the genesis, this kind of thinking remains self-defeating in the end. More than anything, it takes me out of the present and puts me into the future without having any shred of evidence that there will be a problem. So lately, I have intentionally been catching it and then refuting it mentally.
As for my friend toasting at her hypothetical wedding—well, turns out she did get married but to a sober dude, and I believe they were just fine toasting with sparkling Martinelli’s.
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