Sober & Spiraling

An entirely unhelpful how-to guide for living your worst life.

I’m trying something new this week—humor! Please read this essay with at least ten grains of salt, knowing it’s part study in sarcasm, part essay on exaggeration, and part meditation on melodrama.

When things are going well, I love a nice, familiar cognitive distortion to shake things up. Back in my drinking days, a long, late night of partying did the trick, but I stopped doing that. Excess caffeine induced a chaotic mind buzz that came close, but guess what? I quit that, too. Now, I’m not even on Instagram. Will I return? Who knows! I’m sober from the key things I used to reliably send me into a spiraling vortex of fear, anxiety, depression, and regret, so what’s a girl to do?

Luckily, I’ve discovered my brain needs no assistance from the above. It can just make shit up to make me feel bad without me having to lift a finger, open an app, or pour a drink—thanks, brain! If you’ve been sober (or just like, happy) for a while now and you’re getting tired of the high-vibe, positive outlook on life thing, try some cognitive distortions, a surefire way to have you curled up in the fetal position on a random Thursday afternoon.

Let’s get started!

Polarization

There’s nothing quite like hyperbolic over-exaggeration to knock me off balance into a catatonic state of despair. Also known as black-and-white thinking, polarization is a fun way to become wildly hopeless.

Polarization was the source of many a hangover back in my drinking days. If I decided I wasn’t drinking and then had one drink, there was no going back—now it was a bender! With no room for grey areas, polarization’s dichotomy is between perfection and imperfection, and we all know how easily attainable perfection is.

It pairs beautifully with overgeneralization.

Overgeneralization

This one’s characterized by dramatic assessments of things in terms of “always,” “never,” “nothing,” and “everything.” Making grand statements in absolutes based on singular experiences adds just the right amount of pessimism to send me over the edge whenever I need a dose of utterly unnecessary drama to spice up my day.

**Doesn’t catch a wave for 30 minutes** — I never catch good waves.

**Catches a wave after said 30 minutes** — Everything is okay now!

**Has a bad day** — I’m always depressed, and I’ll never change.

**Has a great day** — I’ll never be sad again!

Overgeneralization doesn’t just blow up my internal sense of self, either. It’s also excellent for sending my interpersonal relationships into a tailspin because now we’re not arguing about the thing but about each person’s memory of the instances of the thing for the last one to twenty years!

Try it for yourself. The next time you and your S.O. are in an argument, slide one of these phrases in:

You never (insert favorite fire-starter argument topic)

You’re always (insert favorite fire-starter argument topic)

Why is everything (insert favorite fire-starter argument topic)

Then watch the other person say, “NO, remember that one time when …” and, like a small toddler, you can dissolve into a puddle, saying, “That one time doesn’t coo-ouunn-ttt!!!” And on and on, until the argument has spiraled so far off-topic that you find yourselves, two fugue-state hours later, asking, “What were we arguing about again?”

Photo by Alexander Dummer on Unsplash

Catastrophizing

If your self-destructive ego needs another way to obsessively stress over anything and everything that has or hasn’t happened yet, catastrophizing is the way to go. It does the trick when a friend’s phone gets disconnected mid-call, hubs isn’t texting back, or I’ve made a minor error. Let’s go in order (with examples)!

Phone gets disconnected: Clearly, their phone disconnected because they became distracted and rear-ended a truck full of rebar, causing the rusty metal to slice through their windshield, Final Destination-style, and impale said friend’s body, my final words to them something meaningless and idiotic like, “I’m just really craving some flaming hot Cheetos right now.”

Hubby is not texting back: He’s obviously not texting back because he’s been held up at gunpoint, and, stupidly, he resisted the masked robber’s request for his wedding ring. In a courageous yet useless display of resistance, he fought back, only to be shot by the robber, leaving him bleeding out in a gutter.

Making a minor error: I sent out a Substack with multiple typos, and now everyone will think I’m a moron who doesn’t care about my writing—but I really do care, I swear!—and now anyone who reads it will think I’m an uncaring idiot. My Substack is over before it’s even begun.

Control Fallacy

The belief that things are 100% in my control or 100% out of my control—absolutes without degrees. There’s no gray. There’s no color at all because color and grey areas are for chill babes, and I’m not a chill babe. I’m a black-and-white-thinking gremlin scrambling around, trying to keep all the plates spinning or throwing all the plates at the wall. It’s all on me, or there is absolutely nothing I can do.

OCD is spinning all the plates, and alcoholism was my plate-throwing gauntlet. Full-stop-out-of-controlness. I prefer to believe things are within my control because alcohol is out of the question now. Ready to go full control mode via OCD? Here are five easy steps.

1. Become hyperaware of all surfaces, minute sensations, and the touch history of all items in your house over the last seven days.

2. Micromanage those around you to assuage your out-of-control vibe, assessing the varying degrees of cleanliness to dirtiness throughout the house and creating an internal hierarchy that is only logical to you.

3. Ask loved ones to ascribe to that hierarchy while saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules,” as you create more and more rules to follow.

4. Feel sad, and wonder why it can’t be simpler. Remember that the only things within your control are your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

5. Go back to Step 1 because being in control of your thoughts, feelings, AND behaviors? That sounds much too complicated—who has the time?

My ‘Mentals’

I downloaded an app many moons ago that promised insights into my nature. While scrolling through the various tabs of things I don’t understand, like transits, gates, and channels, I stumbled upon a new tab: Genetic Trauma. When the tab unfurled with the heading “Shame,” I was like, “Duh.”

I sped-read through the paragraph describing “the main trigger of this trauma is the feeling that you are not worthy enough” **raises hand** and made my way to the solution:

“If you want to quit your trauma scenario, you better start with humor.”

Laughing at myself comes unnaturally. I like to believe there’s gravity to my situation. There is, and there isn’t, but I was tired of thinking deeply about why I am the way I am. So, I thought, why not write these outsized frenetic inclinations of my head into an essay, offering them up as a how-to guide for driving yourself a little batshit so that you and I might laugh at the sheer silliness of my (in the brilliant Maria Bamford’s words) “mentals”?

Sometimes, it’s enough to let the heaviness give way to free-floating hyperbole, doused in a belligerent unwillingness to make meaning from what is quite possibly just the nonsense chatter of an unmedicated brain doing its thang. One does not preclude the other; maybe it’s enough to let them dance, albeit poorly and without rhythm.

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

I want to know whether you’ve tried adding comedy to the craziness.

Tell me about it in the comments:

1. Share a time you just had to laugh instead of cry and found your healing in the punchline.

2. Share something you’re taking less seriously in life right now, be it karaoke or kite-flying, Substacking or speed dating.

I’d love to hear from you.