When we battle anxiety, it can feel as if we have an unwanted superpower. The ability to see every possible outcome stemming from a point in time.
A prescient glimpse into alternate realities where all of the things that could go wrong, do go very wrong.
Worry traps us at a vantage point outside of space and time.
It forces us to observe every nightmare scenario forking from one of our past decisions or a looming choice. At least that’s the way it feels.
Anxiety sufferers spend a lot of time viewing the parallel realities. It’s a common mental snare that keeps us up at night, paralyzes us, traps us in a glass box of emotion outside of time and space. Something only Ron Burgundy could escape.
But there’s an important truth that our anxiety attempts to hide from us. It might be the key to shutting down our worries and escaping a horrifying trip through the multiverse.
Assembling a Team of Superheroes to Repair Your Multiverse
Anxiety sufferers are quite susceptible to the timelines that play out in their heads. They imagine where a path may take them. Sometimes they become transfixed by crucial points in the past. They agonize about where a different choice may have led.
When we get stuck in our own ruminations on the future and past, are we seeing the multiverse and the infinite grim outcomes in the future? Perhaps.
But this paralysis could also be our minds trying to cope with real life. Sometimes untethered from reality by our digital lifestyles or the trauma we encounter. The cerebellum launches narratives as some natural defense mechanism, the purpose of which went extinct long ago. Instinctively producing horror shows out of the excess energy for a captive viewer.
We might feel like some of the heroes pulled out of time and space during The Crisis on Infinite Earths. It’s a comic book miniseries from DC Comics. It’s all about the multiverses collapsing.
A team of superheroes and supervillains is shown the reality that there are many different Earths and universes. Each one is shaped by forking histories that make each different from our own.
A different Superman on each Earth, some with evil tendencies. Even a heroic Lex Luthor. (Thanks Marv Wolfman, George Perez) (Thanks to Alex Ross for beautiful painted covers)
Merging these multiple outcomes becomes a juggling act for comic book writers. The same thing can happen to our thoughts. We can feel like the tiny decisions made in our own lives can have these sorts of consequences. Dark versions of our lives, where our friends and family, like Supergirl or Barry Allen (The Flash) pay the ultimate price. We lose a friend, a partner, the world we’ve constructed.
Anxiety and Time Travel
Anxiety also likes to shift time on sufferers. Victims can get stuck in a moment of defeat or humiliation and feel like they cannot escape the pull of a tragic, enveloping memory.
It’s easy to feel like The Flash, who went through a gauntlet of emotion in real life (it seemed real to me). The Reverse-Flash, a supervillain, and Flash’s nemesis, could go so fast he could control time. In the villain’s many incarnations, Reverse-Flash trapped the Flash in the worst moments throughout his life.
The Flash seemed doomed to witness those failures and tragedies for an infinity thanks to the devious plans of this psychopath. But those who suffer from extreme anxiety don’t need a Reverse-Flash to feel trapped in a moment.
We can force our own heads up, eyes wired open, and force ourselves to experience a memory we wish wasn’t real over and over again. Looking for a way to change the past. But not even a superhero can do that (unless certain scientific or magical abilities are utilized).
It’s anxiety playing the supervillain, trapping us in our own doubt and regret. An inescapable loop of our top ten personal disasters. Or the disasters we are sure are still to come.
It may seem silly to compare our own small problems to the crashing and burning of dozens of alternate realities.
Yet, anxiety can make even the most insignificant moments seem like our own personal Waterloos (thanks Andrew Bird) and our anxiety takes advantage of each one.
Avoiding The Crisis on Your Infinite Earths
But there is one thing our anxiety hopes we don’t notice. As we get stuck in a past regret or future decision, we fail to notice that all the multiple outcomes our ailing brains present are the darkest ones. We usually don’t get previews of the positive outcomes that are also possible.
Why is that? It might be anxiety’s fondness for self-preservation. It cues up the 10% of eventualities that might be viewed as negative. Never the possibilities that might be serendipitous. If you saw both at once, your fears would be much more managble.
That’s not how anxiety works of course. It distracts you from those positive timelines because if you are reminded there are possibilities other than varying degrees of apocalypse, anxiety might be out of a job.
When we get stuck in a moment in the past, it’s never within the happiest memories. It’s the worst memories. Acknowledging this truth sometimes serves to take the power from a memory that imprisons us.
And if we are honest, many of the things that cause us the most distress tend to end favorably. Yet, we are too busy moving on to the next thing to stress over instead of acknowledging the victory we were sure was impossible. And how many outcomes that we’ve dreaded actually end up opening up a better path in the end?
Try to remember this alternate view the next time you are stuck in a moment and you can’t get out of it (thanks U2). Remind yourself that for every darkest timeline (thanks Community) you are shown, there must be just as many or more where you are secure, loved, and content.
Where you and Supergirl are shutting down galactic warlords. Where you are walking a corn maze with someone you met by random chance. Mirror universes where you help a mama dog give birth to a litter of puppies in a barn in Wyoming.
Spy on your alternate selves succeeding in that other reality and take a little pride in their accomplishments. Maybe cheer them on. They are rooting for you. Be encouraged to chase your own happiness. After all, if your multiverse selves are finding these preferable destinies, it proves these eventualities are possible. It’s up to you to pave the way, be ready, and stay open to random events that alter the timeline. End
I wrote about the quest to find your destiny in my article When the Path Curves Out of Sight. It’s about how you can’t expect to see the entire path ahead before you set out. You’ll usually have to step out on faith.
We also sometimes gain the superpowers we need to meet our destinies through difficult times and failure. I discuss this phenomenon in Drowning Aquaman. (Yes, more comic book wisdom)