I’d like to introduce you to my two brainmates, What If and If Then (you may already know them–they tell me they have lots of clones). Really, it’d be more accurate to say I’d like to warn you about them. They seem to be closely related, and they’re definitely equally diabolical. They’ve been with me as long as I can remember, although as I’ve gotten older they’ve been louder and rowdier. Totally inconsiderate.

Their favorite activity is to team up and fill my head with scary, useless thoughts: What if I get the coronavirus and die? What if I write this and it’s horrible and people who read it think that I have no talent and they laugh at me? And this one is frequently recurring: What if I say the wrong thing to my friends and that causes them to not want to be my friend anymore? And What If can cause a special kind of terror if its cohort, Too-High Cortisol Level, is around. The two of them combine, get my body ramped up, and become Panic. Then What If is pretty much all I think about, and the thoughts generally end in misery or death: What If I can’t sleep? What If these feelings never go away? What if I’m miserable forever? What if this anxiety kills me?

If Then is not quite as evil, but still very annoying. If Then can cause me to question myself, other people, and my relationships: If I were a better person, then I would have more empathy for this person. If so-and-so loved me, then he/she would have talked to me longer. If I were closer with so-and-so, then we would share more intimate details about ourselves.

Not surprisingly, the loud, rude behavior of What If and If Then keep me from knowing another mate who’s always with me: The Present. This mate is where it’s at. It has all the real action, and from my limited experience, I’ve had a lovely time hanging out with it.

Now I have to go, because I’ve gone way over my fifteen minutes. So even though What If and If Then are trying to keep me here–What If I don’t say all this right and people don’t understand? What if people don’t like it because it’s silly? If I were a better writer, then I could say what I meant more exactly in this limited amount of time–I’m telling them to go piss off. They’ll sneak up on me again, as they love to do, but I’m getting better at ignoring them. They don’t like being ignored and tend go off and sulk in a corner.

And then, when it’s finally quiet, I remember, and I say, Hey Present, where you at?