Chapter 10: What’s the Worst that Could Happen?

A new candle store opened up in our neighborhood. They sold a novel room freshener. The way it worked was complicated, but in essence there is a reservoir of alcohol with a wick inside. You light the wick on fire, and it burns the alcohol, heating a stone soaked in oil.

“It’s a better aromatizer than a regular oil lamp, because the stone is so hot it sucks the surrounding air in and replaces it with the aromatized air.”

“Intriguing, I said. Exactly how hot does the stone get?” I was worried about the stone burning the house in some way.

“The stone itself is about thirteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, but the fire itself can get up to three thousand degrees.”

“That seems dangerous,” I frowned.

“That’s why you want to keep the stone in the special housing to keep it from burning you.”

“So with the housing it’s safe?”

“Completely,” she said, picking up the smoldering stone via the housing.

I took the new alcohol burner home and was anxious to try it out. I put everything together and realized I didn’t put the wick on correctly. I disassembled everything, put the wick in, then reassembled everything, but something was still wrong. A tiny glass clamp that held the wick was supposed to go on, but I was tired of taking the thing apart, and wanted to try it out.

“Are you sure that’s safe?” my wife asked.

“What’s the worst that can happen?”

She stepped out of the room silently, which was the universe’s way of giving me a hint. I didn’t catch on. I put the burner on the table and lit the wick. The wick took a few seconds to light, but soon drew enough alcohol to catch on fire.

The wick burned with intense heat, which caused it to contract. It shrunk and slipped through the opening, dropping into the alcohol. The alcohol lit on fire inside the lamp, instead of on the small wick. This created a tall three thousand degree flame underneath my hand. My hand didn’t like it.

I yanked my hand away and blew on the flame, but the alcohol was too hot to put out. I blew as hard as I could, which somehow extinguished the flame inside the lamp. I was afraid it was going to crack the glass protector on our wooden table, so I grabbed some rags and picked up the lamp.

As I lifted it, scalding liquid sloshed along the sides of the reservoir. The temperature difference caused the lamp to shatter. The alcohol ran along the glass table, forming cracks as it went. I threw down the rags, and my wife materialized behind me with a mop. We collected all the alcohol before any more damage happened. I’ll never know if she had the mop ready all along or not.

“You need to get someone to take care of that,” she said in a hushed tone.

“We can just sweep it up and buy a new one,” I shot back, “it’s not a big deal.”

“I was referring to your hand.”

I turned over my hand, and saw the damage for the first time. There was a clean, round hole revealing the tissue inside. I remember just staring at it. I had never seen the inside of my hand before. It wasn’t bleeding, which seemed odd to me. I got the keys and headed to the car.

“You’re not driving,” she stated.

“Oh, right”

I handed her the keys, and we headed to the doctor. They said I had a small third degree burn, gave me some creams and gave me instructions for how to care for it. We headed home, glad to see it hadn’t burned down. I never tried to use that lamp again. At the end of the day, I learned never to ask “what’s the worst that can happen?” Sometimes the universe will answer.

While that version of the question was rhetorical, I asked another version of the question on a regular basis. I would constantly fear what could happen in any given scenario. I would seriously consider what the worst possible result was and try to prepare for it, which is exhausting by the way.

When I walked into a restaurant, I would glance over the people and identify how many of them could kill me. I would ensure I sat close enough to a door where I could outrun them if necessary. I would check for car bombs when I got in my car. When I got home, I would check for hidden villains waiting to kill me. Before I asked my boss for a day off, I came up with a list of reasons I would get fired, and be sure to take care of them first.

My wife would laugh at the way my brain worked. One day I took her out to a restaurant late at night. We couldn’t find the place, and she worked hard to give me directions as we went along. “You were supposed to take a left back there,” she said. I pulled over, slammed the car in park, and turned off the engine. We both sat in silence for a few moments before she finally asked the question. “What’s the matter?”

“We’re going to be late, and they’ll be closed. You’ll get angry at me, because I wasn’t able to get you to the place you wanted to go. You’ll blame me for never listening to you, and for leaving to late, and we’re going to get a divorce. I hate crowded restaurants anyway.”

I have never heard her laugh so loud in my life. She was doubled over in the passenger seat, but quickly regained her composure. “You contemplated all that in the two seconds it took to pull over?”

“Yeah. Didn’t you?”

“No!”

“Well, what would you do if I ruined our date?”

“The date isn’t the restaurant, it’s spending time with you. If we don’t make it, we can go somewhere else! In fact, let’s just go where you want to go!”

“I don’t know where I want to go.”

“What do you like?”

“I don’t know. There’s a Taco Bell on the way home.”

“Let’s do that,” she concluded.

In the end, we downgraded our date from a steakhouse to Taco Bell, and we didn’t get a divorce. I wasn’t entirely sure what caused me to think that way, but it was burdensome. Somehow, I always knew that people around me thought the worst of me and were perpetually disappointed.

The Air Force had started treating me for depression. I don’t remember when they began, but I imagine it was back when I visited Mental Health for anxiety. One of the surveys that they took immediately showed signs of depression. I saw doctors weekly for updates and tweaks to my treatment.

On the topic of depression, I want to say one thing. I’ve been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, social anxiety disorder and general anxiety disorder. These diagnoses are likely correct, but they are more for the doctor than they are for me. Saying I have depression doesn’t fix it or help me to better deal with it. It only informs people who are in a position to do something about it.

It was a little frustrating that no one seemed to have a solution. When I get the flu, they don’t do follow-ups on a regular basis. Instead, they say “let us know if we didn’t fix it.” Doctors had a solution for everything in past visits. However, for depression, it seemed more of an experiment than treatment. I imagined them saying “let’s see what happens if you do this.”

In the weekly sessions, they would ask me how the previous week went, and they would change or adjust my medication. The questions were surgical at first, and I believe the problems I presented masked the underlying issues. For example, I was dreaming disturbingly graphic dreams about people being dismembered and killed. There was enough blood in my dreams for a blood bank. Eventually, other problems presented themselves, such as issues between coworkers or problems at home.

Still, these issues were masking the real problem. Somehow, in all this I didn’t talk much about wanting to kill myself. Perhaps I was afraid of what would happen if I told the truth. The truth is that I thought about suicide several times a day. If you aren’t a suicide-aholic like me, you may struggle to understand this line of thinking. People with chronic suicidal ideation don’t have to try to think about ending their lives. The thought is as invasive as ants at a picnic.

There’s an awesome mental-health comedian named Frank King. In his TedX talk in Vancouver, Canada, he said,

“See, people don’t understand. Let’s say my car breaks down. I have three choices: get it fixed, get a new one, or I could just kill myself.”

His analogy is right. There is almost no ‘good reason’ to kill yourself, but when you have chronic suicidal ideation, you always think about it. As Frank King says, “it’s always on the menu.”

As much as I thought about suicide, it was more of a feeling that I didn’t want to live anymore, and less of a feeling that I wanted to actually die. When I visualized actually killing myself, it made me uncomfortable. Yet Ian’s words kept ringing through my head.

“If you were serious, you would have done it”

It seemed like I needed to be more serious if I wanted people to take me seriously. I started trying to figure out how to actually get serious about it, so I would make a noose and pretend to hang myself to get more comfortable with the idea. I experimented with different ways to determine which one I thought I could pull off.

Let me tell you, this is a terrible idea. I have a friend who shot himself in the head and survived. Half of his face is destroyed, and every time he looks in the mirror, he’s forced to reconcile the experience. It’s not a good idea to flirt with the idea of suicide. A better idea is to be honest with your doctor that you’re getting serious enough to do something about it, but you don’t have the courage to go through with it. That’s what happened to me in one of the sessions with my Air Force psychiatrist.

“How many times a week do you think about killing yourself?”

My brow crinkled as math started happening in my brain. I calculated for a few minutes and said “I don’t know. Thirty?”

“Thirty times a week?”

“Well, I replied. It’s like three to eight times a day. Averaging that out to five, then multiplied by seven, that’s thirty-five.” I was furious. I said thirty earlier, now I said thirty-five.

I’m such an idiot,

I thought quietly

. I should just kill myself. Whoops, there’s one more!

“Do you currently have a plan?”

“It depends on what you mean.” I didn’t want to make another math mistake, so I did the math out loud. “If you mean A plan, as in ONE plan, then no. I have a few plans in case one of them doesn’t work. I honestly haven’t decided, but I’ve got a few ready to go, and I’m trying to narrow it down. It’s just really hard.”

“You have the things ready?”

“I believe so. They’re in my closet. Sometimes I go home and practice so that in case I have to kill myself, I won’t get confused.”

He leaned forward a few inches, “that’s called rehearsal. Rehearsal, or practicing the plan, is a bad sign.”

Since I was a little confused, he recommended I be placed under close supervision so that I could receive the help I needed to get through what was going on. This turned out to be an excellent recommendation, and I wish everyone going through my problems would receive the same treatment. As much as I appreciate it now, it made me feel like the ultimate failure at the time.

My supervisor drove me to Bridgeway, the mental health intensive care facility. He dropped me off at the front desk and left. A nurse checked me in and did a bunch of paperwork that I didn’t fully understand. Once that was completed, she took me to another room, then left, closing the door behind her.

I stared at the door realizing it only opened from the outside. I was trapped.

I am trapped and I am stupid. How could I have let my guard down like this? What kind of fool am I?

The thoughts were racing

.

Everything in me wanted to break out, but I knew that if I did, it would be reported to the Air Force.

As I was loathing myself for my present situation, I was grateful to the taxpayer. It seems like an odd thought, but I was always considering them. In combat arms training, we had to count the bullets we expended and collect all the casings. We weren’t allowed to fire too many rounds or lose the casings, because we didn’t want to waste taxpayer money. The taxpayers were paying for me to get the treatment I needed, and I didn’t want to waste that money. I was going to get everything possible out of this imprisonment.

I had nothing with me. No change of clothes or anything. Bridgeway provided everything that I needed, and removed the rest. That is to say, they took my clothes and made me change in front of a steward who ensured I left everything behind. The shoes they gave you didn’t even have shoelaces to prevent you from using them against yourself or others.

While staying there, we had regular sessions. In the morning, we did blood work and took medication. Throughout the day, we met with various doctors and participated in group activities. I met with the same psychiatrist every day. Each morning he would ask me how the medication was affecting me. It frustrated me, because I felt like he should already know how it was affecting me.

I told him how frustrated I was. I understood that he was competent at what he did, but from my position it seemed like a game of battleship. It felt like doctors would fire off pills into me and wait to see what happened. Couldn’t they do brain scans and blood samples and use those to determine what pills we needed?

He looked at me with a compassionate smile, and stood up from his desk. “I don’t ever do this, but here,” he said, handing me a book from the shelf. “This explains the chemical process of psychotropic medication.” He told me to bring the book back to him in two days, which I agreed to with a grin. I was anxious to get to a quiet corner and discover what this book had to say.

I read through the book as hastily as I could. It was two hundred and eighty pages, and talked about what happens when a patient takes a pill. There are many factors, like tolerance, interaction between medications, and interaction with your diet, which can cause the medication to behave differently inside your system.

They can’t simply give you the chemical that you’re missing, because your brain will compensate by blocking that chemical. If you’re missing testosterone and you take pure testosterone, then your brain will notice a surge of testosterone that it didn’t authorize. It will shut down the natural testosterone emissions in your system, and produce counteractive chemicals to balance you out.

In a normal process, the pill breaks down and enters your bloodstream, where it reaches your brain. Your brain notices a chemical surge. If the surge is sustained for several weeks, your brain attempts to “fix the problem.” To do so, it tells your pituitary gland to release a chemical which your brain things will balance things.

Therefore, if you don’t have enough of a chemical like serotonin, then you take something else. The something else creates an illusion, which causes your brain to compensate by producing more serotonin. If, however, the medication has an interaction or adverse reaction, then your brain could do unforeseen things, which could put you in a worse state than you started.

That explains why psychiatrists would put me on a drug for a short time, then increase it after two to four weeks. If after eight weeks the drug didn’t work, then they would work me back off of it and start a new one. It truly was like a game of battleship, because the doctors didn’t know what the inside of my system was like. They had to give me a pill and observe how I react to it, and then make another calculated move based on the results.

Armed with this new information, I decided to do everything possible to help find the correct pill that would fix me. In time, doctors eventually landed on one that was astounding. While taking the pill, I stopped having unwanted thoughts of suicide. Before it was so intrusive that I couldn’t do anything without suicide popping into my brain.

However, while I was on the quest to find the correct pill, doctors insisted I do additional therapy to find the solution. This bugged me a lot. I wanted to focus my energy on finding the pill that would make all my problems go away. However, they insisted that talk therapy would be essential in a full recovery.

In one of those talks, there were ten of us sitting in a half circle. The doctor would ask a person a question, then give them feedback on their answer. He asked me why I was in treatment and what I expected to get out of it. I don’t remember my answer, but I remember his.

“It seems like you’re catastrophizing,” he said.

“Catastrophizing?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’ll give you an example. What would happen if you were late to work?”

“I would get written up”

“Then what happens?”

“I might lose my job”

“Then what happens?”

“If I lost my job, I wouldn’t have money to pay my bills”

“Then what happens?”

“If I couldn’t pay my bills, I would lose my house”

“Then what happens?”

“If I lost my house, I’d live on the street”

“Then what happens?”

“If I lived on the street, my wife would probably leave me”

“Then what happens?”

“If my wife left me, then I’d have nothing else to live for”

“Then what happens?”

“Well, I’d probably kill myself”

“Then what happens?”

Something clicked inside my mind. If I killed myself, it wouldn’t matter. I don’t mean it’s inconsequential or that I, Samuel Dillow, don’t matter. I mean I realized the world would keep turning. It wouldn’t be the end of civilization, or a complete disaster. I wouldn’t make headlines as a failure. In essence, it isn’t the worst thing that could happen. I’m not saying it’s OK to kill myself. What I’m saying is I realized when I got to the worst possible scenario my mind could come up with, the world kept turning. Things were never as bad in reality as they were in my mind.

There was one point back then that I still didn’t grasp. The doctor was only asking one question. He didn’t ask what was the

worst

thing that could happen. He merely asked what happens

next

. I was writing my own story in my own mind. I could’ve answered I got a promotion, I switched to a better job, or that my wife got a job and supported the family. How cool would it have been if my wife got a job and paid all the bills, and I got to work on my dream hobbies for the rest of my life? Instead, I was stuck doing everything I could, trying to prevent the worst case scenario from happening.

Searching for more information, I turned to Emma McAdams, a marriage and family therapist from Utah. She explained that often we catastrophize when we are afraid to take a risk. We expect the worst possible outcome, hoping that anything else will feel better.

This is called “anchoring”, and I did it myself in college. I studied as hard as I could for a math test, hoping to get an A, but when I got a B, I felt deflated. Later, before a history test, I thought to myself “all I need is a D or above.” When that teacher handed me a B back, I was thrilled. By anchoring to the D, a B was a huge improvement.

Unfortunately, anchoring to the worst case all the time often depletes us of the will to continue. Emma suggests replacing every negative result with the possibility of a positive outcome. I COULD lose my job, or I COULD be sent to training to get better. My wife MIGHT leave me, or she MIGHT help out with the bills.

Another approach is to reframe the negatives. I often viewed decisions like a bunch of boxes. One or two boxes held the best possible outcome (a million dollars or a dream job). The others had the worst possible outcomes (getting fired or failing a test).

Obviously, I want to find the positive box or boxes. Yet I’m so afraid of the negative ones, I’m crippled by that fear. If I do make a choice, I’m unable to appreciate any outcome between failure or success.

I’ve found that reframing the negative is a more helpful coping mechanism. It empowers me to try my hardest, in spite of the worst that could happen. If I fail the test, next time I’ll take the course with a better professor and actually understand. Perhaps I’ll change my major to a field that better suits me. If I get fired from a job, it frees me up to get a better job, more suited to my skills.

Reframing the negative before the worst happens, is helpful. Unfortunately, sometimes you have to practice when the worst has already happened. In the 2019 pandemic, I lost my job. It was a crushing feeling, but I’d learned to reframe the negative. I talked to my wife, and she gave me permission to venture out and write this book. I’m not worried, because I know I can get a job if needed. And if my wife supported me through having

nothing

, I know she’ll definitely support me through having

something

.

Most catastrophization in my life didn’t take place as slowly as in this story. Most of the time, I could get from bad to worst-ever scenario in five seconds or less. In reality, almost all my catastrophizing time is spent by adding layers to the existing worst case scenario. It would take me five seconds from my brain to move from “something unpleasant has happened” to “life is pointless and I should die.” The rest of the catastrophizing was me spending time coming up with alternate scenarios and playing them out in my mind to imagine how they would finish. What I learned to do in this situation is write out a mind map.

I find that writing out a mind map slows down my catastrophizing brain and allows me to be fairer to myself. Then I can make decisions based on all the possible outcomes, instead of only the negative ones.

Another way to handle the catastrophizing cascade is to get insurance. I was talking with Elle Michell, a risk management consultant for large corporations. She said that we can avoid risk, but that also stunts possible growth. Instead, another option is to get insurance. She said: “Car insurance doesn’t keep you from getting hit. It solely minimizes the negative downsides”. One day I was driving to work. I had barely had the job for a few weeks, and I knew I was going to be late. If I was late, they would start the meeting without me, and I would either miss the whole meeting, or walk in in the middle of it. When everyone saw me walk in, they’d know I was late, and I would be fired. I was officially catastrophizing, as the panic started to settle in, I knew I had to do something. I pulled over and took a moment, then I called my boss. She answered curtly, so I figured she was busy.

“I just want you to know that I’m heading in, but I’m going to be late, which could make me late for the meeting.”

“That’s ok. We’ll push it 30 minutes and give people time to get to know each other. Get here when you can.”

She did have a talk with me about the importance of punctuality, but by giving myself insurance, I also gave her insurance. Everyone was able to save some face.

After about a week I headed back to military service and continued to meet with Mental Health to review my progress. As I mentioned before, I was excited and committed to the process, because I felt like the end was in sight. They had me scheduled with a psychiatrist every two weeks to review medication, and a psychologist weekly to talk through things.

We were talking about my diet and she asked me if I eat breakfast.

“No, because I have to go to PT (exercise) in the morning, and the Chow Hall closes before I can get back.”

“What if we had the chow hall put aside some food for you?”

“I couldn’t eat it, because I have to be at my duty station by seven sharp.”

“I’ve noticed you use the phrase ‘have to’ a lot,” she said, changing the subject.

She handed me a slip of paper and explained you don’t need to do anything except eat, sleep, and breathe. You have to eat or you’ll die. That includes all the things related to eating, like using the restroom. You have to sleep, or your body will do it for you. One day after working more than two days straight, I fell asleep and didn’t realize I was sleeping until someone woke me. It’s not optional — your body will sleep one way or another. Obviously breathing is also non-optional.

“Well, I appreciate what you’re doing here, but I disagree,” I said back smugly. “I do have to report to duty.”

“What will happen if you don’t?”

“I’ll be put in jail!” I was annoyed. She was a military officer. Surely she understood the way things worked.

“And will you die there?”

“What? No!”

“Do you want to go to jail?”

“No.”

“So you want to go to work in order to avoid going to jail.”

I don’t remember if she kept talking after that or not. I was irritated. She wants me to say, “I want to go to work,” but I don’t want to work. I want to sit at home and work on experiments all day. I want to be an inventor who lives on the side of a mountain where people never visit, and it’s cool all year ‘round. I don’t feel like I want to go to work.

Later that week someone invited me to the movies. The film they were going to watch seemed fun, and I wanted to hang out with friends. Yet I was afraid that hanging out with them would mess up my routine and I wouldn’t make it to work on time. I started to say “I have to prepare for work,” but I paused.

“I’d love to go. It really sounds interesting, but I want to get things ready for work.”

“Ok,” they said. “Have fun!”

I froze for a bit and thought about how I felt. Was I okay with saying that I wanted to get things ready for work? Honestly, I understand how I did want to get my things ready for work. I also wanted to watch the film. At that moment, I felt like I would have preferred to watch the movie. Yet If I fast-forwarded one day, things may be different. I would probably be pleased I got my uniform ready instead of watching a movie.

Ever since I’ve been looking for opportunities to change “have to” to “want to”. I also switch my “need” to “would like”. It’s made a significant impact on my peace. I generally feel more at peace when I do things that I want to do than when I do things because I feel obligated to do them.

In addition to replacing “need to” with “want to,” I’ve found that other changes in my self-talk have made a significant difference in the way I feel. For example, one day I dropped a coffee mug on the tile floor. Hot coffee splashed on my clothes and the floor. Chunks of ceramic flew everywhere.

I started to say “this is a disaster.” It felt like the worst way things could have ended. Now I had to make up time, change clothes, and clean the kitchen. It was stressful to hear the ceramic shatter. Instead, I said out loud, “that was unfortunate.” I immediately felt relief. Ever since I’ve been using phrases like “that could have gone better.”

Some people tend to get hung up on the extreme with this concept. The goal of this manner of thinking is not to encourage people to skip out on work because they want to. The goal is for you to find the reason that you want to do something — even if you think you don’t want to do it. If you don’t enjoy your job, then it may help you find another job. But the purpose isn’t to say that you can stop going to work because you want to.

Using these new phrases has helped me to feel less like I’ve hit rock bottom and more like there is a chance at recovery. Furthermore, saying things like “that could have gone better” encourages me to try harder next time. I’m not saying that these phrases will fix everyone’s problems. I do believe that these changes can help some people to have better days in the midst of chaos.

Armed with my pills and my new phrases, I had high expectations of life. However, something was still missing. I figured that I would take the pills for the rest of my life, and my problems would go away, but pills alone aren’t the solution. I’m not the only one who felt that way either.

Consider Johan Hari, a London journalist who suffered severe depression most of his life. His doctor put him on antidepressants, and he felt much better. Eventually, the feelings would come back and his doctor would up the dose. After he reached the maximum allowed dosage, his problems came back as usual.

He had to go deeper, but he was afraid to allow anything to challenge his belief that he’d found the answer in his pills. He was working on a book named “Chasing the Scream,” which addressed the war on drugs in Mexico. He would often bury himself in his work to keep from investigating his problem with depression.

I found it easier to interview hit men for the Mexican drug cartels than to look into […] my story about my emotions — what I felt, and why I felt it.

What do you do when the thing that’s supposed to work doesn’t work for you? As a journalist, he decided to do what he did best. He flew forty thousand miles and interviewed doctors from all over the world. What he found is that while medication can have an impact on your emotional well-being, the solution is sometimes inside of you.

He says things really fell into place when he met Dr. Derek Summerfield. Dr. Summerfield attempted to introduce the Cambodians to antidepressants in 2001.

They said to him “We don’t need them, we’ve already got antidepressants.”

“What do you mean?”

He thought they were going to talk about their native home remedies, but instead they told him a story. There was a farmer who stood on a land mine and got his leg blown off. They fit him with an artificial leg, and soon he went back to work in the rice fields. As it turns out, it’s painful to work under water when you’ve got an artificial limb. It was fairly traumatic to go back to work where he got blown up. The farmer started crying all day and refused to get out of bed.

“This is when we gave him an antidepressant,” said the Camboian doctor.

“What was it?” replied Dr. Summerfield.

They told him that they went to sit with him and listen to him talk. They understood his pain, but it had understandable causes in his life. So they talked to the community and decided to buy him a cow. They said to themselves that if he started selling milk instead of rice, then he wouldn’t hurt himself so much or work in the place where he was injured.

Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped. Within a month, his depression was gone. That’s what the Cambodians meant by antidepressants. To be clear, we’re not talking about cows here. We’re talking about community. Had they given him pills and more positive self-talk, he would have still been going through the same frustrating situations, which causes a physical and mental toll.

Johan Hari says, “If you’re depressed, if you’re anxious, you’re not weak. You’re not crazy. You’re not a machine with broken parts. You’re a human being with unmet needs.” He feels you need to get into a community or group to find meaning and purpose.

I partly agree, but I have an unpleasant premonition. You see, I had all these things, and my life did improve. However, the improvement didn’t hold for long, and I eventually found myself at rock bottom again (emotionally speaking). I hope Johan Hari has an unbelievably happy life, but I fear he will hit rock bottom again.

I perceive humans as people of three parts: mind, body, and soul. When healing a person, you must heal the whole person. If you fix problems with chemical imbalances, resolving problems with your body, you’ll be more capable to fix the rest of your problems. If you fix problems with your mind by adjusting self talk and joining a community, then you advance things further. However, life isn’t going to do you any favors, and you have to have a way to manage the continuous onslaught of problems it throws at you. You need something more transcendental than pills and happy thoughts.