Future Tripping

coming to terms with my toxic trait

Future Tripping.

Two words that, the moment I heard them strung together, were so clear. I felt seen.

A tripper of the future. Someone who worries about completely made-up future scenarios that will likely never happen. An overthinker who can go deep into an imaginary situation, play out every possible outcome, and then do it all over again.

It’s me, hi!

The other thing I felt when I heard the term? Relief. Relief in knowing that this feeling - the spiral - was common enough to have a name. And a cool name, might I add.

A quick Google search told me it’s alternatively known as anticipatory anxiety. And while that term is just as descriptive, it doesn’t quite have the same je ne sais quoi as Future Tripping. It feels sterile, clinical - like something a doctor would jot down on a prescription pad alongside an Rx for a quick-fix pill before hurrying off to the next patient in the never-ending cog.

Future Tripping, on the other hand, sounds like a summer anthem. Or a brand. A brand with really good hats and sweatshirts, emblazoned with its namesake. But beyond the sheer marketing potential, anticipatory anxiety doesn’t quite land with me. It sounds like something you struggle with in anticipation of everything, which isn’t what I experience. My future tripping is selective - selective worrying, as I like to think of it. I don’t worry about everything, or even most things really, but the things I do worry about? I worry about hard.

It happens in both big ways and small, and only with the people I care about. A delayed text response? I’m worried. A simple “Can we talk?” triggers an internal reel of worst-case scenarios. Even something as routine as a doctor’s appointment can send me down a rabbit hole of what-ifs that end in some highly improbable diagnosis.

Logically, I know most of these things will never happen. But that doesn’t stop my brain from boarding the flight, grabbing a window seat, and taking off into the land of hypothetical doom. And paradoxically? I’m an incredible manifester of good things in my life and am “relentlessly optimistic,” as my husband put it in his vows.