Here it is again. Life as catastrophe. The drumbeat of terrors. What if I never publish another novel? What if I or a loved one succumbs to a devastating disease? What if I give a reading and no one shows up? What if all our money vanishes and we are left to live on the street?

It's OK to snicker here, except all of this feels so real to me. All of it keeps me up at night, and oh, OK, in the daytime, too.

But shaking this off is hard. One bit of doom thinking jumpstarts all other catastrophic thinking about what could happen. And for me, who grew up on catastrophe, it’s like cling wrap.

And for me, it’s learned behavior I want to unlearn.

Growing up, catastrophizing was a way of life taught by my mom and my sister. They believed if you thought about the absolute worst thing happening, you’d be prepared for it. This had to do with terrifying fears about gym class, where I’d be made to leap up onto parallel bars, the same bars that sent another girl to the ER the week before. When I got sick with lung infections, which happened a lot, there was always talk in my house that I was near death. Worse, when I was healthy, catastrophizing carried warnings. Don’t go outside because........

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