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Stop Catastrophizing Your Catastrophe
Instead of helping me, many doctors minimized and misinterpreted my debilitating and constant vertigo.
Do you know what your worst fear is? Take a moment and think about it.
Okay, time’s up. What was it? The loss of a loved one? Being made homeless? Perhaps losing a limb, or being surprised by a shark in the sea? It doesn’t really matter, of course. Not many people have their ultimate, number one, lifelong fear realized out of the blue, for one very simple reason: what is the ultimate horror for one person is probably not the same for another, and it takes a particularly cruel twist of fate to experience your own personal Hell in real life, exactly as you’d imagined it.
But what happens when you do?
When I was a little girl, perhaps nine or ten, I read an article in a newspaper about a woman who’d been dizzy for over twenty years. I can’t remember her name, but I remember her story. One day, she got on a speedboat during a day out with her family, but when she set foot back on solid ground, she still felt as though she was at sea. A constant sense of motion, rocking and swaying, for over twenty years. It had ruined her life, and the doctors couldn’t help. Mal de Débarquement Syndrome, the newspaper said. An extreme case, certainly, but…
