I just did a Google image search for “how bad can it go” and among a whole bunch of pseudo-inspirational bullshit memes about adjusting a bad attitude, there was this completely random picture of butter. I really like butter and I really like completely random things, so I am linking to this picture with much delight.

When I finally decided to bite the bullet and start a new blog, I had a lot of trouble coming up with a name.  I wanted something clever and snazzy, something that was memorable and rolled off the tongue.  I’m generally neither clever nor snazzy, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t pretend to be on the Internet, right?!  The names I came up with were weak at best, though.  Finally, I put the question to a group of my favorite knitter friends on Ravelry (shout out to my LSG ALA hoars), and the suggestion of “Eat Your Words” came up.  Since eating my words in the figurative sense is something I’m all too familiar with, and since I was coming off a long (if sporadic) stint as a self-styled food blogger, it felt like a perfect name.

The Internet, however, is full of thieving rat bastards who come up with good ideas WAY faster than I do, so “Eat Your Words” was already long gone on every blogging site I searched for it. Incidentally, so were “Eat My Words”, “Eat These Words” and “Eat Some Words”.

‘Ok, Internet, I FUCKING GET IT’, I thought to myself. I started to question whether or not I should even bother with the blog at all, and had a good 45 minute grump session where-in I detailed all my life failings to myself (the list is vast but I’m so well practiced that it tends to go very quickly once I start), before finally saying, ‘Fuck it. I’m doing this. How bad can it go?’

And then it dawned on me. If I was going to write about my mental struggles, my whacked-out sense of humor…if I was going to write about ME…then “How Bad Can It Go” was actually a far better name than the ones I had originally been looking for. It fits so well because not only is it something that I actually say ridiculously frequently (usually in a sarcastic manner), but it’s also a play on how my brain works.

When you’re an analytical person, you tend to be the type that thinks through many possible outcomes of every action. When you’re analytical by nature and also have an anxiety disorder, your ability to think through multiple outcomes and weigh various options can swiftly turn from a useful asset to a crippling liability. I am a person who often quite literally cannot stop thinking of all the ways anything and everything can go badly. You could point me to a scene of utter tranquility, ask “how bad can it go?”, and I’d be able to come up with at least three nightmare scenarios right off the top of my head. Granted, they would likely be far-fetched at best, but that’s one of the supreme ass-aches of an anxiety disorder – even when you know damn well that what you’re thinking is completely fucking ridiculous and far-fetched, you can’t not think it. You can’t shut off the part of your brain that is continually saying, “what if, what if, what if, whaaaaatttt iiiiiifffff”.

One of the ways I’ve learned to deal with my anxiety and depression is to try and find the funny in it. Even if it’s the type of terrible gallows humor that I can’t explain to anyone without making them grimace and back away slowly, it still helps. It’s a little bit harder to get stuck in a “what if” feedback loop when I’m coming up with the most ludicrous and unfeasible scenarios possible on purpose in the interest of making myself or other people laugh.

Like I’ve said before, I’m really good at starting things but pretty crap at finishing them, so this is the point in my little shit-show of an essay where I’m struggling to come up with something eloquent to sum everything up. So instead, I’ll just stop writing for now and wonder how bad it can go…