Pretty often lately it’ll happen to me that I’ll look bewildered at reality and just feel like something, even though I can’t quite tell what, is wrong. Wrong as in, things just aren’t going the way they’re supposed to. You think it’s going…fine enough, but then you’ll feel like you’re fricked. Either you messed something up or it was out of your control but either way something went horribly wrong and you can do absolutely nothing about it. So you’re there sitting waiting for the worst to occur just so you can simply accuse it to be the reason for your feeling and call it a day and forget about it. It’s that, or it’s feeling like something with reality itself feels off, almost dreamlike. Though it’s different from derealization. I’m really challenged as I lack the vocabulary to express it all well.
This is not intended to be a joke:
The reality of our lives is that we are fucked. We are going to die, everyone we love is going to die, and before that death if we’re lucky enough to have a long life we’ll face the horror of aging.
If that basic fuckedness of existence isn’t acknowledged and integrated, I could see how it would wander around in the mind trying to be recognized by attaching to nearby situations.
Have you fully accepted the deep and unavoidable horror of existence? Once I did it got easier to keep a functional perspective on whether and when things were going to fuck up.
Another way to put it is that it sounds like a healthy mechanism, amplified to an unhealthy degree. As Bruce Lee said, “Do not be tense, but ready”. Maybe that feeling of certainty that something’s gonna fuck up, only needs to be toned down slightly, to become a readiness for unexpected problems.
Like when you have stage fright, and you re-channel the fear into excitement. Same energy, different frame.