If worse comes to worst

When I feel full of anxiety about money and the future and the freelancing world and the lack of work security in general (and sometimes in particular…), my brain starts doing this mental game where I think about « what’s the worst that could happen ». Various scenarios go through my head, most of them involving having to take some jobs I used to have but swore I would never take again. When I’m down to the last stretch of my imagination, I often end up thinking that « I could always become a waitress » (like anybody would want ME as a waitress).

These days, don’t ask me why, I have a feeling that, if things get really bad, I might end up behind the counter at a Tim Hortons donut shop. (I apologize to all my readers who are actually working at Tim Hortons or who know and care about someone who does. I don’t mean to be insulting. All workers deserve respect. But I have fears, you know, and, well, they are hard to explain… ).

I can see myself in a tiny and ugly apartment with B., in a neighborhood we don’t like very much. We don’t have any furniture since we had to sell it all because of bad money decisions. He has no job and we live on my tips. We kept his old laptop, but we can’t even afford a high speed internet access and have to get on the net via a regular modem. But then he’s making me dinner on a small burner and it smells awfully good in that tiny ugly place, and we’re having fun eating off the floor, and he says I smell like sweet dough since I started working at Tim Hortons, so it’s not so bad after all. Wow, I feel better already!

Worst case scenarios can calm you down, as you realize that it’s not all that bad and you would probably survive any situation to blog about it (even if you were on a slow modem). Still, they tell a lot about a person’s baggage and upbringing. (For example, my parents thought having a mortgage meant living above your means and being slightly pretentious.)

So, I’m curious. What’s your worst case scenario? What do you tell yourself when things are grim? Where are you? How do you spend your days? How does it make you feel to think about it?