Halloween is the one month a year the whole world agrees to be a little unhinged in public. Yard skeletons are somehow twelve feet tall and playing volleyball. Someone at the office shows up as a shark eating a man in a rowboat, and nobody asks why. It’s understandable why Halloween is so many people’s favorite holiday.

But here’s what gets me every October. We’ll spend real money and real effort on fake fear, haunted houses, jump-scare movies, the works, and then walk straight out of that theater into a week of very real, entirely unpaid dread about a doctor’s appointment, a performance review, or an email we still haven’t opened.

We are not short on imagination

Far from it. We use it to cook dinner out of three random fridge items, to picture a room before we’ve bought a single throw pillow, to write the perfect comeback to an argument that happened four years ago, usually around 2 a.m. Our imagination is working overtime. It just isn’t always working for us.

The shark you never saw

Here is a story that has stuck with me for years.

When Steven Spielberg was filming Jaws, the mechanical shark kept breaking down. Salt water, apparently, was not in the plan. He could not shoot the movie the way he had written it, so he was forced to imply the shark instead. A fin. A shot from the water’s point of view. That music.

He let the audience’s imagination do the rest.

And most people will tell you it is scarier than if he had shown the whole shark from the first scene. Left to fill in the blanks, our brains build something worse than what is actually there. Almost every time.

Haunted houses run on the same trick. The scariest part is usually not the actor in the mask. It is the ten seconds of dim hallway before you get to him, when your own brain is doing all the work. The people who design these places know it, and they stretch that hallway out on purpose.

That is not a flaw in the system. That is the whole feature.

Imagination does not come with a setting that says “only use this for good.” It is a tool, full stop. It is just as willing to build our worst-case Tuesday as our dream kitchen. Given nothing else to work with, it will happily write a screenplay where we get the diagnosis, lose the client, or find out everyone has been talking about us. All from one unread text.

I know this because I have attended the two a.m. screening. More than once. I have rehearsed an entire argument with someone who had no idea it was happening, complete with my best lines and their stunned silence. I have typed a symptom into a search bar at eleven at night and had a full condition picked out by eleven-fifteen.

That is imagination too. It is just aimed at the haunted house instead of the highlight reel.

Don’t go in the basement

Here is the part that gets me.

We are the audience yelling “don’t go in the basement” at the screen. We know better for the woman in the movie. We can see from our seat that she should turn on a light, call someone, and run.

And then we go home and do the exact metaphorical version in our own lives. We replay the scary scenario instead of calling the doctor, sending the email, or having the conversation.

We know better for the character. We may just forget to apply it to ourselves.

You are already the director

Halloween is actually a great, low-stakes moment to notice this, because for one month a year we deliberately choose our fear.

We pick the costume. We pick the movie. We decide how many fake spiders go on the porch. We know none of it is real, which is exactly why it is fun instead of just scary.

The rest of the year, most of us are not choosing. We default.

And whatever gets rehearsed the most, in the most vivid detail, on the most repeat, tends to start feeling less like a possibility and more like the plan.

Somebody put the phrase “catastrophic thinking” on this a while ago, and I have not been able to unsee it since. It is not a diagnosis, and I do not think any of us need another label pasted to our foreheads. But sometimes a useful phrase gives us somewhere to begin.

So here is the question I have been pondering during this Halloween week, and I would gently invite you to do the same, too: when it comes to the parts of our lives that actually matter, are we picking the movie? Or are we leaving the remote on the couch for whoever grabs it first?

Where this shows up

This is not about forcing positivity or pretending nothing bad ever happens. Real risk is real. Some sharks are in the water.

It is about noticing which script is currently running, and choosing, a little more often, to write a different one on purpose.

A few places I have watched it show up, in my own life and in the lives of the women I coach:

• The relationship where we have already had the whole fight in our heads before we have brought up the actual topic.
• The goal we quietly shelved because we imagined every single way it could flop, and never once imagined it working.
• The health scare we diagnosed ourselves with three separate times before we called an actual doctor.
• The new opportunity we said yes to in our imagination for about four seconds, before switching the channel back to “what if I fail? What will people say?”
• The deal we have already lost, in our heads, two days before the inspection even happens.
• The trip we talked ourselves out of because we pre-lived every version of it going wrong, weather, flights, budget, before we checked a single price.

None of that means ignoring real risk or real feelings. It means giving the possible version of the story equal screen time to the worst-case one, instead of running the disaster reel on a loop and calling it “being realistic.”

The trailer swap

Here is a small practice I actually use on myself when I catch my imagination writing horror instead of hope. I call it the trailer swap, and it takes about ninety seconds.

1. Catch the scene. Notice the movie currently playing, and name it plainly. “I am imagining this conversation going badly” is enough.
2. Ask who is directing. Is this based on something that has actually happened? Or is it a script my imagination wrote entirely on its own, with no notes from reality?
3. Cut a new trailer. Picture one specific, realistic version where it works out. Maybe even goes really well. Not a fantasy, just a fair outcome.
4. Run it a few times. The scary version got rehearsed into feeling true through repetition. The possible version deserves the same number of viewings.

It is not magic. It does not erase every legitimate worry, and it is not supposed to. It is just redirecting a tool we are all already using constantly, toward something that serves us instead of something that just scares us.

There is a reason actors run a scene dozens of times before it feels believable on stage. Repetition is what turns a script into something that feels true. Our brains do not check whether the script was ever a fact. They just run whatever has been performed the most.

Which means the version we practice is the one that starts to feel real. Whether or not we ever meant to rehearse it.

Picking the pen back up

Whatever we imagine on repeat, we start preparing for. Our nervous system, our choices, our whole posture walking into a room. All of it responds to the movie we keep replaying, even if we never meant to write that particular one.

The power to imagine a version of our lives we are genuinely excited about was never missing. It is the same imagination that has been running the show the whole time. It is just pointed in a different direction.

I have had times in my life where I was running the disaster reel so faithfully I could have charged admission. And at some point I had to stop and ask myself, “Okay, Rosemary. Who exactly is directing this?”

The answer was not comfortable. But it was useful.

So this Halloween, enjoy every bit of the fake fear. The costumes, the candy, the neighbor’s alarmingly ambitious inflatable lawn display. And then, when it comes to the story we are actually living, maybe consider picking the pen back up.

The Power breathing you is greater than any circumstance, situation, or condition. I believe that. And I am absolutely sure it is greater than a screenplay we wrote ourselves at two in the morning.

If any of this is speaking to you, I would love to talk. I offer a free discovery session where we can look at what is really going on, what you actually want, and what a small, doable step forward could look like. No pressure, no pitch, no homework. Just an honest conversation about you and the story you are actually ready to write next.

No need to have the ending figured out before we talk. Come as you are and we’ll explore the scary movies and the possibilities together.

With love,

Rosemary Gibson