What If?

In the New York Times’ building in Times Square, there is a front-page story that will never see the light of day.

I first encountered it while visiting the building’s in-house museum as part of a 2022 summer journalism program. Traipsing through the space, I marveled at previously published coverage of the most significant events in modern American history: the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the moon landing, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. This front page, in contrast, was caught in media res. Eternally preserved in its unfinished state, its header was “New York, Someday”; its body text read “Lorem Ipsum”; and its empty spaces, porous, remained unstoppered by photos.

All that was left was the headline, written out in bold black text: “MADAM PRESIDENT: CLINTON DEFEATS TRUMP IN HISTORIC VICTORY; DEMOCRATS IN CLOSE RACE TO RETAKE SENATE.”

More than anything else in the museum, this image captivated me. It seemed, to me, a visual representation of a truncated timeline, a story unfurling before crumpling back on itself. I can’t say it wasn’t disheartening seeing how tantalizingly close Clinton’s victory had been, but my fascination overwhelmed my disappointment. What would that alternate world look like?

This kind of “what-if” is, of course, not new — counterfactual thinking underpins everything from “Back to the Future” to historical fiction to the scientific method. Any sort of reimagining or reshaping of an already told narrative involves considering these what-ifs, assigning new weights to the delicate balance of contingency and agency. The magnitude and proximity of the what-ifs embodied by the newspaper, however, arrested me. The almost-tangible alternate histories opened up a web of previously obscured possibilities.

***

What To Do When Your Brain Gets Stuck”: This volume, covered in a thin film of dust, sits at the bottom of the bookshelf in my room at home. While eerily reminiscent of self-help material in the back of a store, it’s designed for kids — on the front cover, a young boy punctures a series of balloons bearing the legends “check,” “count,” and “redo” while a roller coaster careens by. The goal? To help the child in question (me) deal with anxiety.

I’ve been an anxious person since elementary school. For me, thoughts manifested mainly in “what-if” form, ranging from the broad — What if I’m not smart anymore? What if I’m secretly selfish? — to the minute: What if I didn’t read a few pages of the book? Does that mean that I haven’t actually read it? What if all of my stuff fell out of my bag, even though I know it’s been completely zipped shut? (The latter concern continues to plague me. I habitually glance over my shoulder while walking to ensure that I haven’t dropped anything. I know that looks suspicious. I do it anyway.)

“What to Do When Your Brain Gets Stuck” was supposed to help me ferret out each of these what-ifs, incisively interrogate them, and decisively destroy them. The source of the anxieties was conveniently personified in the pages of the book as an impish, fanged monster, and I was to avoid capitulating to its demands by engaging in strategic tactics of delay (don’t act on an anxious compulsion immediately) and exposure (deliberately confront smaller concerns, and then build up to larger ones).

Over the years, I have become increasingly adept at keeping up with the imp, sparring deftly with it, predicting and subverting the worries it’d set up as if it were an exercise in logic. Still, I have had to combat evolving anxieties. The pandemic brought with it a host of new what-ifs about social interaction after a year spent online. (What if I’m coming across as awkward?) When I turned fifteen, driving became a new manifestation of “what-ifs,” the consequences of each excursion magnified by potential fatalities. (This one’s more simple: What if I die?)

This kind of cat-and-mouse chase is, of course, tiring. And when my brain got stuck, it got stuck. As a writer and musician, I adored the creative process, but I was always more comfortable adhering rigidly to set formats, aghast at any opportunities that required extemporaneous creation. Every enterprising thought, one type of what-if — What if I tried X? — quietly, quickly became a different kind of what-if — What if I failed X? — and was put to bed. I cut my own stories short.

While seeing the New York Times header didn’t spark an epiphany regarding these parallel what-ifs, it did make me step back for a moment. There was no use crying over spilled milk — I couldn’t change the past — but I could consider alternate stories. For the first time, I thought, What could happen? instead of What should happen?

The difference between the two questions is subtle, but one expands, and the other contracts. The second delineates a “right answer” and thus creates anxious what-ifs; the first, open-ended, encourages exploration. I had been looking at “what if” in just one way for so long that I’d lost sight of its other meanings.

***

When I arrived on campus in September, “What to Do When Your Brain Gets Stuck” was not among the set of volumes I lugged to campus — a motley crew of Toni Morrison and Stephen King novels — but perhaps it should have been. My what-ifs had doubled and tripled in amplitude: Everything from academics to food to navigation was new, and therefore uncertain.

It’s something of a cliché to tell first-years to “try new things,” but I recognized that it would be the best way to harness my creative what-ifs, exercise their muscles so that they might fight a worthy battle with the anxious ones. I forged into new territory, hefting what-ifs both apprehensive and inventive on my back. When I saw signs around campus advertising auditions for Harvard’s improv troupes, I decided I’d give it a shot, hoping that the principle of “yes, and?” would trump the insidious “What if no one laughs?” I took a film music class in which I’d have to score a scene from a movie. I got off-campus to avoid staying in the Harvard bubble.

At the same time, I shirked from a cappella auditions even though I enjoyed singing; decided against pursuing creative writing; and found myself too intimidated to properly attend Harvard Composers Association meetings. That is to say, I do not always choose the “right” path, and I don’t think I will ever quite learn how to balance my what-ifs. But I am getting better at it.

So when the election results began to roll in on Nov. 5, the New York Times front page and my what-ifs immediately came to mind. Right now, I thought, there is an editor at the New York Times who has just deleted “Madam President” from the front page again. Perhaps it was even the same page that he pulled up, to play around with the headline, perhaps change the “Clinton” to “Harris,” delete the bit about the Senate, make the 2016 into a 2024. But despite the frustration in this, despite the fact that she didn’t win, this unfinished page bears witness to the fact that she ran.

And the things that I do, the millions of messy and sometimes unsuccessful what-ifs they engender, bear witness to my life.