Daily Inspiration Quote by Dorothy Dix

Anxiety, Dix suggests, is a perversely gifted novelist: it can outwrite reality with cleaner plot twists and no closing credits. "Imaginary troubles" are harder because they are frictionless. They don’t have deadlines, diagnoses, or even the mercy of being provably false. They metastasize in the one place you can’t put down your bags: your own mind.

The line works because of its sly reversal of common sense. We assume the actual is heavier than the hypothetical, but Dix points to a psychological hack: concrete problems come with handles. You can measure them, name them, ask for help, take one humiliating step after another. Imagined problems, by contrast, are pure possibility - which means pure control illusion. You keep rehearsing, bargaining, optimizing, as if the right mental draft will prevent pain. That rehearsal becomes the pain.

Her choice of "queer" matters, too. It’s not just "odd"; it’s faintly accusatory, a wink at the reader’s private melodrama. Dix made her name as a journalist and advice columnist, writing into an era when middle-class respectability demanded that suffering be managed quietly and publicly. In that context, "imaginary troubles" includes not only personal worry but socially produced dread: reputation, marriageability, money insecurity, the fear of becoming a story other people tell about you.

The subtext is bracingly pragmatic: stop treating anticipation as preparation. Reality is often brutal, but it’s also finite. Fantasy has no such decency.