The thing about windmills

My horse is tired from all this arbitrary charging. My arm is sore from positioning my lance just so in anticipation of battle.
I tilt, because a battle must be looming. I tilt at imagined slights, at inferred feints, at the whiff of a notion of something untoward. But, when faced with reality, when a person comes to me bearing goodwill and kind thoughts I dismiss it. My perception is greater than my reality. What a ridiculous way to live. My horse is aged, sway-backed and shudders beneath me.
Even more preposterous are the occasions where I do come upon "hulking giants", but instead of seeing them as such, I choose then to view them as harmless conduits of positive energy, when in fact I should be lowering my visor and clicking my tongue to get my august mare to savvy forward into battle.
Why, why, why do I do this? It's almost as though I need to struggle to survive, so when there is no struggle I feel compelled to create one. Surely there is a name for this particular misfiring of some random synaptic fuse. I can't possibly believe that things are going well, so I must create scenarios in which things are not going well at all.
From the detached perspective of an outsider looking in: my god, this girl must be an anxious, overwrought, neurotic bundle of nerves! Why, I bet she beats herself up endlessly if she gains five pounds, or runs a marathon four minutes slower than the last one. She doesn't pay heed to compliments, but dwells on criticisms. When everyone else around her has forgiven her for some minor issue, she will torment herself over it endlessly and wonder what right she has to inhabit the earth. In fact, I bet she operates in so many shades of grey that when the CFO asks her if it's "fine" to transfer seventy thousand pounds from the UK account to the Canadian chequing account she will walk into his office (for fear of having anything in writing) to advise him that she cannot answer that question because "the term 'fine' is subjective" and she doesn't know his ultimate cashflow strategy, therefore she feels she cannot comment.
The sad thing is that, when she does let go, and when she does take a moment to appreciate the vibrant colors of the tulips that spring forth from their planter boxes on the overhead walkway near her office, and visualizes the juxtaposition of the blood red flower, defying all naturous odds, against the burl of traffic and construction in the background; or perhaps when she sees the woman - for the second time in as many days - with the horribly gnarled hands that belong to someone twice her age, who looks as though she has given her very soul to something or someone other than herself or her own happiness, and is the epitome of bone weary with her pewter gray hair and her soft-soled shoes to accommodate her swelling ankles, and the pink nail polish that is applied even though the last tangent of the middle finger of her right hand bends at such an angle that one can't help wondering if that finger wasn't broken, because arthritis cannot possibly be so cruel as to inflict such torment on one single digit, that this girl becomes so immensely overwhelmed with everything that life holds, with everything that each day brings, with a feeling that is so much greater than herself and her surroundings, that she has to take a moment's respite, so as not to shatter the illusion of rigid apathy and self-control.