It’s been a while since I’ve written anything creative,
anything beyond work manuals and emails. Perhaps a haiku here and there, but
the passion I once felt for it – the feeling that it was the most natural thing
in the world to do… has left me. There was a time in my life where writing was
second nature. It was something I was born doing; telling stories and
communicating my thoughts was my most natural state of being. Writing was
something I did not need motivation to do, it just happened.
And I lost it.
I haven’t updated my blog in more than a year. I haven’t
written anything with serious purpose in that time and beyond. It is as if I
had achieved my dream of becoming a published author so I could check that item
off my bucket list and move on to the new thing. That was what I had been
telling myself, but now I’m not so sure. There is always more to a motivation
than what is on the surface and when I look at the date of my last attempt to
write something for my blog, I realize that it was around the same time I
started my battle with anxiety, although I didn’t not know at the time that
anxiety was what I was actually feeling. In fact, it has taken me this long to
see how badly anxiety has taken over my life and robbed me of my joy.
Never one to shy away from sharing my life’s progression on
this blog, I don’t see any reason why I would process this experience any
differently. The creeping creature of anxiety, the boogie man I could never
see, but always feel breathing on my neck has lingered in my life, my chest, my
brain dampening my spirit and lust for life for far too long. I have buried
these feelings deep within me, smile glazed across my face as I go about my
daily routine and I am finally seeing it as an observer rather than just a
participant.
In the last six months there have been times when the
anxiety was so bad I broke down crying in the shower in the morning, other
times where my best recourse was to vomit just to get the heaviness out of my
chest. I craved the company of other people; desperate to fill the time of day
with another human being and I am so incredibly grateful for my roommate and
her understanding as I clung to her company as if it would save my life. You
see, it wasn’t loneliness that I feared, but rather being alone with myself. I
remember being too afraid to write, even journal, because I was not ready to
face whatever demons were within me, these sources of anxiety that, for my own
survival, I needed to smoke out into the light. There were mirrors,
metaphorical and physical, that I could not face without a swelling of tears in
my throat.
And yet, there were days, weeks even, where I felt nothing.
Not the cold emptiness of nothing, but just the calm nothingness of
“not-anxiety.” Those moments of “not-anxiety” were respites of the new normal,
but at my worst they took months to get to. I had been self-medicating to help
me sleep at night until I stopped because my fear of addiction, thankfully,
outweighed my fear of the anxiety.
For a short while, the last two months, I had the longest
respite I’ve felt in the last year. This respite wasn’t “not-anxiety,” but
actual peace. I thought I was finally out of it, cured of anxious feelings that
could be written off as a “tough year,” but I was wrong. In a most beautiful
place, in the thick of the Rocky Mountains, that nasty little gremlin made
itself known for “no apparent reason.” It was just there, sitting in the depths
of my stomach urging me to burst into tears over “nothing.” Compound my anxiety
with boiling frustration and a deep refusal to say anything beyond “my anxiety
is getting the better of me” and my afternoon is shot.
Thankfully, for now (ß
my anxiety is talking, hello Demon #1), I have a support system who did not let
me lock it all away, but rather poked and prodded until I looked at the boogie
man and started talking about what I saw. It is a start and I have a long way to go yet.
I'm not sure where this experience will take me, but what I do know is that there are still stories left inside of me. There are
beautiful landscapes and characters and experiences wrestling for their turn to
be written. I won’t begin my next novel now, but I will begin the training
process again. I am going to set some goals, create some challenges for myself
with writing. Perhaps instead of creating the writing prompts, I will practice
some created by others. It is ok to ask for help. It is ok to seek inspiration
from sources beyond yourself. It is ok to struggle and to fall.
And it is ok to let
someone reach out so that you can stand back up.
