Living With Anxiety - A Literal Pain

 


Sometimes things are nice and calm and easy to deal with, like going to ren faire and getting your hair braided and made really pretty. Sometimes, you stumble upon something that needs to be done, but also triggers your anxiety and mucks up nearly your entire day. 

I'm gonna be honest. Living with anxiety sucks. It's frustrating because it's not really up to you what triggers anxiety or panic attacks sometimes, but then in hindsight, you figure you probably should've expected that. It's really easy to blame yourself for every little thing, but sometimes it's not actually your fault. Sometimes it just happens to take you by surprise.

I've been hesitant for a long time to actually write up a query letter or book proposal so that I can send out my book to get it published. I actually sat down and tried this week, only to start getting anxious. It took me a bit to realize that I was starting to freak out instead of just being reluctant to work on something that's difficult to work on. My mind flashed back to high school and college, working on college application essays and reports and essays in college. Geez. Apparently, I had blocked out just how much those stressed me out. I hate writing stuff like that. With a passion! I don't like trying to make myself look good on paper. It triggers this sense of not being good enough, not being worthy of someone's attention. It makes me feel inadequate. It's completely overwhelming, and logic doesn't work to calm me down.

But...I gotta write up a query letter to send my story out to a few places, to get some feedback and figure out if traditional publishing is the way to go!

There are many types of writing, and to truly be an accomplished writer, you kind of need to be good at more than one type of writing. In my personal opinion. I say this only because it seems to be the only way to get traditionally published. No-one's gonna write this stuff for me, but I clearly can't attempt it on my own because I start wanting to cry, trembling, and wanting to throw my computer out the window. So what do I do?

I'm going to do the one thing I can. Get help. If I can't do this on my own, I'll find someone who can either help me figure out words, or keep me company and distract the anxiety from taking over completely.

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