Fumbled it Again

I fumbled the A to Z Challenge. Again.

But rather than asking myself why I even bother to jump into things that I obviously can't handle I'm going to stick to telling myself, "It's better to have strived and failed than never to have striven at all."

Still, I think I've learned something important about myself. (Something more than "Oh God, remind me never to try the A to Z again.") Or at least finally managed to get it through my thick skull:

I can't handle hard deadlines or schedules.

Now, let me clarify. I've tried deadlines and schedules. I've tried them in abundance. I've tried participating in the excellent A Round of Words in 80 Days, which is about as lenient a writing challenge as you can get, and I even signed up for NaNoWriMo last year, a much stricter challenge, and gave that a shot. I've tried setting my own goals somewhere in between. I've tried telling myself "just write something, anything, even if it's only one sentence of fiction, everyday." I've tried various daily word count goals. I've tried every type of goal I can think of.

But here's the thing... (and when you read that, I want you to hear it in the voice of Tony Shalhoub as Monk, because I always do.) Here's the thing... I become hopelessly anxious at the thought of deadlines. And it doesn't matter what word you use. Call it a goal, call it a challenge, call it whatever you want. My inner demons aren't fooled. If I'm supposed to accomplish a specific task by a specific time/date then I can't handle it.

Trivia: in my senior year of high school I was supposed to write a 10 page paper for my English class. I couldn't handle the deadline for this paper. It passed by and I hadn't even read the book I was supposed to be analyzing. (I never actually did read the whole thing. It was an awful book, but there was a list of books we were supposed to choose from and I was sick that day so when I came back to school I had to choose from the dregs.) Weeks passed. My teacher finally cornered me and made it clear that my grade would be shot if I didn't turn in that paper. Filled with anxiety, I forced myself to write 10 pages of, what I thought of as, drivel. (Have I mentioned that I hate literary criticism? Which is basically what we were supposed to do.) Well, I must have simulated what my teacher wanted well enough because despite taking off 20 points for being late, I scraped a grade of 77.

What's the point of that story? There's a part of me that knows perfectly well that I can do the tasks that are set for me. I'm a smart, competent person and even a decent writer and part of me knows it. The other part is thoroughly convinced that I'm a failure at everything I do and that I can't write worth crap. The second part of me is usually in charge. And fighting against that part of me, even thinking about going against it, causes terrible anxiety EVEN WHEN I KNOW, LOGICALLY, THAT THAT PART OF ME IS WRONG. I've talked a bit about my anxiety before. Anxiety is painful in a very physical as well as mental way and it's exhausting to struggle with it. And people, like me, with real anxiety problems (I take medication, but it only helps so much) have no control over how our minds and bodies react to it.

I can't handle deadlines. They give me panic attacks. They paralyze my mind and body.

So what can I do?

I think the key to why deadlines give me such anxiety is that they are in the future. During all the time between NOW and THEN my mind has ample opportunity to play on my insecurities. (And it has a rip roaring time, let me tell you.) I usually start out well. But as time passes everything becomes more and more difficult for me to face. Perhaps, then, I should eliminate that time factor. But how?

I'm also the type of person who needs to feel prepared when I sit down to write. Otherwise uncertainty creeps in and that leads to more anxiety. I need to have my research done, my notes to hand, and at least a rough outline of what I want to accomplish with my story in mind. Right now I don't feel prepared. So I'm going to focus on preparation, because the thought of research and outlining doesn't freak me out like the thought of actually writing the story does. And I think if I'm better prepared then the thought of writing the story will freak me out less.

So my goal is to finish all of my research and worldbuilding notes and outlines by the end of the summer. (By that I mean the end of summer vacation.) Right now I've got 5 kids, 2 of which are in school. In September my middle child will be starting kindergarten. That will mean only the two little ones home and they both take good naps during the day. So if I can manage to finish everything I need to feel prepared over the summer, I'm going to try to discipline myself to sit down and write during nap time. I'm not going to set wordcount goals or anything, I'm not event going to set myself the goal of writing everyday. I'm just going to try to set up a correlation in my mind: nap time>write. I won't guilt myself if I miss a day or if I can only get a sentence down before the boys wake up. I will try to empty my mind of all pressures associated with writing. It will simply be nap time>write.

I will just have to wait and see whether this method will be helpful to me. Every writer needs to find their own method, their own positive habits, what works for them. I'm still searching. Perhaps once I have begun to find it I will feel that I can begin to call myself a real writer. Stay tuned.

Insecure Writer's Support Group: Learning to say "It is good"

Take an insecurity and ratchet it all the way up and what do you get? An anxiety.

I've probably obliquely mentioned that I have anxiety issues before. But I'm one of those people who likes to (needs to, really) maintain a veneer of being calm and collected no matter how I feel on the inside. So while I'm projecting this...

There's a very real chance that on the inside I look more like this...

And the problem with the anxiety that I suffer is that it's general, meaning that at any given point in time I'm feeling strong anxiety about nothing in particular that manifests its self by making everything I want to do difficult. My anxiety isn't based on anything real or anything rational for the most part. And let me tell you, that drives me insane. Because I am a very rational and logical person. So I can sit back and examine my symptoms of anxiety and KNOW that there's nothing to be anxious about, no reason to argue about the possible consequences of every little thing, no basis to most of my fears. And yet, that knowledge has absolutely no affect on my symptoms. I simply can't control the physical effects of my fear. I can't stop the breathing difficulty or the rapidly beating heart or the muscular paralysis or anything else that I experience every time I need to make an important phone call. (That's right, I get severe anxiety from making phone calls. It's stupid and really, really inconvenient and I've been struggling against it for years with no results.)

Quite honestly, anxiety is something that people who have never suffered from it can't understand most of the time.

And I'm talking about this today because in addition to phone calls, trying new tastes, needles and other various things I suffer from anxiety of putting my own words out there for other people to read. I know that this is what's been holding me back for a long time as a writer. It was easier, once upon a time, when I didn't really consider publication as the goal of my writing. I just wrote because I couldn't help it and the only person I ever showed any of it to was my husband. Now that every word I write has the potential to be seen by the public...

Well, let's just say I even have a hard time hitting the publish button on blog posts. There's a part of me always second guessing myself, whispering "You could have said that much better with a bit more time". But down that road lies madness. If you start telling yourself that with a bit more work it could be so much better (even though it's true) then you'll never get around to publishing anything because it could ALWAYS get better. None of us are sitting down to the computer and typing up perfection on the first draft or even the 50th.

For me, this particular madness is preemptive. Before I even get a first draft down the voices are whispering to me, "Why bother? You'll never get it right. It will always fall short of what you want it to be." And that's probably true as well. It's probably been true of all the masterpieces of literature that were ever published. In one way or another, they fell short of the author's vision. And yet we have those masterpieces because at some point the writer looked at his or her creation and said "It is good." Not "It is perfect and could never get better" but simply "It is good."

I haven't managed to reach this point yet, but I'm working on it. I suspect simple discipline is necessary and I am admittedly not a very disciplined person in my habits. That's something I plan to work on this year.

So how about you? Do you struggle with this anxiety? Have you found ways of combating it? I could use all the tips and tricks I can get.