Anxiety right out of the gate
In a not-so-unexpected turn of events, I was a little too optimistic while on holiday. I came back to work on the 4th of January and immediately had to put my writing plans aside. We are in the home stretch of a six-month project and are doing the last user interviews, discussing deliverables, and preparing our final presentation. Monday was back to back calls to catch up and plan our next couple of week.
Despite being more than reasonable for me to take a break from writing, which is a side hobby, I felt my usual anxiety build up and found myself often thinking about how I wasn't writing. Equally predictable has been my inability to focus on writing anytime I had some spare time since I didn't have enough time to wind down from work.
Having a creative job is awesome, I love what I do and I will be the last person to complain about work. In fact, I even like the company I work for. But that means that any creative hobby actually taps into the same type of energy I need for writing.
Recently, I've started paying more attention to this sort of things, and I've divided my activities into four types: active, passive, physical and social.
Active activities, such as writing, drawing, or playing the guitar, require me to create something.
Passive activities include reading, watching videos or movies, and even scrolling through social media – anything that involves consuming media of any kind. These end up taking a lot of my off time because so much of my work is in the active court.
Physical activities are of course stuff like walking and going to the gym, maybe the occasional yoga class, and social activities focus on building relationships with other humans (90% of whom has been my partner during this pandemic).
These are basically my character stats and they need to be kept in check. The good news is that one type of energy seem to top up while I'm using a different one, so going to the gym will free up some brain space for some reading, or spending enough time writing “in the zone” will eventually make me want to see people again.
This is probably pretty basic for most people I was never taught how to regulate my energy or my emotions as a kid, and I'm “reparenting” myself as I go. It's much harder to learn as an adult.
All this to say that I've hit a wall right out of the gate with my project, but I'm trying not to be too hard on myself because work has been pretty intense and I need to chill.
##starting small
Since I'm still not sure about the entire plot, but I want to start writing, I'm giving myself the opportunity to explore my potential character with some short stories. I will start posting them on my [other (as of today empty) blog] (https://wordsmith.social/queer-stories-lab/). If I post there, I won't post here unless I feel strongly about it – sometimes I need to debrief. Also, when I'm in the writing zone I don't really want to get out and journalling is a very easy way to keep going.
I was also following a creative writing course on Coursera and I will try and pick it back up and post the writing exercises there.