Anxiety

I was thinking this morning as I was getting ready to get on here and start my writing exercise about anxiety. There are a lot of words for it and ways of explaining it. There are also a lot of opinions about it. Whether it’s good or bad. Whether it keeps us going or destroys us. I was thinking that it may be a topic to do my morning exercise on and then wondered if I could find one thousand words on anxiety. It may be that I can. It is up to my fingers you know. So here it is. If you don’t have to write about anything at all, just write, then you let your soul talk. Your fingers bring the inner self to the front and what you see appearing on the page in front of you is a surprise. It’s not at all like thinking carefully about every word. Yesterday afternoon it took me an hour to carefully choose twenty words. They are very important words and I may change them again as the creativity flows. They are on the first three pages of Elsie Rabbit’s Easter and that’s why they are so important and also why it took so long. I even got frustrated in the middle of it because after taking a minute to focus my attention to teaching Chloe how to make a paper airplane she insisted on interrupting me every five minutes with updates as to how the planes were doing and what was going on at the paper airplane airport. So I got frustrated and yes, a little anxious. I said, “you know, I need a place to work where I can shut the door.” It wasn’t very nice of me. I felt so bad that I got writers block. I thought about packing it up for another day but resisted. Pretty soon I got back to my words and worked out loud. So everyone could hear everything going on inside my head. I asked her if she had enough planes and if so, could she please just go and play. My husband was having stress of his own. The water pipe going from the well to the house has been plugging up gradually and finally the dribble is not working for either of us and it is time to deal with it. He tried to blow the blockage out backwards with an air compressor but it only made it worse. So now our little stream is even smaller. He had turned the water off to the house so that he could do this stuff. Since every job which needed to be done at that time required water, I decided to work out the text and picture layout for my first three pages. I would like to get three pages a day figured out. I will be ok with two pages a day. After all, a small step forward is movement. As long as something is happening every day. Sometimes I am so excited and happy about my book and at other times I’m completely nervous about it and wonder if I’m seriously over the top disillusioned. Whether or not I should be spending my time this way. I’ve read enough now to know that all authors, whether it’s their first book or their tenth or twentieth have these same feelings of inadequacy and self doubt. They don’t last long and I put them all in their place in my head. We had some level of stress going on in our house and then to top it off, I reminded my husband that I am completely out of chicken feed and can be ready to leave whenever he is at a point. He was getting a little quiet which I am learning is what happens when a man has a big job to do and is challenged. The thing is that these things are our personal challenges and we are able to deal with them, it will just take some time. But these things are only stressful if we fight them. I channeled my brain to focus on the words on the first three pages. My husband made a plan to put in a new water line. And Chloe played airport with her new airplanes which I might add, her dad rebuilt for her since the ones I showed her how to build weren’t that good. Somehow I should have known that he was a professional paper airplane maker. We went to get feed and it was a nice quiet drive. Our level of stress is not too high and our anxiety level is even lower. One reason is that we haven’t turned on the news for a long time. We don’t concern ourselves with too much that doesn’t have to do with us. We can look things up on the internet if we need to. I look up international news sometimes to keep up a little on stuff going on. I checked on the fires going on out west. I have family living close to some of those fires. I also checked on the news from the middle east as I am interested in what is going on with Israel. I check these things from the internet though. I don’t turn on the TV at all. I don’t want all that anxiety coming into my living room. I don’t read the newspaper either. I don’t want to be bombarded with information all day long about things which don’t have anything to do with me. I do select information. If I want to know something I can find it out. This is after all the age of information. What I don’t need is more stress than an ordinary afternoon will provide. Since my anxiety levels have gone down I have become more creative. Even though channeling that creativity may produce stress of it’s own, it is always something that I can do something about so it turns into a challenge. It appears that I’m not very good at talking about anxiety. I still got one thousand words but not much on the subject. Maybe another day I’ll nail it.

Elizabeth Williams, 1,000 words a day, exercise.