Anxieties, Old and New

It made me very sad today, when I realized that there are now more mandatory blog posts behind me than there are ahead of me for the composition class that spawned this project. Of course, I plan to continue to write in this blog even after it's no longer required, because, after all, it's my personal slice of the Internet, damn it, and it's my awesome T-Rex picture up there.

Still, when I realized that the time is fast approaching that this will no longer be required portion of my day, it made me sad. I have very much come to look forward to the time that we spend together, you and I. I like to look through the archives and see how I've been, night after night. I enjoy the record that has begun to accumulate.

Again, this is not to say that I'm going to stop once the assignment has ended. What makes me said is knowing that the safety net will be gone. The deadline will be passed, in one sense, and I'll go back to the old way; where my updating only happens because I want it to happen. I will not lie; I'm very fond of the way things are right now. The fact that this matters for a grade is an excellent motivator to keep me on task, to keep me updating even when I don't feel like it... especially when I don't feel like it. Because that's how it starts, that's how this new, wonderful habit of writing every day starts to revert back to the old ways of "meh, I'll write when I feel like it."

We all know this by now: very, very rarely, does one every truly "feel like it." Oh, sure, there are the times where I have a great idea and I think, "that might make a cool story," and I'll sit down, and start writing. Or I'll think about how much I want to blog every day and I'll do a few entries. But always, the fire goes out after a few days, everything fades once the "new" feeling wears off. And by the time it's work, my interest has gone to other things.

I don't like that. I don't like being that way, and that's why this has all been so important to me. That's why this blog has become so important to me and why the NaNoWriMo project has become so important to me. Because these two things show me that I can be the kind of writer that I dream of being. That I can be the person who writes every day, like my heroes do.

These things have shown me that I might have what it takes to live my dream.

It's not about being good, any more. I used to worry about that, in all of my writing classes and with every single thing that I set out to do. I used to worry, is this good? Is this something that's worthy of a "real writer?" I know why I think, or rather, why I thought that way for so long, for several years, in fact. I had a friend when I was younger, who, despite being a well meaning and caring individual, made a comment on one of the first short stories I ever wrote, that stuck with me to this very day. She read one of my early works, before she really knew me, and a few years later, we were talking about those first attempts, and she remarked how silly it seemed to her, that I had been this callow kid who thought he could be a writer with storytelling skills that were that poor and unfocused.

I know, of course, that she meant it as a compliment to how far I had come since those early days, but I know that I took some of what she said in a negative context, which became an anxiety throughout my life whenever I would tell people "oh, I'm a writer." And it's very possibly all in my head, but there was the worry that, upon telling somebody you want to make this thing your life, that you feel that it is your life in a sense, that you have a certain standard to meet. You better be good if you tell people you want to be a writer.

It's an anxiety that I carried with me for too long, and that I admit, still gnaws at me from time to time. But more and more, as I write for the pleasure of it and because I find that I am unhappy when I don't do it, I realize that it doesn't matter. Anxiety is my greatest opponent, I have realized. It is the source of my procrastination and it's what has held me back every time I allowed myself to stop, when I told myself "oh, I don't feel like writing tonight."

I do not pretend to think that the battle is over and that I'm suddenly this paragon of confidence. New anxieties replace old ones, after all; for instance, I worry now that I use the word "suddenly" far more often than I should. But just like courage is not the absence of fear, but the will to act in spite of it, so too is my resolve not wrought of a lack of anxiety, but the freedom to push beyond it.