I feel like I’m running out of time on an important deadline. I haven’t done any prep work. I am completely unprepared to even start, much less finish on time.
It sounds like some sort of stress dream.
Only it’s not a dream.
It’s just one of the many obnoxious ways my brain manifests unexplained anxiety.
I’m not actually running on any deadlines—that I know of.
It’s entirely possible there’s something I need to do, that I’ve completely forgotten about because my short term memory is like a damn Etch-a-Sketch. One quick motion and the whole thing is a blank slate.
I’m incredibly slow to respond to any sort of communication (phone calls, emails, texts, et al…). I’ll get the message, I’ll think, “I need to respond to this,” and then…I don’t. More often than not that mother-effing irrational anxiety intervenes, preventing me from doing it right now (unless I want a full-blown panic attack on my hands) and then as soon as I look at something else, somebody jars the Etch-a-Sketch and the thought is wiped clean.
Something will trigger me to remember some time later and I’ll think, “I need to respond to that,” and the cycle begins again. Eventually so much time has passed since the initial communication, I start to wonder if it’s even worth responding because, in many cases, it no longer seems relevant to respond at all.
This is my brain and welcome to it.
Which is to say, my brain is an asshole a hot mess—depression, anxiety, inattentive ADHD—and then you pile on the creative aspect and all that entails and…well…you get things like this blog.
Glutton for punishment you are, you poor fool.
My writing folder is also a bit of a train wreck for the same reasons. I try to keep on top of active projects versus filing away stalled ones, but sometimes it just keeps piling up until I can’t make heads or tails of what I’m actually working on. Then I have to go through and judge harshly, sorting out what I’ve stopped working on, and what is still making progress, no matter how minor.
I NEED to just pick one project and focus on that alone. But…if I’m only working on one thing at a time, and I get stuck on a given part, then I don’t write anything and then the mental health starts to spiral and…yep.
Countless projects at one time, it is.
A while back…or two years ago, apparently…I went through my writing folder and all my active projects, and wrote a blurb for each one. It was an exercise in brevity (even if the post itself is stupid long) which is not exactly one of my strong suits, especially when it comes to writing.
It’s interesting to go back to that post and see what’s changed in the projects themselves, and what I’m still working on verses what has been stuffed into the stalled folder. A lot has changed, but a lot has also stayed the same in all that time.
I’ve been wanting to do that again with the current state of my writing folder. I’ve started and stopped and deleted a handful of posts, but it’s a really slow slog. There are some projects that just haven’t changed enough to warrant another blurb. But there are plenty that are new to the pile that I could write about. But when I sit down to write it out…I got nothin’.
Par for the course.
I have plenty to write about all of these projects, but the brevity aspect becomes a problem. And the whole point of the exercise is keeping it short. Then the projects with multiple versions under one header get rather convoluted, especially the most recent one eating my brain.
So where does that leave me?
Staring at my writing folder, cursing my inability to focus on one thing at a time, and wondering how long it will be before I fall back into the seek therapy folder and start focusing on inane fanfiction again. Or some other never-see-the-light-of-day monstrosity. Or I’ll just keep coming up with different scenarios to put Alison, Parker, and Tyler into because why not?
(Effortlessly by Sister Hazel)
—
 |
Give Me Something O.A.R. |