2014: Goals for Life, and How to Get Over Anxiety.

Don’t let the title mislead you into thinking I know how to get over anxiety, because I don’t. Really what I’m trying to do is figure out how to do that. Because what I’m doing is I’m trying to get myself out there as a writer, as an independent artist, and I keep stabbing myself in the foot by closing off my doors and walls and sequestering myself instead of finding ways to get out there.

This applies to life in general.

I’ve been depressed since April of this year. Only within the last couple of months have I really started to pull myself out of it. I drank everyday, I kept myself indoors as much as possible, I didn’t go out with friends and I hardly did anything nice for myself. I wrote, I went to work, I came home. Every other weekend I have my children and we sit around and play video games for three days straight until they go back to their mom, and I return to my shadow. It hasn’t been easy, or recognizable. It wasn’t as though I was aware of the fact that I was depressed; when you’re there, you don’t really know. Or maybe you do, and you just don’t know how to get over or out of it. My choice was drinking away the knowledge. I got drunk every single night from April to September, about which time I drastically decreased my alcohol intake. Literally every single night I was getting drunk. On the weekends I would clear through a 12 pack of Corona or Rolling Rock without question. So in September, sometime around my birthday on the 26th, after going a week without drinking, my body basically shut down while I was at work and I had a massive panic attack. I had another one recently. It wasn’t as bad, but that’s because I knew what it was as it came. The first one, I didn’t know. I freaked out. That made it worse. But the combination of depression, my mother’s death, a recent breakup, and the lack of alcohol all collided together and thus my whole body just gave up.

I have anxiety. Working in public service, or rather customer service, has lessened it to a degree over the years, but every time I approach someone new there’s a new tinge of sweat running down my sides, a flutter in my chest, a tearing noise in my head. I’ve learned how to introduce myself when I serve tables, how to talk to people, how to mask it. Every now and again I come across a situation where I don’t know what to do, and then everything freezes. It’s like running, but then there’s a concrete wall going high into the sky and pushing outward in all directions. How do you get over that?

Part of me hiding myself in my apartment is anxiety. Part of it is wanting relief from feeling like I don’t know what I’m doing. That’s really the root of anxiety for me: that I don’t know what I’m doing, and that whoever is watching me will judge me on my performance. As such, I’ve become a really hard worker in whatever job I’m doing, but I’m at the point where I don’t want to go to a daily job anymore. I’ve published three books, I’m editing my fourth, and I’m writing my fifth. Writers, like any artists, need to put time and effort into their craft to get noticed and to make money off of what they do. It’s just how it works. And I want to do that. Except then it happens: anxiety. Which, when one thinks about it logically, shouldn’t be a problem. After all, who’s watching me try and put myself out there in the field of novelists? No one. So no one can judge how I go about getting myself out there. And yet, there it is. Anxiety.

What I know about myself is that I do well when I know what do to. And I don’t know what to do, or how to go about it. And I also hate asking for help. It makes me feel small. I’ve learned how to do it, but I hate doing it. All I want to do is make it on my own, to show others that I can, and to make people who know me proud. But then I hide.

2014 is going to be about learning how to ask for help, and putting myself out on stage, and being more active. Online, offline, whatever. I need to be active. I’ve been hiding myself. I want to get out of this job and have the job I want to have: writing. I want to not have to go to a job so often that it denies me having time with my kids. I get them every other weekend simply because I need to work as often as I do. I’m certainly in a better paying job than I used to be, but I still have to work five to six days a week to be sure I can cover everything I need for me and for when my kids are here.

I don’t know shit about marketing. I don’t know how to get myself out there. But I’m going to learn. And I’m going to take care of myself better. I never really thought about my anxiety; I always figured I just get nervous sometimes and that’s all there is to it. But after being depressed for three quarters of the year and having two panic attacks, I’m starting to see it as something else entirely. Mental illnesses are still illnesses. You don’t get to just get over it because it’s in your head. That’s the hardest spot to reach: your head. Surgery won’t do it. Medicine sometimes will. But time helps and friends help. At least, that’s what I think. So I’m working on it.

Anyways, this is my little writing thoughts for the day, for the end of the year. If you made it this far, thanks for reading, and for those of you who’ve asked, sorry I haven’t done much more than reblog stuff in the last few months. Now you know why. I’d like to be more of a presence. So expect to hear a little bit more out of me.