Wanting to be a successful writer and dealing with anxiety had been two conflicting forces for me in the last several years. I go back and forth between wanting to publish something somewhere, even just the campus literary magazine, to being convinced everybody would hate it and telling myself I would be the laughingstock of the literary community. Obviously creative criticism is part of the game when you want to be a writer, but anxiety can increase the pain tenfold, and that alone makes it incredibly difficult to put work out there in the big, scary real world.
Writing has always been a passion of mine. I started young, using kindergarten journal time to write short tales about dragons, fairies, or some adventure I supposedly went on with my dog when I should have been sleeping. When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was always the same: I was going to be an author (and also a veterinarian simultaneously).
Continuing on through elementary school, I received incredible encouragement from my family, friends and teachers to continue writing. I had a poem published in a book when I was in fourth grade, which I thought was the biggest achievement ever. I carried this big black notebook my dad had gotten me for my birthday around with me everywhere. I was always writing, and I was always sharing my stories. I would spend hours sitting in the back office at my dad’s house typing pages and pages of what childhood me thought would be my first novel. I even had a pen name all figured out. I was ready to share the stories I wrote with the world. Then I got to junior high.
Junior high was a pretty hectic time for me. My anxiety skyrocketed and my self-esteem plummeted. I continued to deal with it through writing, but I no longer shared what I wrote. I told people I did not have time to write anymore to keep them from asking about it, and that was it. In fact, it took me until my freshman year of college to feel just confident enough to let a friend of mine read something I wrote, and even then I would not let her read it in front of me or discuss it afterwards.
College was supposed to be different. I told myself I would minor in creative writing and signed up for the course my freshman year. I made it through one class with the teacher reading the syllabus and then I dropped it. The idea of having to let other people read my work, or even worse, me having to read my own pieces out loud, had me shaking and feeling nauseous.
I would love to say that now as a junior in college, I have faced my anxiety and my fear as a writer. I would love to say that I went on to get that minor in creative writing. However, I have not done these things. But I have continued to write.
Anxiety can make you feel as if nothing you do is good enough. For anybody else who has struggled with that feeling, regardless of if it is towards writing or any other passion, the biggest, most important thing you can do to help yourself is to not stop doing what you love.
