high anxiety

A friend told me this morning that she had been experiencing some high anxiety lately - her son is about to do end-of-grade testing for the first time, her older son just graduated from college, and she's right at her own midterm for the class in some kind of human resource management thingamajig. I thought of the Mel Brooks movie and immediately wished I hadn't - other than marrying Anne Bancroft, I really think Mel Brooks should have stayed out of the movies altogether; at least I wouldn't be stuck sharing a house with my husband's copy of Blazing Saddles.

I digress.

What she meant was that she was experiencing a high level of anxiety. I originally thought of vertigo. But as my day has progressed, I'm beginning to think that sometimes there's not much of a difference.

Tonight I feel like I'm scrabbling for any kind of grip on the edge of a crumbling cliff - desperate, shaky, weak, and at the very beginning of a freefall, that half a second when your stomach realizes it's about to drop, and drop for a very long time. I'm not an adrenaline junkie. And I hate heights. It makes me impatient, angry, mean. It's supposed to have to do with my menstrual cycles, but tonight it's triggered by something else.

I've done as much as I can with the first three chapters. I'll put a finishing touch on the first scene, maybe run a spell-check, put it off as long as I can, then I'm sending the first chapter out for critiquing to an online critical writing group - a group of writers who do not know me and have no emotional investment in this book at all.

I'm scared shitless. And at the same time, I know that once I do this, once I just post the thing and have done with it, I'll be able to move on, because I'm frankly sick as hell of the first three everfucking chapters.

Plus maybe I'll be a little less of a cunt to my family. They don't deserve this.

~Andi