free-floating anxiety

There's a whole lot of that swirling around me at the moment - or rather, in me. It's a very odd physical sensation and not at all pleasant - it's like the feeling you get right before you go down the other side of the rollercoaster, except not as dramatic and much more mysterious and disturbing.

I know part of what this is about. Ditching Blackwell, or relegating him to the back burner, is a huge step towards casting away the last bits of what this novel was years and years ago when I first started writing it. A little scary. Kinda feels like jumping off a cliff, which, of course, would explain the feeling.

But then some of it has to do with my progress. It's not like there hasn't been any - I'm working steadily and regularly, but when I get my daily updates from the critical writing board, I feel terribly anxious that I haven't offered any crits (not that there's a minimum or anything) and that I haven't posted anything else since the third scene.

And the only thing that helps is to work. So off I go to do the shit I have to do to make this weekend work. Finish shopping for the party, bake and frost the cake, clean the house so our visitors from out of town can at least have a clean toilet to vomit in should the need arise, and still slap some lunch together for Aeryn.

Then I can work. And then, hopefully, this awful sense that I'm plodding slowly down the road while everyone else is catching up with the ice cream truck, so scared that there won't be any left for me by the time I get there. It's almost like preemptive grief. Or disappointment. Or something.

No rest for the wicked, right?

Right.

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

bang head here

You know what?

I am either really screwed or at the cutting edge. I'm thinking screwed.

God, it would be so fucking easy to just give up.