Day 3: A 'what if' so many days later

Ever since I first recognised my anxiety as a real presence in my life (and not just a pretext for laziness), I've looked at my life defensively. I've told myself that I don't have the drive, the perseverance, the discipline that I aspire for. And I've thought that keeping myself away from the cliff-edge of anxiety requires an adjustment of expectations accordingly. But doing this guilt-free and reasonably is one thing I've never mastered. Over the years, the figure of who I want to be has become so dominating in my mind that it is impossible for me to imagine my actually existing self shorn of ambition, aspiration, guilt and shame. 

I've always seen myself in terms of what I still have left to do, and hence failed to recognise the qualities others say they see in me. From the assertions about my resilience from my previous counsellors to the affirmations about my integral presence in the company from my last boss, numerous others have pointed out strengths that I find difficult to recognise. 

Thus far, the strategy to change this pattern has been to reality test these assertions against my own self-doubt and learn to recognise them as more truthful. Needless to say, this strategy has failed miserably. But, I recently thought, what if I were to not try to ascertain the truth value of these assertions but try to simply live them as articles of faith? 

So, that's my new 90-day project. I'm not going to tiptoe my way through the next 90 days, hedging thoughts and actions to protect my fragile ego-integrity. Instead, I'm going to take these assertions at face value, and live my aspirations as if I have endless stores of resilience, determination, will, strength and power with which to pursue them. What if I am every bit as powerful as I want to be? How will I live my life then? This is my experiment for the next 90 days. 

Day 2: 2 days overdue!

It's the end of the day and I want nothing more than to crawl into bed and check out. But I am pushing myself to put down at least one coherent thought before I go. I'm still pushing myself to write, and wondering if this will ever get easier.

I've been thinking the past two days about anticipation, and how much of a role it plays in my everyday. On most days, anticipation acts as one of the biggest bleeders of time. Every time I anticipate a task or activity, it inevitably sets off a churning in my stomach as I imagine all the ways it could go wrong. This then requires a massive investment of energy to overcome that anxiety and get to the task. It's no wonder I feel so tired so often, since every task empties my reserves so thoroughly.

I can't just get out of that bind by trying not to anticipate the future though. Because then nothing would ever get planned and done on time. There has to be a way to see this anticipation differently. I just haven't finished thinking through what that is yet. 

Day 1: Getting started

I've been asked to write my way through anxiety. S says that she sees a creative energy in my writing that can work its way back into what other areas where it's lacking. It's very tempting to take her at her word. But it's also been years since I've felt comfortable writing. In fact, ever since TH (2005-07), I've always had a love-hate relationship with writing. It's been the one skill that I've been both proudly confident and abysmally insecure about. In my mind, it all started with M (the top boss for my supplement in Chennai), indicating bitter disappointment at an article about Beethoven containing some basic factual errors. After that, every time I wrote, I wrote with a deep fear that more wrongs would be committed. So, my biggest hope with every article was that people should not read it. Such a paradoxical desire--to write an article for publication in a major newspaper with the hope that no one should ever read it!

Ever since then, my relationship with all writing has been inherently ambivalent. The attraction has remained: through all of the ups and downs, I've constantly returned to text as my bread and butter, from working at TNM to editing academic papers at CG to writing marketing content for R. Yet, every individual piece of writing has been approached with fear, anxiety and a desire to run away from it for as long as possible. And the idea of writing for pleasure has disappeared completely. So too has the idea of reading for pleasure.

Of course, the idea of doing for pleasure anything but watch television and play games on my phone is missing from my life in general. Everything seems like a chore to me in the midst of anxiety. But writing holds a special place of anxiety. It has and continues to define me in so many ways. But, precisely because it contributes so much to defining me, I can't bear the thought of writing poorly. And given that the expectation of failure corrodes so much of my thinking, the advance expectation that I will inevitably write poorly also dominates. Indeed, when S praised my writing and said that she saw something in it that would be helpful not only to myself but also to others, my internal voice alternated between scoffing at her and sputtering in choked surprise.

Even now, that voice is trying everything in its power to distract me from this endeavour. Since I began writing these four paragraphs, I have logged twice onto Facebook, dived into cleaning 3 different things, and generally struggled to bring my fingers back to the keyboard. So, I write this last sentence with a weight on my chest that's one part enthusiasm, one part determination to stick to this, and about a 100 parts of anxiety and sadness about the anticipated failure to continue this habit. Can two tiny flickers of hope and determination overcome this massive burden of fear and sadness? I guess I have to wait to find out.