I've been nursing functional anxiety about this paper for months, but I've been fucking freaking out the last two weeks. The complete draft is due in six days. This weekend is the last clear chunk of time I have to produce pages.
I'm a good writer; I know I can do this. That's not the thing. The thing is, I chose to write about my most core emotionally triggering issue: death anxiety as it manifests in intimate relationships. And so whenever I sit down to write, on some deeply unconscious but visceral level, I think of loved ones dying. When Astrid leaves the apartment to go to work, my eyes well up with tears thinking she might get into a car accident. When a sentence finally emerges from my fingertips, I imagine my sister calling me with the news that my mother is dead. That's what the anxiety is about. It's the core of the procrastination, the stop-starts, the binge eating, the grasping at every possible distraction: if I write this paper, I will kill everyone I've ever truly loved.
Okay, that's off my chest. Now I guess I need to write.
4 comments:
ack, eek, I think I'm gasp.................................
Just kidding.
LOL! Thanks, Alex - I needed that!
The bright side is that you didn't pick something horribly dry and unengaging from which you feel totally distanced and couldn't care about if you tried. Way better your boat than that one.
now would probably be the appropriate time to reveal that i'm immortal due to the fact that i grew up in jersey and absorbed too much radioactive material in my orange juliuses at the strip mall. so fear not, fairest -- 1000 years from now, it'll just be me, the cockroaches and a large stockpile of twinkies.
xoxo
*d*
Post a Comment