Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Wracking, see Nerves

I have a project at work that's making me nervous. When I feel nervous about something, I want to avoid it, do something else. This is a good way for me to get other things done, but that elephant (could it be a giraffe?) is still in the room.

Most new things make me nervous--certainly anything new. It's the unknown.

If I avoided everything that induced anxiety, everything new, I would not even have this job. I would not be working on crazy long poems. I would not have made my daughter a triple-layer chocolate birthday cake filled with hazelnut buttercream and chocolate mousse.

Clearly, the rewards can outweigh the anxiety.

I've been trying to breathe through it--which is good, but it doesn't necessarily create any movement, any forward progress.

So I then I try to break it down, really take it one step at a time while trying to hold that end vision in my head. For the cake, I had to make one component at a time.

For the poems, I have to look at one section at a time, or look only at how the sequences string together, or examine just the verbs. Verbs are good.

And for other projects, like this one, I need to map the path that will get me to the X with the treasure, move past the anxiety by focusing on those steps, one at a time.

What makes you nervous? How do you move through it?

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