Down A Dark Hole.

So I almost wrote today. Outside my head. Not on my phone. With the possible intent to … show it to the public.

I used to do it a lot. Writing, that is. One time, I wrote about 99% of a story on a dirty Nordstrom’s bag, because I couldn’t find anything else, and I needed to write it, just to see if I could write something with no dialogue. Or something in X POV. Or something, just because I saw a word and desired to use it. And then I’d post the results, send the story to the winds, call it good or bad or what have you. It was written. It was out there. There was some sort of completed cycle.

And then there was anxiety.

It’s not like anxiety was a new thing. Far from it: I’ve apparently been depersonalizing since I was 12. It’s just that, well, for my teens and early 20s, the comorbidity that tended to cause me the most trouble was depression.

Depression may cause me not to write, crawl out of bed, do dishes, wash my hair, wear anything but a bathrobe, and it may cause me to do some incredibly stupid things that would probably rightfully earn a trigger warning for suicidal thoughts and self-harm, but it’s an entirely different blocker than anxiety. There’s nothing there, so nothing matters.

Anxiety is worse, because the words are there. Whole plots, at times. Researched and intricate and probably only of interest to me, but honestly, that never stopped me before, so why is it stopping me now?

It’s not rational, anxiety. I dislike things that aren’t rational.

I dislike that I can’t just say, “You are an irrational thing. Be gone!”

One of the things I dislike most about mental illness is that there’s always, always collateral damage. Even after the worst of it’s gone, there’s always (for me) something I can’t get back. In the case of depression, there are more things than I could list (some good, some bad). In the anxiety case, it’s largely been my writing. Hell, my creativity in general.

The last two years have been the least productive years on a creative level of my entire life. I’d work out the Percentage of Useful Lifetime Thus Far Lost to Anxiety, but that would be even less productive than me sitting here counting the threads of navel lint is going to be, and perhaps even counterproductive, because then I’ll have a number over which I can obsess.

And the real snag I’m going to hit here is, as long as I have to be a responsible adult, with adult responsibilities, no matter how much I medicate it, the anxiety, that unwanted byproduct of my coping mechanisms, of always having to be watching, thinking, considering my reactions to things in light of the fact that I’m dealing with a neurotypical’s world, is never going to go away. So now I need coping mechanisms for my coping mechanisms, to try to solve the issues caused my coping mechanisms.

At some point, it gets really recursive when I try to explain.

So I think my coping mechanism is going to be attempting to write something and actually put it out there. Could be fannish. Could be original. Could be something in between.