a ramble on creativity ft. anxiety and my mom January is finally over, thank God. I know everyone and their mother’s been saying this month’s been long as hell and exhausting to boot, but it bears repeating: it’s been long as hell and exhausting to boot. But now it’s February, and it came with blazing sun even if it was bitterly cold. I spent the first day of this month celebrating my niece’s birthday—she’s already six!—making up a Ramadan fast, and wrestling with insecurity and envy and a looming feeling of dread. It’s the latter I wanna talk about, and it springs from my mother. Not that she did anything to me; this is definitely a me problem, not a her problem. See, my mother’s a storyteller, and a wonderful one, and I am in awe of her…and I really wish I could tell stories the way that she does. She sees magic and humour and whimsy in the mundane and prosaic and manages to convey it all genuinely, sincerely, and entertainingly. She’s also lived a (hard) life full of wonderful, amazing, devastating, fascinating things I have very little connection to. I didn’t realize how much so until she wrote this piece about her childhood, a childhood so unlike my own and so foreign to me that I had a little existential crisis while reading it. It’s a beautiful piece and I aspire to write like that: honestly and truly and beautifully. I don’t feel like I do, though. Or at least, not about real life. Never about real life. The closest I get to doing anything so revealing is with some of my poetry, but mostly I write fiction, and all of me is (often intentionally) veiled in layers of make-belief that give me just enough plausible deniability to ensure that no one can ever use any of it against me. To ensure I’m not too exposed to the world, which I’m convinced will hurt me in my most tender, ill-shielded places. It turns out I am chock-full of fear? This is a realization I have every year, and every year I’m confronted with just how deep the fear goes; I am scared all the time. It’s ridiculous! I live a good, safe life but my internal landscape is a warzone of self-inflicted terror and misery and stress. God, it’s exhausting. I don’t know why I’m convinced that everyone who gets a glimpse into my inner self via my writing is going to point at me and go “hA hA!’”, Nelson-from-the-Simpson’s-style, except like, in a devastatingly cruel but simultaneously unintentional way. It’s doubly weird because I do actually like my writing. I’m proud of what I write. I like writing, even when I hate it (and I mostly hate it because I can’t be consistent and prolific with it). But back to my mother, because there’s more (there’s always more. I’m a pro at spiraling). She’s not just a storyteller, she’s a dreamer. She has aspirations. In contrast, I feel like I’ve lost all my dreams. Or…well, I feel like I’m just recycling the same dreams over and over again, and they’ve gone horribly stale and dull as dirt and flat after all this time. Case in point: my mom’s excited about the literary society we’re trying to get up and running. She wants us to really invest time and energy and effort and creativity into getting the site going, and instagram, and substack, and having meetings, and creating a podcast, and for me to please, please share my work on there. She has a huge and exciting vision for it and she needs me to help make it a reality. Listen. I was excited and determined about it initially, when I messaged her early in January with the very same stars in my eyes. But now…mostly what I feel about it is mounting dread. It just seems like…a lot of work? No, no, that’s not true, and I’m trying to tell the truth. It feels scary. How juvenile, right? But yeah; she’s asking me to put myself out there. To make a (lot of) effort. To be seen to be trying. I’m afraid to. I’m afraid it will all amount to nothing. I’m afraid to let her and myself down because I don’t think I can be consistent with the effort or do it right or—I don’t even know. I’m afraid to fail. I can’t even qualify what failure would be. Mostly, I’m afraid that this will be an embarrassment. (To whom? The mean audience in my head that I’m projecting out onto the world? They’re not even real.) I know the solution to this is to stop with the catastrophizing and just do. Let things pan out as they will; the result is not my business. I really and truly just have to try. But it’s hard, it’s so goddamn hard, because I am an overthinker to my core and a pessimist with delusions aspirations of grandeur, and I want so much, and my wanting is so big that it also scares me. I have to get past these fears. It’s killing me not to. So…I’m going to do what my mom’s been patiently telling me my whole life, essentially: try, and allow myself to be seen to be trying, and work to refuse to care about what other people may or may not be thinking about what I make and do and am. At least I’ll have made an effort. At least I’ll have something to show for all my angsting. At least I didn’t spend another year of my short and interminably long life creatively paralyzed. So that’s what this post is. Me being honest and real and open and trying. Ugh. Anyway, I’ll round this post off with a song which, I think, captures the vibes in my anxious little heart lately, from one of my favourite bands: On the Run by Glass Animals. Here’s to February. Here’s to the growing sunlight, even with bitter cold and salt dust. Here’s to trying, inconsistently but constantly. Here’s to being scared and doing it anyway. Here’s to being seen. Here’s to running towards something, and not just away, away, away. Wanna stay updated on this blog? 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