Anxieties, time pressures...

Anxieties, time pressures...
11/26/11
7:06p

She was anxious about her Nanowrimo writing for the day. She had not gotten to it until late in the day, never a time that she had been able to work on it. She had had to work on one of the art projects hanging over her head. There had been a little progress on that. Not perhaps she could get in a little Nano work before cooking some dinner. The Nano work could not be left too long. Neither could the art project. They were in competition for the time available. Always the time factor squeezing everything. No wonder she kept having such a heavy feeling in her chest. She was finding this all quite depressing and she was feeling anxious about all of it.

She kept trying to think of ways to get out of what seemed like a prison she had built up for herself. She reminded herself that she had to keep her mind on what she wanted to do, not on what she wanted to get away from. If she could keep her mind, her vision, on what she wanted, it would fall into place. It certainly seemed like that was how things usually worked out. What seemed tricky was when she was not clear on what she wanted. Whenever she knew something she wanted, something she wanted to do, it was as if it happened instantly. Why did it seem so hard to understand what she wanted?

Was she scared to want something? Was she scared to accept that she wanted something? Was she scared to say she wanted a particular thing, or to believe she wanted something? Perhaps she was afraid to want something only to find out she did not want it. Why should that be a problem? Weren't people allowed to change their minds?

She was feeling so guilty that she was only now starting this art project. It was a project she did every year at this time. Last year she had started it much later than this time. She believed the person it was for was annoyed at being kept in the dark about it. The person was waiting to see how things stood. But she was not ready to communicate about it until she had some solid work done on it.

She had made the mistake the night before of calling her mother to check in. That meant an hour and a half was spent mostly listening to her mother. When the call was over, there was no more emotional energy to spend on any kind of work. She needed to go completely to personal free time. She wondered how people were able to function at constant 'go' levels. They seemed so driven. She had stopped that a long time ago as much as possible. It still seemed there was too much of it in her life. There had to be a way to arrange things so they did not always seem so pressurized.

She again had had no idea what she might want to write about for the day's Nano session. Earlier she had done quite a bit of writing longhand in her regular journal.
She just figured if she could at least make a small dent in her daily quota, that was better than nothing if it came down to that. There were only a few days left of the challenge. She felt she really needed to get most of what was left done now, since her two teaching days had rarely given her a chance to write. How she longed to be done with this challenge.

At least last night she had finally registered her Nano project and validated the word count to that point. There she had had another round of doubts over whether her project qualified. She was having trouble even saying the word 'novel' in referring to it. She was calling it 'project' instead.
7:36p

She did not want to talk about the drawing she'd been working on that evening. She had two of them going. They were to be composite views peering through the slender branches of blooming rhododendron bushes, with a hummingbird perched in a branch, to a view of the lighthouse in the bay. This was a springtime scene. The composite was that the rhododendron with the hummingbird had actually been facing a house on the hill rather than out to the ocean.

The new neighbor downstairs had such a heavy walk.

7:43p 751 words