Daily Writing Prompt #5

WordPress decided to come out swinging for today’s daily writing prompt, and I, being the writer that I am, felt obligated to respond. Anyways, I need the writing practice.

Nerves, anxiety, hysteria, call it what you want, that doesn’t change much to me. I’m a nervous person. I kinda always have been. From a young age, I was someone plagued by fear. A lot of things could trigger a panic attack in my small body, and over time, I learned why those episodes happened and how to manage them better. It’s been a long time since I had a panic attack; they’re pretty few and far between now, but I would still consider myself a nervous person.

So, what makes me nervous?

Where do I even begin?

The news, politics, wondering if I left my apartment door unlocked, climate change, people driving recklessly, answering a question wrong, the prospect of failure, writer’s block, overthinking, nuclear war, my cat eating something she shouldn’t have, everyone hating my writing, people who fullheartedly believe everything they read on FaceBook, and on and on and on.

Nervous energy and I are not quite friends, but bitter acquaintances. We seem to share a sort of mutual understanding of one another—I cannot control it, but I do understand the why behind it all. 

That compassion of understanding is a big reason why I’ve been able to reduce the panic and anxiety genetically encoded into my body. Through more than a decade of therapy, I’ve been handed the instruction manual to many of my “quirks”, let’s call them (issues or problems makes it sound like there’s a solution or fix for what’s going on in my brain and that’s only half true, there’s only so much therapy can do to heal you). And while that instruction manual isn’t perfect, there are a few translation errors here and there, it’s enough that I can get by. 

So, cheers to being nervous, may it never bring us all the way down.