Currently reading: A Feast for Crows - George R. R. Martin
June. It's June. Where on earth has all that time gone?
This afternoon that wonderful companion of ours called anxiety reared its ugly little head and I was lucky to experience paralysing fear for a short while. Because what else would we want to do on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, hey? This is only read as diary-ish for a very short time before I get to my point for today.
This weekend a Teen Wolf convention is happening in Austria. I saw pictures of it on tumblr. There's people I admire there, everyone looks like they're having a wonderful time and it's extremely sunny. They're also, you know, in Austria. I initially became aware of all this around 10:30 yesterday morning, when I was in London, watching torrential rain pour outside knowing I had to go and walk in it soon to get to a physiotherapy appointment to find out why I've been in agonising pain all week. So you know, I wasn't overly happy, and I had a nice little moan about how I wish I was there rather than here, but then I moved on. I went to physio, discovered I haven't done anything particularly serious, and watched a fair bit of TV in the afternoon. Tidied my room, skyped both Harriet and J, practised the viola and generally had an ok day. I mean, I was in pain, I couldn't do much more than take it easy.
Today I'm thankfully in a lot less pain. I woke up late. I had my viola lesson at 12:30. I had a late lunch. And I've been on tumblr, unavoidably seeing pictures of the convention because whilst I follow over 300 blogs of a variety of different subjects, that seems to be all anyone currently online is talking about. I realised that it was 3pm. It's a lovely day outside, and I was inside doing absolutely nothing. And that's when the fear hit.
Because I want to be like this:
But I don't know where to start.
Living in London, and particularly in an area where I'm high up enough to see all of central London from my bedroom window, even as far as the other side of the river, I'm constantly aware that the world is at my fingertips. Possibilities are endless. I can do whatever I want, all I need to do is reach out and grasp it. I'm a very blessed person - I'm white, middle-class, living in a first-world country, intelligent, financially stable, went to a good university and got a good degree, get on extremely well with my family and haven't had anything particularly bad happen to me other than occasional brushes with anxiety and depression. The only way I would be even luckier regarding doing what I want in the world is if I were male. And yet, despite knowing the world is mine for the taking, I feel paralysed, like my arms are stuck to my sides.
In part, there's too much choice. I know that I'm not doing what I want to be doing just at the moment. I have ideas about what I would like to do, and even some notions on what I can start to do in order to get there. But then I feel that if I'm spending my time doing x, I'm not doing y or z. So if I decide to spend a couple of hours reading a book - which I really need to do more of - then that's wasting time that I could be writing, or going and finding people to socialise with, or attending an acting class, or doing exercise etc. In the end, I don't do anything. I have similar problems with choice when deciding what to watch or what to eat. In the end I just don't make a decision and have wasted several hours of my day.
Then there's the lack of feeling connected. When I'm online looking at things related to people I admire and wish I could be like/ work with, it's very easy to feel connected to your dreams. You're learning loads of information about your ideal hobbies, careers, people you'd like to meet one day. But this feeling is a lie. You're not getting any closer to being a successful actor by looking up pictures of your favourite actors all day. You're not getting any closer to being a published author by researching various publishing houses that you're going to send your book to 'when it's written'. Looking at fitspiration won't make you any fitter.
You have to switch the internet off and do something. And it's not a good feeling. For me personally, when I turn the internet off, I no longer feel connected to the wider world of people in film, theatre and television, and I feel further away than ever from my goals. But that's not the case. If I used the time I spend daydreaming online actually doing something constructive towards my goals, I'd be so much closer. In fact, I've wasted so much time over the last few years that I could probably have written several novels, learnt a few languages and mastered a couple of instruments. Saying "omg Chris Colfer has published three novels, written and starred in his own movie and written an episode of Glee on top of performing in all the episodes and doing press etc and he's only 23" won't do anything other than make you feel bad. Yes, it shows that some people are successful when they're your age. But a) they're anomalies, and b) they're not spending all their time going "it's not fair so-and-so is my age and yet they're so much more productive than me". It is fair. They're actually working their asses off for what they want. What are you doing? Absolutely nothing, other than thinking you should get on with something.
Yeah, I'm going to say no to that.
I was always a very confident child when I was a lot younger, who believed that she could do whatever she put her mind to. But I wasn't very driven. I didn't need to be. I just stumbled into opportunities, and I was fortunate enough to find a lot of things easy. I didn't need to revise for tests, I didn't need to work hard to make people like me, I didn't get stage fright before performing (in fact I loved the attention and sought it out), I didn't really need to practice any of the instruments I tried to play. But now I do.
Buried somewhere deep, deep down inside me lives that confident child. She's just extremely hidden. Or, clutching to her last breaths, I don't know. But I still believe that I can do whatever I want to if I just put my mind to it. And when I dream about my goals, I dream that I'm successful. Not necessarily famous, but well known and respected by those I know and respect in the same field. I'm also constantly told that most people don't ever achieve the levels of success that I dream about. I know this, and I also know that I won't get anywhere near that if I don't even try, but there's the difficulty. I get scared to try, because I don't want to fail. I've not really ever failed before - I've always landed on my feet. I've also never had to really rely on being driven and working hard to do anything before. I haven't flexed those muscles in a very long time. I don't know that they won't fail me.
But unless I move on from worrying about this all the time, I will definitely fail me.
I need to move on with my life. I need to stop letting this fear of failure paralyse me. Easier said than done, but acknowledging it is at least a step in the right direction. I need to start doing. And I also need to think about what it is I want to do and why I want to do it, because achieving my goals might not even be the way to achieve what I want.
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Things I'm improving on: Keeping my room tidy.
Things I've still got a long way to go with: Updating this blog.
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