It happened again.
For the past couple of months—months!—I have needed to open up a couple of files, get some information, and get moving on a project.
But I was just dead in the water. Absolutely frozen.
And then, the middle of the morning today, the logjam shifted. I opened the files, read the information I needed, and wrote up the pieces I needed to finish to get the project moving forward again.
This happens to me a lot. As I’ve mentioned before, I get hit with extraordinary anxiety, even over very simply activities. A good deal of my adult life has been spent learning how to navigate these self-made blockades.
And that’s what I need to emphasize: most of my barriers are not external obstacles. instead, they are creations of my own mind. Nevertheless, they feel real to me, and for that reason they may as well be real, for all intents and purposes.
So part of the problem that I need to deal with when a self-made blockade shows up is, how do I manage the story I am telling myself?
That may sound like a funny way of putting it. Why would a story matter?
Well, it matters because—like most folks, I guess—a good deal of my interior life is tied up in the stories I am telling myself. The old scripts, the old stories, show up and blast their lines over bullhorns.
Most often, the voices don’t really make me feel bad, they just make me feel tired. So I convince myself that I’ll deal with the project when I am better rested or something. And inevitably, I do not become better rested.
So the cycle continues.
The natural question to ask, of course, is how a person like me navigates these sorts of anxieties.
The answer is… well, it’s a bit weird.
I’m a big fan of a 2001 film called Heist. It was written by David Mamet, and starts Gene Hackman as an aging burglar and con artist who is trying hard to retire from his life of crime.
There’s a scene in the film where Hackman is talking to another crook about the master plan. The crook mentions that hackman must be a pretty smart fella. Hackman responds that he’s not that smart. Instead, Hackman says,
I tried to imagine a fella smarter than myself. Then I tried to think, "what would he do?"
And this, my friends, is the essence of how I try to maneuver out of my self-made blockades: I play a little trick with myself regarding time.
When I feel the anxiety hit, I do my best not to beat myself up or berate myself. I just accept that, at least for now, I am powerless to move the boulder in front of me. I am blocked, and no amount of wishing it otherwise will unblock me.
But then I have a little thing I tell myself:
I can’t do this… but there is a me in the future that has figured it out. I’m not that guy, but that guy is for sure going to figure it out. I can’t wait to meet him.
That’s the trick. And—crazy as it may sound—it kinda works.
When I say “works,” I mean it gets me out of the cycle of beating myself up for not being a hotshot. I allow my present self to completely suck. I don’t push myself to have to do the Big Anxiety-Ridden Thing.
Instead, I go fold laundry, or tidy up the desk, or take a nap.
But what I have learned from doing this is that, eventually—sooner of later—a different me shows up. One day I can’t do something. The next day, a slightly different me can.
And I am fine giving that other guy all the credit.
Something I have learned from listening to a lot of other creative people is that my experience is pretty typical.
That is to say, everybody (pretty much) gets horrible anxiety at some point in the creative process. The trick—for those of us who are too dumb to quit when the anxiety hits—is figuring out how to trick yourself into being creative in spite of your best efforts to sabotage everything.
So I’ve shown you my trick, or one of them, at least. Feel free to use it, if it works. If not, feel free to invent something that will work, for you.
Whatever you do, though, don’t let those bastard voices win.
Courage.
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