“Anxiety can just as well express itself by muteness as by a scream.”
Normally I try not to just re-post things on here but someone shared this recently and it struck me as a very relevant part of starting Prologue Games or any creative adventure. (thanks to +Laurie Zolkosky for sharing! All quotes are pulled from the Brain Pickings piece on anxiety & creativity she shared)
“Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self… — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever.”
I’ve experienced my fair share of anxiety since starting this journey but have had a hard time pinning down exactly why. It’s easy to point to the workload, the competing interests, the uncertainty of the next paycheck, but I think it’s been more than that. It’s freaking scary to create something. What if it sucks? What if I can’t find the way to express what’s inside my head? What if I do get this idea out but no one likes it? What if…
“One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living”
It’s easy to long for the safety of another environment. It feels easier to work in someone else’s possibility space than to create my own. But at the end of the day, I am really attracted to the idea that I should embrace the anxiety.
“[W]hoever is educated [by possibility] remains with anxiety; he does not permit himself to be deceived by its countless falsification and accurately remembers the past. Then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them. For him, anxiety becomes a serving spirit that against its will leads him where he wishes to go.” (emphasis added)
So here’s to embracing anxiety and tearing down the false sense of security that the current environment provides. Without the possibility of something new, why are we even trying?
Just keep creating. That’s the only antidote for the fear. I’ve been a journalist and a game developer for so long that the act of creation is relatively routine. The threat of rebuke and rejection remain, and while it still sucks to face criticism and sometimes it gets under the skin, I’m mostly immune to it now.
Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that, if not immune, I’m at least able to constructively process the criticism. I can either adapt and adjust based on the criticism or dismiss it and stay my course.