I'll do that later...

(A LONG moody one!)
(edited 2 hours later)

That's a pretty lame little molehill of a pile of washing that needs sorting and putting away. Usually I have mountainous proportions compared with that.
I guess we're fortunate that the previous owners of our house thought to have a conservatory attached to the building really and I can stash all the washing in there. It's not much good for anything else.
Conservatories are silly. Either too hot or too cold and always full of woodlice and too many damned windows that look filthy in the sunlight. And ours leaks.

Today I'm doing my blipfoto journal early. So it's not a journal at all. It's a pile of thoughts before I even get going on my dull plodding existence.

I'm having an "I vont to be alone" phase. It's just built up to a crescendo now.
My brain has been fizzing and bursting with creative idea bubbles: things I want to write and /or do, and little phrases and one-liners I want to get down before they disappear. Phrases come to me and linger in the front of my mind temporarily. If I like the way the words have arranged themselves and the impact they might make, I want to do something with them. But invariably they distort or burst before I get to do anything with them. I lose things in my anxious, busy head. The thought, the idea might remain but it doesn't work anymore; it loses its magic.

I have to put things off all the time. I know I'm not alone in this. Some people are so busy they have to put practical stuff first all the time. It's so sad. We can't seem to find time for creativity anymore. And yet creativity and imagination are what drives progress. Stupid, huh?

I can't claim to be the busiest person on Earth in terms of employment or household practicalities. I have the privilege of being a stresshead, perfectionist, anxious fraught person with a near constant adrenalin rush instead. In theory I am my own boss, but it never feels that way. I feel I am at the mercy of duty, convention, social expectation and domesticity. And yet - at my age when I really should know better - I guess it's all just self-imposed and I should stop navel-gazing and do what's best. The trouble is, when you're anxious you don't know what's best. You can't make any distinctions between what you want to do and what you don't want to do; what's really important and what's not important at all. It gets mucked up by floods of adrenalin pushing through your body before the sensible part of your brain wakes up. Even when I can slow my brain down and have a word with myself, it's too late: I've been kick-started. No one can say anything ever that helps. It just aggravates me.
Social conditioning, expectations, judgements, media and advertising have a lot to answer for. I've been conditioned all my life into artificial roles, behaviours, appearances and standards. It seems I am clever enough to recognise all this for what it is and mentally and morally ("morally"...?) reject it but the anxious part of me can't. The worst part of all this is that if I wasn't anxious, I wouldn't be taking so long to get things done and they wouldn't be so much of a problem.
So: don't be anxious; don't sweat it; don't worry about those things. They don't matter.
Cured!
Oh - if only it was that simple! In fact just being told that I'm worrying unnecessarily makes me even more anxious!

The major thing my anxiety has taught me (rightly or wrongly) is that other people are the problem. I can't distinguish between which other people sometimes, so I mostly avoid everybody. I also avoid having people in the house.
Other People in the house means I have to look a certain way, the loos must be extremely clean, the kitchen must be clean and the house must look like I am in control of myself. Which, ironically, all adds up to mean I am not in control of myself at all. It also means I am the host and must be pleasant and interested, ask the right questions, provide food and drink, take care of any children, and make sure Other People are happy. Again, ironically, this usually means I am so overwhelmed by how I must perform that I behave like a completely unnatural fuckwit.
All my life I have hidden these anxieties because 1 of 2 things happen when you are honest about them: 1. People who love you and understand you stay away because they don't want to upset you. Wrong; or 2. People who don't understand tell you you are being stupid, there's nothing to worry about and offer advice. Also wrong.
So I keep quiet and let people carry on thinking I'm an unsociable, unfriendly, uncaring git.

Where's all this leading?
Well. Back to the beginning. I want to be creative. I want to sit and write every day. I don't want to write all day every day like I used to think I wanted to. I just want to be able to grab those thought bubbles and make copies of them before they disappear without being clouded by the constant stream of obligation.
Right now, for instance I am juggling the comings and goings of 2 of the kids, trying to persuade the middle child to take the dog for a walk - and not just a 2 minute outing (failed), the phone has rung and demanded my attention, the doorbell has rung and demanded my attention, I've missed breakfast, the house is a mess, I'm not looking even vaguely decent or presentable if anyone were to come round, and all last year's bookwork needs sorting (and finishing filing) and giving to the accountant.

My idea for having another blipfoto account for flash fiction hasn't worked so far. I keep thinking I haven't got time or when I have it's too late at night and I'm too tired and I don't feel creative.

A couple of things have inspired* me in the last 24 hours. But I still feel I have to deal with all the things which are making me anxious first and unfortunately that list never ever ever ends when I feel like this.


Miserable self indulgence I know. But I needed to do this.

I've just popped back to mop up some stonking typos and am feeling a bit better. I can recognise that what is happening today is not the direct cause of my anxiety. It's things I've had to force myself to deal with without reacting in the past couple of weeks and the build up of tension and tiredness that has caused. Things happening to me today are just triggers for the symptoms that have already manifested.

*My inspiration last night came from Neil Gaiman: In his introduction to children's book Coraline he wrote about how he found himself too busy to continue writing the book but after some years came back to it "I still had no time, so I would write fifty words a night in bed, before I fell asleep," he says.
Such a simple short sentence had an immediate and profound effect on me. Fifty words...? That's a cinch! This paragraph is more than fifty words!