Anxiety as fuel

I can't find the clip of it anymore for some reason, but one of the great scenes of the American Crime Story show about Gianni Versace (for me anyway) is where he talks about how, when he's anxious, he creates.

It's quite interesting isn't it. Because anxiety is essentially reframed here as something that is annoying (yes it is), but also productive (when channelled well). I'm reflecting on this because today feels like one of those anxiously productive energy ones, so I'm just gonna go with it.

What triggered the anxiety? Maybe a bit too much client work on. A couple of annoying situations on a project. A meeting I was worried was gonna go bad, was reassured actually went well, except the feedback suggested it didn't go as well as we thought we did. So I catastrophised.

When catastrophising, it's important to honour the emotion behind it because if you don't it will come back 10x stronger. It's like a hockey stick emotion for a startup you thought was gonna go bust years ago, but actually became a unicorn and you could have retired by now. But after honouring it, you can give it a new home and direction – you channel it.

I channel anxiety and emotion by writing and seeing where those words go. It's not 'optimised' for the social algorithm, sorry. But hopefully it's optimised for a very specific part of the algorithm of your mind that doesn't just want to learn and evolve and hyper-grow in "proud and humble" ways, but the part that just wants to be seen and acknowledged.

If you've felt these feelings, and you're constantly juggling between whether you're more on the 'oh no this is gonna be a bad day' side of the fence, or the 'oh wait actually this is a helluva good fuel' day, I see you. And I salute you. It happens to all of us. You're better than you think. 🫡