I'm writing but not WRITING.

I write every day. Grocery lists, to do lists, journal notes for my health stuff, and random babbling in
my paper daily journal. But getting back into writing fiction or even blog posts is proving pretty hard. I have my anxiety grab me around the throat and shake really, really hard. It's pretty awful, to be honest. Even now, I have a part of me saying I should just delete this post because it is just garbage anyways.

Depression tells me that all of this is pointless. That no one is going to want to read what I write and that I am wasting time that would be better spent on the Sisyphean task of folding laundry and washing dishes. It also tells me that I am a terrible cook, my husband really hates me, and that I have delusions of adequacy when I'm actually nothing but a perpetual failure. Depression is a real bastard. I hate it with a passion. It is a mutual hatred, to be honest.

Anxiety tells me that if I don't get everything perfect on the first shot, something horrible will happen. It tells me that if I don't write just the right thing, someone will hurt people I love, destroy my reputation, or otherwise ruin my life. It also tells me that one misspelled word equates to the destruction of any possible writing career I hoped to have. And that I will be dead before I finish my fantasy novel series, never mind the science fiction/erotica one. The list is endless because I am a very creative person and my anxiety draws off of that to come up with the worst possible scenarios.

All I can do is try. Right now, I'm just trying to keep posting here. I don't want 2018 to be another year of not doing writing. I feel like I've lost a piece of my self in the process of the depressive episode that took up most of last year. I am trying to find it but it is proving harder than I thought. This used to be easy. Now it is hard, but I will keep going because I have stories to write that are clamoring in my brain to get out.