I’ve been working more with my anxiety of late. Instead of trying to squash it, I’ve been listening, applying a gentle ‘why am I feeling this now?’.
The answers aren’t always apparent, but they’re slowly revealing themselves as I grow self-awareness.
One of the things I’ve struggle with is how I want to share work with the world. It often appears as if everyone else has everything sorted: they go down the traditional publishing in magazines/publisher route, or they use Patreon, or they’re community co-creators, or they work on commissions… they know if they’re a non-fiction writer, or poet, or musician, or if fiction or theatre is for them.
Over these years of creative self-discovery I’ve walked all these routes to varying degrees because I’m absolutely someone who has to trundle at least some way along a path before knowing if it’s for me, or not, how else will I know otherwise?
I accept there’s people who don’t do this because they just KNOW their route, and honestly I’m quite envious of that innate self-knowledge, that absolutely surety.
Which returns me to anxiety – what I now realise is that it strikes at very particular times, and these occasions are often when I’m veering off the path that my true Self knows. Anxiety strikes when I set out on a route I think I SHOULD be taking – actually whenever I start using the word ‘should’ my anxiety gives me a right kick in the arse.
I finished the copy edits of the new novel last week. Next week we begin the final proofread and I hope to be able to share the cover with you. I’ll write more about it all throughout April but just to say that I’ll be publishing all future work as Copyleft/ under the Creative Commons.
That includes the new novel. I don’t feel any anxiety about making my work Copyleft even though it goes against everything we’re taught as artists about copyright and intellectual property. But perhaps I don’t believe in that anymore than I believe in land ownership. My heart tells me it’s time to stand in solidarity with the trees and the land whose very existence is the Creative Commons.
? @Andy Garside at today’s socially distanced Resist Anti-Trespass protest.
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