Tuesday, August 21, 2012

High Anxiety


Still here, y'all -- I've just got some mental craziness I'm having to juggle.

I'm a pretty high-anxiety person in general. I stress to a ridiculous degree, wake up at 3:00 AM and can't get back to sleep worrying about things that I can't do anything about (mostly because it's THREE-FREAKING-A.M.), and endless loops of The Shit That's Gone Wrong Or May Go Wrong play over and over in my head. It's a delight, in the "wouldn't it be nice to function like a normal person? Hah!" sense of the word.

Trying to manage the anxiety is one reason I gained all the weight I did. I was in a very difficult marriage, the details of which I don't discuss too much here out of respect for my children's privacy, and the constant churning feeling in my gut was momentarily calmed by food intake. The worse things got, the more I ate until I finally hit a weight that slammed me between the eyes when I heard it. Then I had to drop the food and in doing so I was forced to deal with what was really going on (the whole "what was eating me" thing)...

Remember my limited coping skills? That would be one aspect. It's not over my marriage anymore, thankfully. Choreboy rocks. But I still have it over other areas of my life, and the big one that's kicking me in the pants right now is the "graduation dance" for bellydancing.

The way things are set up, everyone takes the beginning class twice. After you've taken it twice, you're allowed to choreograph and perform your own "graduation dance" and move up to the intermediate class. Unfortunately, I am not creative. No, don't point to this blog and say I'm creative because nothing here is fictionalized other than my last name and the names of others. Everything else is based firmly in reality. This extends to all areas of my life. I'd love to write fiction, but the best I could manage would be rather stilted fanfic. I can't worldbuild or create my own original characters to save my life. Every MC I create is a total Mary Sue, and I end up throwing in the towel on NaNoWriMo on an annual basis. In the kitchen it's the same. Give me someone else's recipe and I'm golden. I can follow those suckers like a beast. Just don't ask me to create my own because it ain't happening. On those few occasions I've attempted to follow some errant inspiration the results have been less than palatable.

So needless to say, choreography isn't my thing. At all. I can't improvise, I can't choreograph, and even trying it at all in the privacy of my own home has me a shaking mess. Again, I can follow someone else's choreography just fine -- give me practice time and we're set! But to create something on my own, without a specific pattern or anything?

Nope.

So I'm stuck. I can either stay in the beginners class forever or hope that sometime between now and the end of next term (there's no way I'll be able to graduate at the end of this term, less than one month away) I grow a creative bone and somehow make this happen.

We shall see. It's not like this is earth-shattering or anything; it's merely the symptom du jour of a much bigger issue.

3 comments:

Brent said...

You don't have to be creative to be an awesome person and a wonderful wife. I can say that with the authority of experience.

Angela Pea said...

Awwww....to what Brent said!

Choreography? Honey, just google some belly dancing you tube videos and borrow! I'm pretty sure that every dance move known to man has already been invented and performed at least once. Except for the weightless stuff that we'll someday do on the Mars settlement, of course. ;)

Amanda said...

Choreboy's gone and outed himself as having an actual name ;)

Thanks, both of you. I don't think I'm allowed to borrow others' choreography, although I'll check. I don't want to stay in beginners forever and I don't want to quit, but at the moment those are the only options I'm seeing. Ugh.

I need a hobby that keeps me moving. I don't want to have to go find another one. Besides, I like these people. It's just the whole anxiety thing over the solo performance/ choreography that's got me tied into knots. I'm losing sleep over it. Ridiculous, but there it is.