Dragon Therapy

Cheers to my first bit of writing in my own apartment!

This is a moment in my life where a lot has happened, and now a new daring and scary adventure begins. I usually think I’m better suited for being busy, I function better when I always have something to do. But. . . the past two months or so, I felt like I was hanging on by a thread. 

As a dance teacher, this is the part of the season that we all look forward to. The hype of performance, of competing, of hard work paying off on the stage. I love going to dance competitions and watching my students on stage. Dance competitions are some of my most favorite places to be. If I’m honest, this is the time of season—the time of year— that reminds me I’m doing something. I’m doing something meaningful. But even as I write that, I still doubt myself and have to tell myself it isn’t me being arrogant or conceited. It’s me reminding myself that what I do matters. This. All. Means. Something. This season, as I take more of a leadership role and work alongside great coworkers and come across friends from other studios and other facets of this job, I feel like I’m part of a community. And what’s a greater feeling is that I have a voice—a standing— in that community.

In the midst of this crazy part of the year, I moved. I am thirty-two years old (almost thirty-three) and I moved for the first time in my life. I had been in three different rooms in the same house, but the last room that I moved out of, I had been in for twenty-five years. Maybe it’s pathetic, weird, or sad that I had been home all this time, but I never felt any of those things. I loved being home. My siblings and I are painfully close, I wanted to help my mom, my parents, and I always want to be there for everything when it comes to my family. And it was never like I sat around on my ass doing nothing, I still have been out trying to make a name for myself.

But moving out now. . . It’s something that I needed to do, to help figure out who I am and what I’m truly capable of on my own. I kept putting it off, for so many reasons. I almost did for college, almost did again for grad school (covid messed with that one), but I finally jumped on it and still can’t totally believe that I actually did it. I was starting to think I’d live in that same pink room for the rest of my life, and I wasn’t necessarily against the idea. I’ve never been good at thinking far into the future, I always live in the now. And I know. . . that isn’t the best way to work this life out.

Listen.

I’m working on it.

But thinking too far ahead, my anxiety gets the better of me. I hate that my anxiety has gotten worse as I have gotten older. So many things send me into a panic, make me overthink, make me question everything, or make me doubt. For a while, I was proud to say that I was good at hiding how anxious I could get. Many times I’d have cataclysmic inner turmoil, but kept functioning on the outside, not giving any sign of what I was thinking or how I was feeling. The past few weeks, it’s felt worse. At one point, I could feel my body in a panic mode from a literal anxiety attack in the middle of teaching. . . but I still kept teaching. Nothing triggered it particularly, and it had nothing to do with what I was actually doing. I went autopilot, going through the motions of teaching, of smiling, of communicating with kids as I normally do.

I scared myself with how easily I kept going, despite that I was terrified I’d collapse from how much I shook, couldn’t see clearly, or was keeping from passing out (fainting, if I’m honest). I marvelled at how I kept functioning while it felt like my mind was melting. On the outside, nothing was different. On the inside, I was falling apart. But I don’t think anybody around me had any idea. And I definitely didn’t want any of my students to know. I texted my amazing brother in the midst of it, and I don’t even remember exactly what he said, nor was it anything super profound, but he answered my text immediately and was there for me. I think that’s what kept me from completely crashing. I was fully aware I was freaking out, and I was fully aware it was for stupid and pointless reasons. Maybe that awareness was what kept me going, too.

I’m easily distracted, though, can easily move onto the next thing. I just know that as I get older, the more I shove it off and bury it, the more it piles up. The more it buries me.

My anxiety comes from desire in validation, desire to mean something, desire to accomplish, desire to be successful, desire to please. All on the broader scope, anyway. On a smaller scope, it’s about work, it’s about family, it’s about friend relationships, romantic relationships (or lack of), it’s about taking a massive step to live on my own, it’s about money money money money. . . The small piles of each thing to bury me.

So, as a means to give myself some therapy, I started writing out a new idea. For so many years I had worked on the same story, written hundreds of thousands of words for it, have plans for multiple books in a series, wrote my graduate thesis on it, self-published a novella for it. . . but a few weeks ago, I started writing a completely new idea. Nerdy with a fantasy twist of dragons and magic and slight Percy Jackson fanfic (that last part was unintentional, but I completely own the truth here), but at the core of this new writing. . . I wrote about me. I made the character a he when I’m a she, but I gave him all of my anxieties, my fears, my anguish, my doubt, my lack of confidence, and my lack of a romantic or intimate relationship in my life (exploring this character’s sexuality in writing has drastically helped me to explore my own). I also gave him some past trauma that doesn’t necessarily match mine, but a sort of trauma that makes his anxieties, faults, and doubts relatable to mine.

But. . . I also gave him my career, my hopes and dreams, some of my heritage, dance students that he loves like how I love mine, and I gave him a loving family and friends like I have. Most importantly, I gave him a good heart. A better heart than mine. A heart that I aspire to have, and try to have every day. 

I made him better than me. I made him be someone to strive for.

He undergoes a big change in his life that’s both scary and exciting, and he has to find a way to navigate it. And he has to do it on his own. When I started writing this idea, I really was just trying to write out another nerdy idea based on one nerdy idea I messed with years ago. But as big changes happened in my real life at the same time as I started writing this, those real-life changes inadvertently translated into what I was writing. I wrote 88,000 words (that’s about 300 pages) of this story all while I was getting ready to move out and into my own apartment for the first time, went on a different work trip (being a teacher or being a judge) literally every weekend for four weeks straight, and still taught every day of the week. This story was thoroughly stuck on my brain through everything I was doing, it was all I could think about for a while (Still is). I just wanted to keep writing and writing and writing. The 300 pages came easy, and I could’ve sat and typed for days on end. I got mad when work or real life got in the way of me writing.

 Those 300 hundred pages turned into a “part one”, and it was about my character learning more about himself, and learning that a big change is coming. 300 pages is a long ass part one for a book, but if my writing tells anybody anything. . . I have a bad habit of writing a lot.

But what gets me. . . within the same week of finishing up this first draft of part one, I got the keys to my own apartment. Part two will be about my character going on a new adventure and discovering how he can exist in this world on his own, and do something meaningful.

Part two for him is meant to start right when part two starts for me.

I don’t know if I’d consider this only part two in my life, though, but the relation is there. I’ve had a lot of parts, a lot of chapters, but this part does seem to be the biggest, and admittedly, the scariest. It’s the biggest change, undoubtedly.

I haven’t dove into part two of his story yet, because I’ve been working on my own part two. It’s been spring break and I’ve been doing lots of things to settle into my new place. I did, however, write out what it’s like to have an anxiety attack at one point (at least how the anxiety feels for me). I say that so casually. . .

 I gave my character an anxiety attack (I am a writer, after all. Most writers are sadists in this way). It was hard for me to write, because it was so personal. But at the same time, I felt like I needed to write it out to help myself understand it. If somebody else read it, they may not feel it as impactfully as I do. It’s different for everybody. But for me, being honest and open about that kind of stuff (at least, in writing) helps me in so many ways. I also hope that being open helps somebody else, anybody else, too. We shouldn't be afraid to talk about the things that make us human.

Dance is always my first love and pretty much always makes me feel better, but damn, writing has been a real good therapy for me. I should probably, you know, go to a real therapist, but the writing has been working wonders for me. Another form of distraction, probably, but maybe the right distraction that I needed.

So anyway, I’m a pathetic almost thirty-three year old figuring out how to live on her own now. But, as they say, everyone’s clock is different. Everyone’s timing is different. The struggle is that none of us know what that timing is, and we have to figure it out as we go. I’m just writing right now to cope, I guess. My writing is my own therapy, and this blog post is just another therapy session.

Now to close. . .I was trying to come up with some profound ending to all of this, but I’m just giving myself anxiety as I sit here staring at the screen. Just taking the time to write at all feels profound enough for me.

Thanks for reading along.

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May no seas fare smooth.

—Andi May