Anticipation is cousin to anxiety — more fun, but just as nerve racking

Anticipation is the silver cloud version 
of its more bleak, less hopeful cousin
Anxiety

Butterflies in the tummy
the same
Even if the waited for, longed for
Anxiously expected X — whatever X may be,
Is quite different.

Because even when the longed-for X is good,
Possibly wonderful, it’s just a theory
until it happens, has unfolded
until anticipation becomes experience
it could all go sideways, end up all wrong.

Anticipation without concern
or doubt or fear
is for the innocent,
children maybe
adults possibly
anyone who has no reason to believe
(who has no reason to believe?)
That
no one will show, know, care
That
everyone will snark, snort, deride 

It's the stuff of nightmares
that daytime light can banish
But then the dark returns…
But then, Oh, look: here comes another day
With light, with love, with hope.

There goes anxiety.
Here stands anticipation:
Arms crossed,
Looking to see how time unfolds
builds, takes me inexorably towards X...

***

When I was seven, the biggest treat outside of Christmas and birthdays was the special dinner out with my parents at the end of the school year to celebrate. The anticipation of the evening, the choosing of the restaurant, the perusing of the menu — all so much more exciting than the eating itself.

When I was 22, my first degree earned, I looked towards the future without a clue where I was heading. It was 1982, Canada was in economic recession, interest rates were in the double digits, and employment opportunities were scarce for a new grad with a mere BA to her name. I took the safe option of an on-campus job in the Language Labs, an admin role dressed up in a crisp white lab coat; the duties involved managing the labs (dozens of cassette-playing machines through which students listened to their “foreign” language lessons; highly innovative for the times) and assisting students when the machines glitched. The job was fine if dead-end-ish, but I had hope for a larger future down the line…somehow, somewhere.

I made that future with my then partner, moving in 1986 all the way from Alberta out to Nova Scotia for her first post-PhD teaching job. There, I hooked my hope to a whole new region of the country, to new friends, and to new studies in journalism. Two very good years there, then one short year in New Brunswick where I landed a good job with a Crown agency, and then we returned West to Winnipeg for that same then-partner’s first tenure-track position. Again, I found work and made a new life with new friends, my hope grounded in community-level politics and my steady climb up the career ladder. 

A few years later, in 1993, I met my now-partner, changed jobs, and moved house all in the same timeframe.

I was living hope as a verb, an action, a muscle to help me find new and different ways of doing, of being, of living…and I am continuing to do so, now as a writer. 

If hope is sister to anticipation for things different, better, exciting, then fear is brother to anxiety. Not clinical-level anxiety; of that, I cannot speak. But ordinary anxiety about the dark, about failure, about pain — that kind of anxiety, for me, is grounded in fear of what lurks beyond my sight, out of immediate reach, not yet known.

As I look ahead to the coming six months that will include me launching my handbook on how to be a writer in four steps into the world, I am doing my best to kick anxiety to the curb and to stand with anticipation. Expectant. Keen. Excited. I am doing my best to make this true, every day, until the day, launch day, the date of which is not yet known. 

And I am buoyed by what actor Dan Levy said in a recent interview, when asked if he was nervous about releasing his most recent creative work to the public: “No,” he said. “I am not nervous.” He paused, then explained. “If you make the thing you wanted to make, that’s all you need to do. Other people’s opinions are fine, they’re entitled to them. My job is to make the thing I wanted to make…as someone who makes things, all you can do is make what you want to make.”

Words for this writer to live by. 

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Top photo by Martin Martz on Unsplash
Yellow flower photo by RoonZ nl on Unsplash