Anxiety 'straight from the heart.'

"The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshipper or lover. The daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.”                                        - Robert Pirsig

When the list of things you have to do is really short but full of seemingly unaccomplishable tasks and you are like me, you make it extremely long with accomplishable tasks. 

Delete 600 emails

Practice Spanish for 10 minutes

Practice Portuguese for 10 minutes

Write a blog post

Workout for 30 minutes. 

etc.

You do this to avoid sitting down and doing the real overwhelming year-long projects. You do this to avoid the anxiety of timelines and long-term goal planning.

In the process, you give yourself serious anxiety because you are consistently not making progress on the big projects. 

It’s senior year of college thesis time all over again.

A cup of coffee focuses you, but it makes your heart race. 

A glass of water settles you, but now you have to get up and pee in the freezing cold outdoor bathroom.

A song is centering, but they hit high notes that make you realize just how stressed you are. 

Making the big project into small goals is nice - but then someone else asks you when the big project will be done. 

Another person adds another great idea, which adds another month. 

“You are going to have to run these units in focus groups in a Peace Corps volunteer's classes.” 

You plan to fill a void. 

Then you realize just how large the void you are trying to fill is.

You plan pretests and post tests. 

Then you realize you have to write every pretest and every post test.

You realize somewhere along the lines that no matter how ambitious you are, writing a Content Based English Health Curriculum is a huge project. 

You like huge projects, but not alongside working every evening in the youth center, working to make the sexual health committees work accessible and valuable, working to make the community blog a place people realize they can share in. Not alongside trying to muster a meaningful "See you later," for the person you love. Not alongside trying to cope with just how far away "later" will actually be. Not alongside trying to hold yourself accountable to all the other things you said “Yes" to.

I don’t like it alongside long journeys north for something Peace Corps asked me to do only to be denied permission to do what I want to do. 

(I also don’t like it alongside e-mails that say my diversity related experiences are not valuable to the new staj - I chalk it up to Peace Corps consistently unaware writing style slip-ups but jeez, “you aren’t gay/atheist/in a meaningful relationship enough” to have anything valuable to say to the new staj seems like a pretty shitty thing to imply, but who the hell am I to know.) 

Some of you have been asking. This is what I have been doing. I have been working on a Content Based English Health Curriculum. I have been compiling the work of other volunteers and writing lots and lots of lesson plans, so that hypothetically, down the line, students being taught English by a PCV will also be taught how to protect against STDs, how to keep their bodies and minds healthy, how to respect each other and themselves, empathy and all the other objectives of Peace Corps Youth Development Work. 

PCVs will enter site with a lesson plan and a workbook and can hit the ground running. They will have a guidance my group and groups before mine have not. They will have a way to turn to other volunteers and ask best practices for particular units. They will have a base of knowledge about how to broach sensitive topics without putting themselves or their reputations at risk. They will have lesson plans without the anxiety of researching grammar they don't understand yet.

In order for this to happen though. I have to continue to make time for the big goals.

It's hard, but I am working on it. 

And this right here, is what an upswing looks like. I have copious amounts of meaningful work - so much so that I find it hard to make room to try to meet my me-goals. 

So much so that my anxiety is through the metaphorical roof. 

So much so that I’m finally out of what was a dark mid-service crisis where I contemplated ending my service [more on that in a different post, when I am less anxious ;) ]

So much so that I’m happy and proud and fulfilled and crazy busy.

So much so that I am extremely grateful to be here. Now if only I could get all my fingers to stop twitching.

At least I can still make a straight line with the computer: Write a blog post.