Roots and Branches

The Pop Culture Reference I use to Reduce Writing + Life Anxiety

For many years, my writing and all my professional work (and everything else) were deeply intertwined with anxiety.

Left unchecked, my anxiety knows no bounds: every project, relationship, ache and pain, and minor inconvenience has the potential to become a full blown disaster to my anxiety brain

Maybe that sounds familiar to you, too?

A while back, I was experimenting with different methods for reducing anxiety and The Scary Door (yes, the Outer Limits knock-off show from Futurama) came to the rescue

I wanted a way to separate anxious thoughts, worst case scenarios, and other freeze response-inducing stuff from my actual lived experience AND most importantly, find a way to take some of the emotional charge out of them. 

A lot of people imagine those things going into a separate room or in a basket or a basement, which is great if it works for you.

But for me, hiding it in a basement feels like it’s just being hidden, not emotionally deactivated, and still has all the fear and shame intact because it’s still given some validity: as though hiding it makes it more real somehow. 

This is where The Scary Door comes in: in part because hiding things behind The Scary Door injects some humor into the experience.

It gives me a separate place to put my fears, but also a lighthearted way to acknowledge that they’re fears I’m feeling, but they are not my current reality. When I say ‘that can go behind the scary door’ I can have a laugh and tap back into the present moment, rather than anxiety spiraling. 

Saying that a fear lives behind The Scary Door takes some of the emotional charge out and leaves me with more energy to make decisions and tackle an issue with clarity because I can separate from my anxiety without shame and without just hiding things away to be forgotten (only to reemerge later in surprise ways).

Give it a try this week! What surprise tools do you use to reduce writing anxiety?

P.S. I’ve opened up spots to work together in the new year, so you can start 2025 building the nourishing creative practice you deserve.

Bloom, my 8-week program to build a sustainable writing practice, is open for our winter cohort: We start on January 6th, and it’s the perfect way to build new habits to support your creative work in an encouraging, fun environment.

I also have two spaces open for my intensive private coaching program, Hawthorn, which begin in February.