What makes you nervous?

For a long time I used to be nervous about a lot of things when I had no idea of the outcome. Uncertainty can be brutal on the nerves for the naturally anxious.

At some point in the last five years or so I got to a point where I couldn’t afford to waste the time or energy worrying over things outside of my control and to just let things happen as they will (not in a “Jesus take the wheel” kind of way) while focusing on the things I can directly change or control.

Nowadays, the things that make me nervous are time-related. Not the things that will inevitably happen, but the time I spend on various things or how I plan and coordinate activities around each other. If someone sets a deadline or a meeting time then I do what I can to hit those marks, but I always feel nervous that I’m not going to make it on time. This is also affected by my own internal struggle to procrastinate, which is a terrible habit, but sometimes the pressure helps. This is what happened to me with that NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge. I started on time and did some work throughout the first couple days, but then work got in the way by chewing through my mental energy capacity to put in the effort until the last hour or so before the submission deadline. Something similar happened with NaNoWriMo last year, but it was mostly self-imposed because I did not actually sign up. I just tried to do it and then got nervous when I wasn’t hitting my word count goals even when I was scheduling time for myself to work. I just didn’t have enough energy at the end of the day and that compounded the nerves a bit.

I’m sure there are other things that make me nervous if I think harder about it but scheduling times for things in your life can be a real bitch and has the greatest impact so far.