Author: Tiffany Grimes

When I asked my doctor if I might have anxiety, I’d imagined she would go through some sort of complex series of diagnostic tests that only someone with a PhD could decipher. Instead, she handed me a single piece of paper listing questions, each some variation of Do you excessively worry? I wanted to ask the test to define excessively. Has the test read the news lately? Does the test have children? Isn’t there a point where reality is concerning enough that it’s a condition not to worry excessively? I digress. All of this worrying has been a challenge to my writing process. While I have always been anxious to some degree, I found the “will I ever be a good enough writer?” anxiety to be hard enough to push through without adding in the “will there even be books anymore by the time I finish writing this thing?” anxiety. On top of it all, my brain was focusing all of its creative energy on thinking up terrifying scenarios for the future of the real world. I had no creative energy left for my story. I was told to try therapy. My therapist told me to slow down. She said my brain was working too fast. She said I should try to breath through it. I wondered how that would help anything. She asked if I might consider meditation....