I have Writer’s Anxiety. It’s like writer’s block, but with more tummy aches. And jitteryness. Maybe that’s Writer’s Caffeine Overdose.

I’ve wanted this for years and years—decades? Since I was fourteen and spent the summer between eighth and ninth grades writing a really terrible novel. I started writing even before that, with really terrible short stories and fake memoirs. I used to be much more dedicated to writing than it recent years. So why now, with my brain so full of stale and crumbly ideas that have spent years expiring in my head, did I finally decide to go for it? A lot of reasons, of course, not the least of which (maybe the most of which) is that my husband said I could. Because someone has to pay the bills and all. Also because my job was boring me. It’s not the job’s fault. It was not actually a boring job. But bored is my default state of being. It would require a daily circus to keep me sufficiently entertained enough to do the basic functions of any job. So boredom + spousal permission* = the stuff dreams are made of. My dream, in its current variation, being to part-time write from home with some paying projects and some time just spent digging out the crumbly bits in my head and to part-time continue being a full-time caretaker to my son.

My home is not a circus, although it does occasionally resemble a zoo, or, more accurately, an animal shelter. It smells like the humane society more often than I actually notice. By the time I do notice, we’ve probably reached circus-floor level stench. We have four pets and a one year-old human child. That’s a lot of stink for a 2.5 bedroom bungalow. That’s about to be exploded into a 5 bedroom bungalow over the course of the next 6 months, so add that to the circus comparison. Maybe my life is a circus, in the strictest first-world-problems sense of the metaphor, although it doesn’t feel that way at all. It feels intensely—and increasingly—normal. No, I’ll be honest, it feels successful. I feel extraordinarily lucky. Like I keep rolling doubles in the board game Life. Did doubles even matter in that game? I can’t remember. I just remember little plastic station wagons filled with pink and blue pegs, and that getting a job like “banker” was preferable to “dog-catcher,” or something similar. I’ve got my station wagon and my blue pegs (and my four furry pegs) and I just got to trade in my first career pick for something much, much better.

So of course my response is anxiety. Because the only logical response to realizing you might have everything you’ve always wanted is to assume it will soon end in failure. The plastic car will veer off the color-coded path and fly over the edge of a cliff. Or I’ll just spend my days scrolling through Facebook and reading other people’s wildly successful blogs while intermittently staring at a blinking cursor on a blank page. No catastrophes. No cliffs. Just realizing that the thing I’ve been talking about doing for 20+ years is not actually the thing I want to do at all…or the thing I am any good at…or the thing I can force myself to focus on for more than five minutes.

And now I’m back to where I started.

*I should say support, because “permission” makes us sound like super-Baptists or something and we’re not super-Baptists or even regular Baptists or even Christians of any variety and we make very few decisions without the other’s thoughtful input, and by “thoughtful” I usually mean “wine-soaked.”