anxiety doesn't make me a better person

A quick glance to the sidebar here (if you're reading on blogger, that is) will tell you that I haven't written in months. I've been feeling strangely inadequate lately, specifically in the area of writing. I'm not sure why that has stopped me from posting here. We all know that blogging is not something reserved for the writing elite. No one required a writing sample when I logged into blogger for the first time. What, then, is the issue?

Today, the madness needed to stop. I still feel nervous and so have begun by discussing the thing closest to the tips of my fingers - this curious writing block.

At the risk of making connections where there are none, I offer (to myself) a shrugging explanation.

I have lately been reflecting on this small world I set about putting together almost three years ago. (No, I don't mean that I created the world three years ago.) I have pieced together, with jobs and people and churches and homes, a rather full life for my graduated self and it is now beginning to feel something like complete. Without the distraction of certain difficulties that have been overcome, my worry, forced out, spills into new arenas.

And these new arenas are filled with questions relating to the role I have played in the small worlds of others, while building my own. I've spent the past few years decided who I am and trying to discover who some other people are, with some career and home-building filling in the gaps. Now, the questions, which are not not new, begin to rise into a place to be disregarded with more difficulty. What impact have I made? How are these people and places different for having known me? I've spent time writing here about the fingerprints left on me, and lately I've been wondering about my own fingerprints. Where are they? Did I mean to leave them there? Do they appear as I expected? Can anyone see them? This, I believe, is why I have hesitated to write. Perhaps, in looking for my life's consequences, I have put considerable pressure on myself to write regarding things of consequence.

The more I write about this, the more I am deciding that it is fruitless to do so. I can't imagine that Mother Theresa spent much time worrying about what impact she was having. (She certainly didn't blog about it.) No, she just did what she saw in front of her to do without vanity or much self-consideration.

So, there we have it. I can't change my impact by thinking about it and so, there should be less whine-ging (whine-blogging) and more doing of things, or at least the same amount of doing of things. Moving forward with confidence that, truly, all I can do is what I can do, and anxiety doesn't make me a better person.