I found some notes the other day, from a creativity workshop I did last year – and the teacher said anxiety was part of the process; that if you wanted to create you need to learn to live with feeling anxious and uncomfortable, particularly at the midpoint when everything you write is crap. Strangely I found that encouraging. So many times I’ve been sitting on drafts in Medium thinking, this isn’t quite right, I can’t make this piece work – but then when I’ve taken that breath and released it to the world, have been surprised by the positive responses I’ve received (even if the piece is still not quite right, to my inner perfectionist).

And what’s that thing people say about shitty first drafts? It’s probably why I still haven’t brought myself to the point of completing a vomit first draft of a novel – because it feels so uncomfortable to push forward with the mess. Which brings me back to the words of that creativity teacher…